Visitors Leave your Website without Engaging
You spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to drive traffic to your websites and landing pages. Analytics show that much of this traffic leaves your website without engaging.
So why are they leaving without engaging? The answer lies in the growth of the internet and the resulting effect on consumer behavior.
Consumer Behavior Has Changed
Because today’s consumers have a variety of online alternatives, they become impatient when they have a question and can’t get an immediate answer. If this need is not satisfied, they’ll move on to a competitor. In addition, Twilio, one of the world’s largest communications platform providers, found in a recent study that 9 out of 10 consumers want to use text messaging to communicate with brands.
Traditional Website Communication Channels Fall Short
With this new insight into consumer behavior, it becomes clear that traditional communication channels aren’t going to provide optimum results by themselves. For example, forms and emails do not provide immediate responses. With the telephone, consumers might get put on hold, the line might be busy, the call may not be answered, or they might have to leave a voicemail that takes forever to hear back on, if ever! Plus, calls can be inconvenient and don’t allow consumers to multitask while communicating. Finally, if it’s after business hours, when over 45% of website visitors prefer to communicate, the consumer’s perception is that they’re going to get an answering machine or service, so they just don’t call at all.
Live Chat Fills the Gap
The missing solution to engagement optimization is live chat. When clicked, a live chat button on your web pages provides a real person to answer impatient online visitors’ questions immediately via text, collect their contact information, qualify them, and move them down the sales funnel by teleconferencing them in real time with your sales personnel, scheduling appointments, and promoting special offers. A recent case study by a Chat 24/7 Live subscriber in the Home Care industry indicated a 650% increase in engagement using live chat during 2016.
In addition to these benefits, live chat provides you with valuable feedback on sales, website issues, employment prospects, complaints and vendor offerings and more.
The latest live chat technology allows the chat providers, such as Chat 24/7 Live, to monitor chats for you 24/7 saving you personnel and training costs, as well as offering you the ability to monitor chats in house during business hours.
Mobile Websites and SMS Text Messaging Are Critical To Marketing Success
The latest live chat technology also allows you to engage your mobile website visitors through SMS text messaging and well as browser based chat. Optimizing engagement through this channel has become very important, since research from the world’s leading technology research firm, Gartner Group, indicates over 50% of e-commerce now is being generated from mobile devices, and as noted above, consumers prefer SMS texting messaging when communicating with businesses.
Customer Service is Your Competitive “Leg Up”
Gartner’s research also provided a finding that could prove critical for your business. 89% of companies surveyed believed that “customer service” currently is the primary competitive differentiator in most industries. As you’ll recall from the above discussion, live chat not only collects anonymous website visitors’ contact info turning them into identified new business prospects, but immediately answers their questions, giving you a leg up on your competitors by providing invaluable “customer service”.
Live Chat An Important Branding Component
Today, where consumers demand instant answers and prefer texting to other means of communications, building a successful brand requires more than selecting a relevant name and designing memorable visual elements.
In competitive industries like yours, brands preferred by your potential customers will be those that not only offer quality and value, but those that provide exceptional customer experience by offering immediate personal engagement.
Studies show that live chat boosts brand perception by improving customer satisfaction, improving online experience, increasing the likelihood of purchase and the likelihood of return, as well as increasing trust.
What’s the Cost?
Most all live chat providers offer cloud-based services. Pricing for software only companies (those that do not offering externally monitored services) is fixed based on the number of personnel in your company that will be monitoring chats. Pricing for providers offering externally monitored live chat services vary. Some charge per lead while others charge a fixed monthly fee with a minimum, plus a charge per lead or chat over a fixed number of leads or chat included in the minimum.
Save Time and Personnel
Software only companies require in house operating training and dedicated personnel. After business hours, when in our experience over 45% of website visitors prefer to communicate, website visitors receive a popup indicating that no one is available, requesting they leave their name and email address. It’s been our experience that consumers who are looking for immediate answers to their questions are unlikely to fill out forms or call after hours since they believe they will get an answering machine or service.
Externally monitored live chat available round-the clock, requires no training and no dedicated in house personnel. Template scripts can be approved and chat button code installed quickly by you and your web developer, allowing you to start receiving new business prospects from chats in less than a day.
This article was written by Steve Seeberg of Chat 24/7 Live, an Americaneagle.com Partner.
Chat 24/7 Live is a providers of round-the-clock externally monitored live chat services to
FASTSIGNS and over 1,500 subscribers in the franchise and multi-location business industries.
www.Franchise.Chat247Live.Com
