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We love chatting. It’s what we do all day – in person, with customers, with prospects and on Slack. For our small business customers, we are constantly working to help them have more live chat conversations with their website visitors and customers.
Instead of hunting all over the web for ideas to get more chats, we thought we’d make it really easy and consolidate one list of 20 marketing strategies and ways you can use Pure Chat to drive more chats.
There are so many small teams using Pure Chat, it’s hard to say specifically what will work best for each business, but in general we’ve either seen these ideas work first-hand or we’ve seen the idea vetted by the experts we follow and admire.
Oh man. Isn’t this the first rule of marketing and branding? Don’t be boring. If your chat box is boring and/or blends into the background of your website no one will ever see it. If they can’t find an easy way to contact you, they might just leave. Want more tips on how to customize your chat box? Check out our guide to customization.
Unlike email, you can just accumulate a long list of messages and wait to respond. The beauty of live chat is that it’s instant. Quick question. Quick reply. One way to get more chat messages from your website visitors is to increase the amount of time you’re available to chat with them. If you’re offline most of the day, your chats will surely diminish. Not at your desk? No problem, just download the mobile app.
Hopefully by now you’ve read the studies stating that fewer form fields increase conversion. In this infographic from Unbounce they share that adding a phone number field to a form decreases conversion 5% on average. Especially for a chat box, you already have someone who genuinely wants to talk to you. Make it easy for them. Get those form field outta here!
Thought you should only put a chat box on your homepage? Think again. Making your chat box available for every page of your website will help you increase chats.
What’s a trigger you ask? It’s a super simple way to pop-up the chat box proactively after a certain amount of time. You can also specify pages for for triggers. Consider triggering your chat box on pages where visitors have the most questions. Check out our detailed post about triggers and proactive chats.
SmallBizTrends reported that over half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices. Half! With Google Analytics, it’s easy to figure how much of your website traffic comes from mobile, but even if it’s a small percentage you need to optimize your website for mobile visitors. If you haven’t updated your website in a while now might be the time to look at your own website on your phone. Check it out. I’ll wait. Seriously. Ok if it looks great you get a gold star. If it looks terrible, it might be time for an update. And make sure you optimize your chat box for mobile, too. Pure Chat enables our mobile optimized chat box by default.
With Pure Chat, we offer you three ways to chat with visitors: on your website, on a hosted chat page and on a personal chat page. Consider adding a link to your hosted chat box or personal chat page to your email signature and/or social media profiles. You just might make an easier and quicker connection with someone.
Our customer usually leave the chat box on the bottom of their website. Consider adding a button to the top of your website with a chat call-to-action. It may be less obvious, but you could also add specific links on your website directing visitors to chat with you. as a CTA (or maybe just in general use website copy to suggest that people chat with you).
If you’ve done everything you can do to optimize your visitor-to-chat ratio, it might be time to invest in driving more traffic. One of the easiest ways to drive traffic is with a small advertising campaign on Facebook. While these ad campaigns can get quite complex and expensive, we recommend starting small and testing the idea to see the results. For the entire soup-to-nuts process, we recommend this great post from Neil Patel on running Facebook ads. And while you’re at it, make sure to avoid these three Facebook ads mistakes outlined by Jay Baer.
If your prospects and customers don’t use Twitter at all, skip down to #11. If your audience can be found on Twitter, consider launching a Twitter ads campaign. The good folks over at Social Media Examiner have put together a fantastic how-to guide for building a winning Twitter ad campaign.
Depending on the length of your sales cycle, you may need to keep your prospects engaged over many weeks and/or months. Just because someone visited your website and opted-in to a newsletter a few months ago doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready to buy. Keep the relationship going and eventually those better educated prospects will come back to your website with buying questions. And boom! You’ll be right there ready to answer their questions via chat.
One way to get more conversations started is to bring back past customers. Running a promotion (free shipping, 10% off, bundled offer) can drive past customers back to your website and also get them to share the offer with friends. Create some great graphics with enticing copy and share with your customers and social followers.
Spending money on social media channels isn’t the only way to drive website traffic (and ultimately chats) from social. You have to know how to use social media in the right way to drive traffic. We’re lucky to have expert advice from social lead gen guru, Taylor Howe. Check out his post on how to stop selling on social media and generate leads.
Organic traffic can be a gift to your business. And drive more chats. There are many online resources to learn how to improve organic search results for your website on your own. Sometimes the time investment is too much and it just makes more sense to lean on the experts. One of our great partners, SpaceCraft, offers affordable SEO optimization services. Check ‘em out.
Joining communities and genuinely participating is a great way to share your expertise and eventually drive website traffic. If it’s been awhile since you’ve joined a community (online or offline) consider joining a large (and active) Linkedin group. You’ll be able to meet other people who focus on the same industry or topic that you care about. It’s also a great way to share what you know and learn some new things. If you write a blog, you can start discussions by sharing your latest posts. This will drive website traffic back to your business.
There are so many benefits of creating and maintaining your Google My Business profile. Especially if you’re a local business you can drive web and foot traffic by improving your Google page. Here’s a post we wrote with all of the details of how to get started.
In addition to improving your Google business profile, consider submitting your website to other online directories of businesses like Yelp, Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and Business Journals are all great places to list your business.
Again, for local and geo-specific businesses there are many ways that optimizing your online presence can drive traffic. And you’re in luck. We wrote the definitive guide to online optimization for local businesses.
Is crappy copy killing your conversions? Your bounce rate might be really high because traffic coming to your website doesn’t immediately connect what you do with a problem they are trying to solve. Improving your website copy might help engage more visitors and encourage them to start a chat conversation with you.
Do you have a friend or contact who owns a business targeting a similar audience? Building a co-marketing partnership may be one way to drive more qualified traffic to both of your websites. Each of you have insights about your customers and audiences that will help craft a targeted offer or landing page that could drive more chats.
Not ready to sign up? Have questions? Shoot us an email at feedback@purechat.com
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