How a Live Chat Feature Can Improve Your Conversion Rates
Every website owner wants to improve conversion rates. Rather than focusing solely on the number of people who are visiting your website, you need to put some attention to how many of them are actually completing your desired action. Getting 10,000 people to your site might sound great, but if only 1 person is converting, you’re not capitalising on this traffic.
So, how can you improve your conversion rates? There are a lot of strategies, each of which has their own benefits. You could change up the design of your website, edit the copy of your landing pages, refine your SEM marketing strategy, add in pop-up messages and more. One of the best strategies, however, is adding in a live chat feature.
What Is Live Chat?
By now you’ve probably come across a live chat feature on other websites. It’s that messaging window in the corner of a website, asking if you need any assistance. These live chat windows allow your customers to interact with your business immediately. Live chat has been growing in popularity. More customers are placing a larger emphasis on customer service when deciding where to do business. With a live chat feature on your website, you can not only improve your customer service experience, but you can improve your conversion rates at the same time. Here’s how it works:
How You Can Use Live Chat on Your Website
There are a few main ways you can use a live chat feature on your website. Let’s take a look at each and how it can improve your conversion rates.
Help With Order Completion
First, your live chat agents can help customers complete their order. For example, imagine a customer comes to your website and has a little trouble with your shopping cart. They reach out for help via the live chat window, and the live chat agent is not only able to help them along but can even add things into their cart for them. Users can complete a transaction all through the live chat window, making it easier to convert them. And the easier it is for website visitors to become customers, the higher your conversion rate will climb.
Answer Product or Service Questions
Another key part of a live chat feature is the ability to quickly answer questions. Let’s say someone is interested in your social media management service, but they are a little confused about how your pricing plans work. If your only customer support option is through email, it could take a while for this prospect to get the answer they need, during which time they may choose another service. But if they are able to find out the information they want right away, they are more likely to convert.
A live chat agent can answer all the questions your customer may have, and do so in a timely fashion. This not only gives you an opportunity to talk about the additional benefits of your product or service, but you can do so right at the time when your prospect is looking to buy.
Upsell
Upselling is a sales technique where you try to convince customers to purchase additional products or a more premium version of your product. The goal of upselling is to generate more revenue through someone who is about to become a customer anyway.
Here’s an example: a customer comes to your website and has questions about your website builder software. After having their questions answered, your live chat agent mentions that you’re currently offering a bundle deal, in which they can get your website builder and marketing software for a discounted price. Since this customer is interested in your website builder software, there’s a chance they want to get the marketing tools too. If so, you’ve now sold an additional product without much effort.
Upselling is a great way to improve your conversion rates on additional products, and the live chat window is the perfect place to do it. To learn more about upselling, you can check out this guide.
Gather Feedback
Finally, live chat features are a great place to gather feedback from your customers. What don’t they like about your website? How could your customer service be better? What kind of changes would they like to see to your products or services? Getting direct feedback from your customers is a great way to learn what you need to do better. You can then take these suggestions and start making changes to your business or website, which will result in higher conversion rates.
For example, let’s say numerous customers are having an issue with your shopping cart. If so, this would be a sign that you need to change shopping cart providers. Doing so would improve the experience for all future customers and result in fewer people leaving the site without converting.
How to Add a Live Chat Feature to Your Website
As you can see, a live chat feature can do a lot to improve your conversion rates. If you want to start getting these benefits, it’s easy to add a live chat feature to your website. The first thing you’ll need to do is choose a provider. There are plenty of live chat software options to choose from. Take the time to explore a few options and find one that not only suits your needs but your budget as well.
Once you have the live chat feature installed on your website, you’ll need people to monitor it. If you don’t have a lot of requests, you may be able to do this on your own, or with your existing customer service team. Another option is to hire more people or outsource this operation entirely. Finally, consider using a chatbot (often provided by the live chat software) to handle some of the more basic requests. A chatbot will give out canned responses to common questions, which will help reduce the workload for your live chat agents.
Improve Your Conversion Rates with Live Chat Today
Setting up a live chat feature on your website is easy and beneficial. Once you have it running, you should start to notice an increase in your conversion rates before long.