How Live Chat Boosts Your Website Conversion Rate

For any business, a website is the most important source for branding, lead generation, or boosting sales conversion. They spend a lot on marketing activities, but yet the conversion rates tend to fall. 

The average website conversion rate is 2.35% across all industries, but it varies from website to website. If you’re hitting around the 2-3% mark, you’re not doing too badly.

Websites need different solutions and implementations. So, how can you convert your website into a sales machine?

By engaging customers promptly at the right time becomes extremely crucial to capture more leads and boost conversion. Real time response is what customers look for.  Live chat can be the best sales tool for helping prospects when they land your website.

Intuitively, it makes sense that live chat boosts website conversion rates. By implementing the best live chat tool on the website, help your sales representatives to provide immediate sales assistance, and reduce the sales cycle that helps in growing revenue.

Key statistics that show how live chat increases conversions 

Live chat is a vital tool in your sales and marketing toolkit. Lead generation is one of the most critical objectives of using live chat on your website. Not only it allows you to provide real time sales assistance but also capture potential visitors by starting a conversation with them.

Here are some live chat statistics to show how the live chat tool converts your website into a lead generation machine to capture more leads and increase conversions.

• 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. (Source: emarketer.com)
• 44% of online consumers say that “having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer. (Source: Forrester)
• 38% of customers said they had made their purchase due to the chat session itself. (Source: vtldesign.com)
• Live chat leads to a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate. (Source: icmi.com)
• 59% of customers are more likely to buy when brands answer their queries in under a minute. (Source: public.ifbyphone.com)
• 53% of customers are likely to abandon their online purchases if they can’t find quick answers to their questions. (Source: Forrester)

Why live chat is your go-to channel to increase conversion rates 

Live chat is one of the best examples of conversational marketing strategy. It gives opportunities to your potential customers to chat with you, right on your website, and at the exact time. Live chat can be used for lead generation and increase sales conversions significantly.

If done well, live chat can drive more sales, and reduce the amount of time it takes to convince a prospect to purchase in the first place.

Let us discuss how live chat can boost your website conversion rates effectively.

1. Customers love live chat because its real time and add a human touch 

It is unpredictable at what particular moment your customers need help. The main purpose of live chat software is to provide real time assistance to website visitors and customers. 

With online live chat, you can address sales queries reported by customers faster, and effective response helps them in quick decision making. Thus, the availability factor acts as a catalyst in reducing the sales cycle and increase online sales. 

Live chat platform makes it possible with immediacy, which eliminates the wait time usually associated with a contact queue. As a result, potential buyers get the answers they want quickly and efficiently. This has helped the live chat team become as valued as traditional sales lead avenues. 

Hunter Engineering, a global car service device provider, faced the issue of lengthy sales cycles as customers took more time for research and scrutiny during the buying process.  

They were searching for automotive lead generation strategies and thus used live chat effectively. This helped them witness a significantly shorter sales cycle as compared to leads from contact forms or paid advertising. Their average sales cycle normally took a few months. With online chat, leads closed in days or weeks. Furthermore, more than 60% of Hunter’s live chat interactions involved sales leads. 

Tips:

• Use the live chat software to deliver 24×7 assistance to the sales FAQs reported by the website visitors and close sales instantly. 
• Avoid lengthy sales cycles with a live chat solution that addresses customer’s queries effectively and help them to make a faster decision.

2. Live chat helps to start conversations proactively 

Prospects land on your website for many reasons: to learn more about you, ask questions, get pricing, and make an informed decision. Live chat allows you to reach those people in the right context and at the right moment. 

By sending personalized triggers at the right time, you can encourage them to spend more time on the website, which means more chances to convert. Proactive engagement is vital when visitors spend a specific amount of time on a particular page. It helps them to make quick sales decisions. 

For example, let’s say a prospect lands on your pricing page. This is a good indication that the lead is worth pursuing but more information is needed to properly qualify and assist them. You can send a proactive trigger message to understand if they have any queries to negotiate a discount.

Here is how live chat triggers can increase conversion rate

• Implement on your pricing page: Live chat is an excellent resource for lead generation and qualification on high-intent parts of your website like pricing pages or marketing landing pages.
• Trigger your core features: Engage your customers by conveying to them about your core features or new feature release. It helps to understand how it will benefit them.
• Welcome your visitors: Automated greetings are a great way to start conversations, engage customers, and increase live chat conversion rate. You can send triggers to the returning visitors as they indicate a higher level of interest in your business.

3. Automate your bookings with live chat

Most of the prospects find it difficult or have to go through back and forth communication for meetings. Maximum bookings occur after hours. It means that more business’ leads are lost simply by not having online scheduling options set in place.

Online scheduling via live chat is an option that is actually viable. It helps customers to do the booking instantly when they are on your website through the chat widget. 

