People love getting problems solved fast.

Adding a live chat to your website could dramatically increase users' satisfaction and sales.

According to Econsultancy, 7 out of 10 people say they would return to a website offering live chat help.

Monetate is an enterprise-level testing and personalization company. One of their clients used Monetate technology to run an A/B test across his entire website, testing the effectiveness of a live chat widget.

He tested the original version of the website against a version with a live chat. In the end, live chat was the winner: It resulted in a 3% increase in Average Order Value.

Specifically, Monetate's client earned over $20,000 by adding a simple live chat widget.

Not bad, right?

The best part is that YOU can get similar results.

Just follow the seven techniques in this guide, and you'll see an improvement in your conversions.

Let's dive right in.

Tactic # 1: Integrate Live Chat into Your Abandoned Cart Recovery Strategy

When someone lands on your eCommerce site, two things can happen:

They either buy something or leave your site right away.

Baymard Institute found that 67% of customers will abandon a shopping cart without purchasing anything.

That isn't very good!

It means you're losing a considerable amount of money daily due to people abandoning a cart.

What if I tell you that you can dramatically reduce that number by integrating a live chat into your strategy?

Here's how:

1. Create a recovery cart email
2. Use cart recovery technology to make things easier
3. Add a live chat button to email:
4. Gmail
5. Yahoo
6. Outlook

Tactic # 2: Integrate Live Chat Into Your CRM 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is excellent.

Live chat technology is also great.

Now, what if you do both?

That's when you can get the most out of every visitor. You'll have an “unfair” advantage over your competitors.

Why?

Suppose your live chat agents have access to customer sales records. In that case, they'll have additional perspective into each customer's history, and, therefore, they'll be able to guide users to the checkout process more effectively.

For instance, if your sales team has already called a specific customer, live chat agents would be able to see that recording, and they could avoid repetitive (and useless) conversations and focus on what the customer needs.

That's a HUGE advantage.

But how can I do that? You ask.

Here’s how:

1. Create accounts for your live chat agents
2. Train your chat agents on your CRM tool
3. Allow chat agents to see customer sales records to approach the conversation more effectively.
4. Start recording both live chat sessions and sales calls, so both teams can start working together.

Tactic # 3: Train Live Chat Agents to Identify Cross-selling and Upselling Opportunities

What if I tell you that you can dramatically increase your revenue by implementing two simple techniques in your sales process?

Let me introduce you to two of the most effective sales techniques: 

Cross-selling and Upselling.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, cross-selling is when you offer a complementary product to an existing customer, and upselling is a sales technique that sells more expensive items and upgrades to make a more profitable sale.

For instance, let's say you run a travel agency and a visitor just bought a trip package. 

In this particular case, you could cross-sell your customer by offering some extra items for their trip.

On the other hand, you could upsell your customer by offering a more expensive package with extra features.

Upsells and cross-sells are responsible for 10-30% of e-commerce revenues, according to Shopify.

If you train your live chat agents to identify a cross-sell or upsell opportunity, you can increase your sales revenue.

Here's how: 

1. Provide your chat agents with visitor behavior analysis
2. Train your agents on how to identify sales opportunities
3. Provide basic sales training to live chat agents to handle the conversation correctly

Tactic # 4: Gather Insightful Data To Increase Conversions

The most critical factor of conversion rate optimization is how well your message matches up with how your customers (or prospective customers) view the world. 

That's why you must start gathering data about your audience from day 1. This way, you'll be able to know the things they struggle with the most and even the exact words they use to describe those problems.

When you approach marketing this way, everything becomes more manageable.

The good news is that live chat allows us to gather data quickly and effectively. 

Unlike traditional marketing, you don't need to perform expensive market research. Install a live chat widget into your site, start making strategic questions for your visitors, and you're all set.

With that information in your hands, you'll be able to create more compelling marketing messages.

But as all we know, the devil is in the detail, so here are three steps you can follow to get the job done:

1. Integrate live chat into your website
2. Make strategic questions
3. Wait until you've collected enough data to make a decision

Tactic # 5: A/B Test Your Live Chat Design And Placement

Integrating live chat technology into your strategy doesn't guarantee that your sales will increase. In fact, in some cases, your sales can even decrease.

Lars Lofgren, former director of Growth at Kissmetrics, found that Olark (a live chat tool) decreased Kissmetrics activations by 22.14%.

By no means I'm saying the same will happen to you. It depends on different factors like your audience, product, and industry. 

I'm trying to explain that you need to test your live chat design and placement to get results from it. 

For instance, integrating a live chat widget within a product page could be more effective than just adding it on random pages.

Here's where A/B testing comes in handy. It allows you to test two variations of the same page to see which performs best. This way, you can make more informed decisions.

Don't worry; it's straightforward, and you can use plenty of tools to automate almost all the processes. 

Here's a three-step process you need to follow to perform a good test:

1. Formulate a hypothesis
2. Test your hypothesis
3. Analyze results and declare a winner

Tactic # 6: If You Don't Optimize for Mobile, You're Screwed

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 63 out of 100 cell phone owners use their mobile devices to use the Internet.

This means that if you don't optimize your live chat strategy for mobile, you could lose a considerable number of people.

Just follow these 3 steps:

1. Solve users' problems in less time
2. Start engaging with shorter responses
3. Change live chat site on mobile

Tactic # 7: Use Live Chat to Humanize Your Brand

As marketers, we often forget that we're talking to actual human beings with real emotions and feelings, and those who understand that and start humanizing their marketing strategies are the ones who get the most leads and sales.

The good news:

Every live chat session is an opportunity to establish your brand as a human; you need to take advantage of that. 

You only have one shot to give an excellent first impression, so don't shortcut this opportunity.

Here are four tips for humanizing your brand: 

• Show a picture of a real person
• Use the same words your customers use
• Be present – respond as quickly as possible
• Allow people to chat with an agent 24/7 if possible

Your Turn!

You've just seen 7 of our favorite live chat marketing techniques.

Now it's time to take action and start implementing these techniques in your business.

You don't need to implement all of them simultaneously, however. 

We highly recommend that you implement only one technique at a time, so you can test and track results more effectively.

Then, you can jump to the next one, and so on until you've tested all the techniques.

That way, you'll know exactly which of them gave you the most results, and you'll be able to spend more time perfecting them rather than just guessing.

Deal?