The way customers want to interact with a business regarding their problems, and how fast they want them solved, also finally affects the effectiveness of the business' marketing strategy. However, many a time, businesses can't get back to customers immediately for obvious reasons.
This doesn't deter the customer from jumping ship, though, and fairly so. As many as 60% of customers expect answers in 10 minutes or fewer. Not being able to provide the relevant information to them in that time can ruin the efficiency of your marketing strategy.
It's in these instances where a customer needs more information readily that businesses can employ a live chat solution to sate customers' desire for more information. You can engage your prospects when they need you the most at the time they are wondering about buying your product or service.
What Is Live Chat?
Live chat is a digital communication tool that allows you to chat with website visitors online in real-time. It is usually deployed as a widget on websites and is a fantastic alternative to emails and phone calls. All that one has to do is to type a message inside the chatbox, and the query will be routed to dedicated personnel.
In the marketing context, live chat lets businesses connect with prospects visiting their website instantly in real-time. If you have already employed a live chat for sales or customer support, you can very well deploy it for your marketing needs as well to support your lead generation campaigns.
Why Add Live Chat to Your Marketing Strategy
People prefer live chat over other mediums. In fact, a report testing customer satisfaction levels measured customer satisfaction at 80% when it came to live chat. Yet another survey found that 53% of customers were willing to spend more with a business that had a live chat functionality on their website.
The reason for the popularity of live chat is obvious. Generally, it is very difficult and arduous for clients to have their queries answered. Did you know that a SuperOffice survey found that the average response time of a company for a service request is more than 12 hours? In contrast to that, a live chat lets clients get answers to their queries in a mere 37 seconds, so it's no wonder why more than 79% of customers prefer it.
Live chat opens the door to conversational marketing, allowing you to talk to prospects in the right context straightaway. By striking up a conversation with the prospect right then helps you engage them rightly. You can trigger the live chat function whenever the user behaves a certain way to help them out with their predicament.
Not only does this show that you are aware of their pain points, but it also helps you boost your chances of converting the prospect. So much so that research claims that website visitors are 2.8 times more likely to end up purchasing a product if they have chatted with you before.
The broader effect of conversational marketing is felt on the sales cycle as well as it increases the likelihood of the prospect converting into a customer. As attested by an HBR study, businesses that get in touch with prospects within 60 minutes since their initial contact results in increased chances of them qualifying their leads.
Conversational marketing can help you turns your fortunes around. Take, for example, the case of HLC, a bicycle parts and accessories distributor. Sensing a shift in interaction trends, the brand invested in a live chat option to help clients know more about the products they wanted to buy online. The insight they received allowed them to service more than 1000 customers every day, in addition to improving their marketing strategy radically.
How to Integrate Live Chat Into Your Marketing Strategy
There are a multitude of ways you can go about developing your marketing strategy with a live chat tool. Here, we will take a look at three ways you can do:
1. Customize live chat widgets based on prospect's search intent
Customizing your live chat widget to trigger it on the basis of the user's search intent can help you provide instant and proactive support to them. By aligning the live chat widget to the prospect's search intent, you can promote marketing messages that redirect them to additional resources that are relevant to their needs, thus helping them get more support without even taking the trouble of contacting you.
2. Market or upsell new product functionality
Live chat can significantly improve your upselling efficiency. According to Bold360, consumers who engage in live chat spend 60% more on their purchases.
With a live chat feature, you can increase the value of a customer's purchase if you find that an alternative product might serve them better. This alternative product may cost more than the customer initially intended to spend, but if you can help them understand that the value they derive from it is greater, they will happily spend more behind it.
3. Proactively question prospects of their requirements
By proactively questioning prospects of what their requirements are, not only do you show them that you are invested in their experience, but you also gather highly contextual information about their preferences. This can help you target high intent pages and ensure you're not letting anyone go.
You can also personalize the initial message and make it relevant to those pages. This way, anytime someone goes there, they get a personalized response right away, ensuring that all questions are answered in real-time.
Best Practices to Deploy Live Chat for Marketing
Now that you know how to integrate live chat into your marketing strategy, it is best to take a look at how to use it effectively. Here are a few best practices to bear in mind when you are deploying your live chat marketing strategy.
1. Ask your prospective customers a direct question
The primary purpose of live chat for marketing is to help visitors know more about your offerings in detail so that they can get the initial push that will keep them progressing through the sales cycle. The best way to do this is to start asking prospects about the nuances of their need. Doing so helps you get a refined understanding of their needs and what you can do to help them.
2. Set goals that can be achieved
While it's good to be ambitious, setting too lofty a goal can actually cause you more harm than good. While designing your live chat marketing strategy, make sure that your goals are realistic and achievable. When you set targeted goals, you also provide yourself with a good platform for data acquisition to inform future strategies that resonate with your customer base.
3. Scrutinize, test, and enhance your chats
Once you have set yourself measurable goals, and put your plan into motion, kick back on your strategizing efforts and pay more attention to the efficiency of your chat sessions. Evaluate them critically to determine what you can do to improve conversion and response rates. This will help you enhance the performance of future live chat marketing strategies as well.
Live Chat: An Indispensable Part of Every Marketing Toolkit
It makes no logical sense to invest huge amounts of time and money in your marketing strategy to bring users to your website, only for you to miss out on them because your website is not optimized properly. Live chat can help you ensure that your marketing strategy goes hand in hand with your customer engagement plan and prevent you from missing out on prospects while creating an unforgettable customer experience at the same time.