Live chat is helping travel agencies and tour operators to automate their business bookings and increase sales. When visitors are browsing the website, online live chat helps them to instantly ask any questions they have.

Lemax is a B2B company that helps travel agencies and tour operators to automate their business and increase sales. The key benefits of automating bookings with live chat was an increase in the number of leads and website conversion rate by addressing their sales queries right away. 

4. Chat invitations can deal with cart abandonment

The checkout page is the worst place to lose customers because it means that they had decided to make a purchase, but they turned out. E-commerce brands lose $18 billion in sales revenue each year because of cart abandonment.

Using chat invitations strongly affects conversion rate optimization. They consist of short personalized messages that encourage customers to start a conversation. Invitations can be used in different scenarios. 

For example, you can create a greeting that will start when somebody goes back and forth between two similar products. In such cases, you can offer help in making the right decision that might lead to purchasing.

How does live chat help to reduce shopping cart abandonment?

• Offer multiple payment options: You should consider including alternative payment options such as mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Samsung Pay), PayPal, etc. The point is that customers should be able to select the payment method most convenient for them.
• Communicate exciting offers: It is also a good idea to use words such as ‘limited period offer’ and ‘last chance’ or include a countdown timer to show the numbers of hours remaining for the sale to end. They play on human psychology and compel action.
• Provide extra discounts: You can lure your customers by providing extra discounts along with the existing ones to complete the purchase. 
• Easy checkout process: Make the payment process as few steps and as seamless as possible so that your customers can complete the checkout process without any friction.

5. Live chat saves money

Live chat provides instant solutions to all their customer and visitor queries very much at the website. The companies that are using live chat have seen an overall reduction in the cost of serving the customers.

Solutions like live chat are easy to implement and a lot more cost-effective than compared to other channels like phone and email support. 

Forrester’s study says, “305% RoI from proactive sales chat with a payback period of 6 months”. Live chat addresses the buyer’s needs instantly by answering the questions and saving a sale. 

According to the research conducted by the American Marketing Association, implementing live chat on a company’s website can increase conversions by up to 20%. Moreover, live chat for sales has a 300% return on investment (ROI).

The cost per interaction as well as the interaction time with live chat is thus reduced.

6. Communicate your value clearly with live chat 

Brand messaging is extremely important as it conveys the unique value proposition and personality of your business through messaging. Clear messaging has the power to inspire and motivate customers, and make them buy your product.

Having live chat on the website helps to communicate the core brand messaging with your customers that convinces them to make a final purchase. It is how your consumers can have a relationship with your brand. 

With clear messaging, you can convey a clear value to your customers, which will help them to quick decisions. Here are some of examples:

• For your features page, you have to showcase your strong feature.
• The landing page should clearly show the call to action (CTA).
• Your ‘Contact Us page should have the reachable contact number.
• The event management page must give a message about how to engage users virtually to increase conversion.

7. Make your live chat work even smarter with bots

As chatbots are becoming mainstream, many businesses are deploying AI-enabled chatbots for lead generation to improve sales conversions. 80% of marketers have started using a chatbot in some way or another. 

As many customers look for human assistance during the sales process, rightly balancing live chat and chatbot technology can make the sales process streamlined and effective. The bot can handle simple sales FAQs and if there is a complex query that the chatbot is unable to understand, it is handed over to the sales agent for immediate assistance.

Let us take Emirates Vacations for example. Its average CTR for display ads was at an all-time low of .35%. Considering this, they created a bot to display ads. The company targets different visuals and bot sequences based on the page the user is browsing. The engagement rates rose by 87% since the deployment of live chat.

Here is how chatbots live  increase live conversion rate with bots

• Bots are 24×7 active: AI chatbots are always-on to engage customers by promptly answering sales FAQs when your live support team is busy or not available. With a sales bot, you can qualify leads by asking questions from the sales experts. They can identify the visitor’s intent and what to present next for lead nurturing.
• Automate sales cycle:  When you automate your sales funnel with chatbots, you gain vital information about sales prospects. You can qualify them by asking specific questions prepared by sales experts and then directing them to the sales representatives for closing sales instantly or scheduling an appointment.
• Higher return on investment (RoI): Bots increase the number of business opportunities by creating effective chat experiences for your customers. Cost savings of $8 billion annually by 2023 through the deployment of chatbots. Leveraging bots is an investment that enriches your overall lead-generation process.

Live chat is your sales strategy

Lead generation is a critical aspect of every business. Live chat can become an important part of your sales tools, whether you are a small business or an enterprise. The results with live chat can be immediately qualified and help in increasing sales conversion. 

Leveraging live chat in your sales funnel helps in capturing more sales leads with a higher return on investment (RoI). It is not more of a cost center but more of a revenue center.