Does Live Chat Actually Boost CVR? (12)
I've been trying to push an ecomm campaign with potential but one that i haven't quite made work yet, and I thought I'd experiment with adding a little Live Chat widget for visitors to communicate. My hope being that the chat button would add a little trust, and also that if I got a handful of visitors chatting I'd learn the main pain points and potential blockers to conversion to improve my lander. I set the button up passively, and had a proactive message after 3mins time on page (rotated between a generic "Hello, Im here to help if you have any questions" as well as ones tiered towards Price/Shipping, and even offering a discount), but the results so far have been disastrous. Not only has not a single person messaged or replied, but I'm seeing my CTR drop and conversions, which not statistically relevant, low as well. I did a full multibrowser QA, so there's no technical issue with errors or the widget overlapping or anything, but live chat appears to be harming rather than helping.
I wanted to hear from others if you've tried similar what your results were. Every article about live chat raves about how amazing it is, backed with studies saying that it raises conversion rates by astronomical percentages - though I noticed they always seem to cherry pick really biased stats, such as saying that visitors who used live chat were more likely to convert than those who didnt, and other obvious correlation vs causation fallacies.
I certainly understand the benefits of live chat for support and retention, but for initial B2C sales, have any of you found it have any benefit at all? Because I certainly haven't
Originally Posted by bc_red
https://www.youtube.com/c/Landingpageguys/
It seems to be best to have all the potential questions adressed in the FAQ, and have only CTA going to the buy/subcribe button. My personal experience is that it takes time (you/the guy taking care of it have interruption during your day), and it does not really help to convert. I guess for expensive or highly customized products, it could make sense, but otherwise not.
I assisted a local company to build their ecomm stores, sleeping/bedroom stuff like matrace, beds, pillows, sheets etc... So pretty high ticket items in most cases. I can definitely confirm that adding a chat applet helped the conversions. I would say that the nature of the products kinda helped it too... chosing a matrace is not easy, since there are quite a few criteria to go by and it was quite obvious from the chat requests as people often asked about how to chose one. Based on this experience, I'd say that with certain product niches, the chat applet can definitely help quite a lot.
Personally, I also used live chat support a couple times, in case of products where I wasn't sure about the proper choice, for example due to compatibility issues or sizing. So yup, I believe this can be actually useful for the customers too.
Thanks for the input. I definitely see those points about more involved higher price point products having value in live chat. In my case this is a relatively straight forward $×× ecomm product. If live chat is out in this case, any suggestions on how to identify customer blockers and pain points to improve the lander?
Originally Posted by bc_red
Originally Posted by matuloo
Originally Posted by bc_red
Or you can retarget the one who clicked/added a product to cart and/or spend 15+ seconds without buying and direct them to a page where the chat is activated, or a page where they can leave their contact details against something free or cheaper than your initial offer, so that you can write/call them.
Interesting question...
I just checked some of my GiddyUp and DFO offers and it looks like they are NOT using it... at least not on first visit (I seem to remember seeing one pop up and say 'Welcome Back! Let me know if you need any help!' once when I clicked on one of their retargeting ads though...
But yeah, guess it depends on the price point too and type of product... I imagine on high-price point products that are hard to select (like mattresses as mentioned above) they are more prevalent...
I would break down the approach in two scenarios.
1 - Running affiliate ecom offers
2 - Running your own store (own products, management, etc)
In the first scenario I wouldn’t bother adding a live chat widget. Most of those products play on the wow effect and most of them fall under the as seen on tv category. Plus spending too much time with a customer that converts later on the network’s/advertiser retargeting campaigns is not that efficient.
In the second scenario I would definitely go for a live chat. Obviously the products play a big part in the love chat engagement rate, however I would add that the targeted country plays a big part in the engagement rate. Usually those with high payment barriers where COD works best, benefit quite a lot from the live chat.
I’ve seen this work great on a friend of mine ecom store, and practically the live chat availability was responsible for shifting annual revenue from around $4M to $7M.
When using live chat, I would double check how the widget shows and adopts on the page. Sometimes, some widgets take up too much space on the page laying on top of the sales copy.
Besides that, add some filters before a chat is being initiated. Something like capturing visitor’s name and email address will help you not only get rid of spam, but collect some data that you can easily use for email campaigns.
I really appreciate all the feedback here. So you guys aren't just sharing suggestions into the void, I thought I'd share what I have done and will do, based in large part on your tips:
1. I ran some heatmapping and session recording. While this didn't find me any smoking gun optimizations, I did identify two key things. The first being that my top call to action for visitors was NOT the primary one, and second, that in my advertorial there is a section that most visitors seem to gloss over.
2. To improve calls to action, I am recording the primary one, so that it doesn't fail as badly. For the second one that is doing well, I'm shifting some key selling points near it, to send users who click off with the best final impressions.
3. Since Live Chat was a bust, I'm instead using that low value section users glass over to put a sort of FAQ framed as an article update based on visitor questions. In this space I'm putting a handful of my best guesses as to why users are hesitant to convert, and also, a "contact the editor" mail link where visitors can email the advertorial author their questions. I'm hoping that I'll get a few good emails, and can then update my best guess FAQ with real proven pain point addressing items.
I put item 2 into action 72hrs ago, and while I don't have enough data, so far the results seem very promising. Both CTR and offer CVR have gone up by double digit percentages. Item 3 I'm just doing today, and I'm a little less confident how it will work, in part because it breaks the fourth wall of an advertorial style page and comes off a bit more like a product listing, but hopefully I'm able to get some good user feedback while not hurting conversions.
I found live chat to be incredibly effective with helping to boost conversions with a skeptical audience. I used it with a garcinia offer, and found it made a massive improvement to my conversions because not only did it show people that the company was "real," but it allowed me to drive some of my content marketing by helping to address frequent visitor questions on my site's blog or FAQs.
I think live chat helps to gather a lot of intel that you otherwise might miss. It is time consuming, so unless you're selling a high-dollar item, you may want to hire a VA to help with this.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum