Stop Wasting Your Lead Gen Efforts
When you look at the marketing and sales funnel, there’s a reason that the opening at the bottom is a fraction of the top – it’s hard work converting leads to customers. You spend a lot of time and resources optimizing your website and creating valuable content to attract qualified leads, but what are you doing to qualify and engage those prospects once you have their attention?
Live chat makes it possible to connect with your visitors, understand their needs and objectives, provide them the information that they need, and guide them through your site towards an action. Think of live chat as the bridge that connects all of your incredible inbound marketing work with your sales team. It helps you and your business convert more and sell more.
Conversion starts with a conversation, but if you’ve ever been in the dating pool, you know that striking up a conversation isn’t always as easy as it may seem. Fortunately, live chat software provides powerful tools to help start and facilitate meaningful conversations to better guide your sales efforts. Sounds great, right? But to realize the results that live chat can drive, you have to implement an effective live chat strategy, beginning with some key steps.
Establish expectations and ownership
The first step in setting forth any plan is to agree on what you’re hoping to achieve. If you’re looking to boost conversions with live chat, you need to define clear KPIs and set up regular measurement schedules to track progress. It’s also helpful to establish clear ownership so that each team member has a firm understanding of expectations and accountability.
Download our guide from the banner below for more specific metrics around tracking the effectiveness of your live chat program.
Assign people to manage live chat
Sounds like common sense, but in order for chat to work, you have to have someone available to respond when visitors engage. You can’t just slap a chat box on your site and expect it to start generating revenue. Depending on the size and structure of your team, front line chat roles may be played by sales, marketing, LDR/BDR (Lead or Business Development Reps), office admins or potentially even an owner/founder.
Leverage proactive chat
As a conversion tool, you might consider proactive chat the ‘secret sauce’ for live chat engagement. This feature allows you to set pre-determined parameters (i.e. url, time on page, new v. returning visitor, etc.) to automatically trigger a personalized chat invitation to your website visitor, in the form of a chat window pop up. Of course, you don’t have to activate proactive chat, but those who do see, on average, a 40% increase in engagement.
Integrate with your CRM
Integrating chat with a CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce, allows for seamless assignment of leads to the proper team members and provides a detailed history of chat activities alongside other customer touch points, so you always know what was said, when it was said, and who said it.
For a more complete look at how to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, check out our Guide: How To Leverage Live Chat To Get More Out Of Inbound Marketing.
How To Leverage Live Chat To Get More Out Of Inbound Marketing
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to implement an effective live chat strategy to get more out of your inbound marketing efforts.
