22% More Leads With One Live Chat Proactive

The goal of our Lead Generation service here at The Chat Shop is to engage with those relevant visitors that would otherwise leave your website without taking any action.

That means engaging the right visitors that wanted to convert, but couldn’t. And it means making sure that valuable prospects have the information and motivation they need to progress to the next stage of buying.

Before we start working with clients, there can be many people leaving the website that are potential leads. What we want to do is talk to the truly valuable ones (valuable for our client’s business) and the one’s that we can facilitate lead generation with. Not everyone wants to talk…prospects that are at the very first stage of research are probably just skim reading and leaving the website fairly quickly.

Our Lead Generation service has a number of elements to it…sorry, but we won’t reveal every little detail of how it ticks here. Too top secret…shhh.

The basic gist of the service however is analysing a client’s website to look for areas where prospects and leads need a little encouragement, where they need some more information or they need to begin building that all important relationship with the brand.

Then we look at what kind of chat invitations we can use (and when to use them) to assist these prospects, and facilitate lead generation. We also sometimes refer to this process as proactive live chat. If you want a little guide to proactive live chat strategy, check out our video on it.

And finally (that’s a lie, there’s a final finally in a second) we make sure that our agents are prepared for how the conversation should be handled when it’s started with one of these invites. Our in-house Explore Identify Match methodology (EIM) helps our Live Chat Experts guide prospects to the right next step whilst gaining more information from them (aka qualifying them whilst building trust and a relationship).

Final finally. We do this on an ongoing basis. We’re always looking for new ways to generate more leads and deliver higher customer satisfaction for our clients. Visitor behaviour never remains in a status quo for long (whether you’re updating website content regularly or not). This means that we’re regularly analysing visitor behaviour and considering new ways to interact with potential leads and convert qualified leads.

Exit Intent Proactive

One of the ways in which we’re now engaging with relevant website visitors is through our new Exit Intent Proactive. This is a new way for us to make sure that valuable leads are not slipping through the proverbial net of our clients’ current lead generation process. One of the clients that we’ve introduced this new proactive for is Hot Pink (bespoke engagement ring designers and retailers), and they’ve seen some fantastic results because of it. Read on to find out more.

The Exit Intent Proactive uses a custom piece of JavaScript, that we created, in order to interact with website visitors that are about to exit the website. The long and short of the JavaScript is that it tracks the visitor’s rapid mouse movement up to the top taskbar. The coding sends a custom variable to live chat, where if the visitors behaviour meets other criteria set for that proactive, we can offer the visitor a friendly greeting from one of our Live Chat Experts.

It’s subtle (so that it’s not intrusive to the overall browsing experience) but it’s enough to grab the user’s attention and often make them think twice about leaving. They have been approached by a helpful representative…so they are going to see if they can get the information or next step that they originally came for but failed to obtain.

Just in case you are wondering…we have a 98% customer satisfaction rating, so we are confident that we can provide the answers visitors may need before they leave.

Human bounce tool

So far you’re probably thinking that this sounds like the kind of bounce tools that you’ve seen before. The kind of thing that you might have seen before on something like the Quick Sprout blog.

Well I don’t blame you for thinking that. It does sound similar so far. There is a big difference between some of these traditional tools and ours however. Don’t get me wrong, we really liked the idea of those existing tools but what we really love is the idea of adding our human touch to them with our real conversations.

Once we’ve caught the attention of a website visitor, we use conversation oozing with personality to build a rapport with the visitor and encourage them to open up to us (so that we can facilitate their next step in the lead generation process).

Our Live Chat experts use a client specific EIM to guide their conversations to the client’s and prospect’s goals. The agents Explore the wants of prospects, Identify their needs and Match them to the perfect next step for their decision stage (a content download, service recommendation or sales call perhaps).

This engaging conversation is a reason for the website visitor to stick around. We provide value in the form of useful information, whilst learning more about them. By the end of the chat we’re able to qualify the prospect as a lead for the client and send their details to the sales team or even upload the information directly to their CRM system. Oh and by “details” we mean far more than just a name and email address…we also send details that help the sales team prioritise leads (buying limitations, product preferences and buying timeline for example). The criteria varies from client to client and is agreed between their team and ours, so that we provide the information that they need.

Preventing over-usage

We don’t use this Exit Intent Proactive to try to engage every single website visitor that is about to leave a client’s website.

We know that not everyone needs our help and that not everyone is a suitable, potential lead. To make sure that we’re only engaging with visitors that are likely to genuinely need our help or that have a real potential to be leads, we stack instructions in our live chat code.

For example, we might only use our Exit Intent Proactive if the website visitor has already viewed 3 pages on a particular product/service and been on the website for 2+ minutes and not gone on to purchase/enquire. This way we know that the visitor has expressed an interest but not found exactly what they were looking for.

A website visitor that has viewed 1 page for all of 6 seconds on the other hand has not demonstrated genuine interest. They probably aren’t worth engaging with at this stage.

The results

Thanks to this Exit Intent Proactive and the engaging conversation of our UK and US live chat agents, we’re able to progress prospects that would have previously left without becoming leads.

As I’ve said, the proactive is new, but that hasn’t stopped us from already seeing some fantastic results. One of our clients, Hot Pink, design and sell bespoke engagement rings. A lot of visitors to their website are browsing various websites and are looking for the perfect designer and some friendly product advice. The behaviour we have seen in the bespoke jewellery market indicates those at an early stage of their purchasing decision will browse several websites in succession until something catches their eye.

We implemented the Exit Intent Proactive when we were worried that Hot Pink were still losing valuable leads from their website, despite all of the leads that we were already converting with our existing proactive greetings.
 
 

Since launching the new proactive at the start of December 2015, the number of sales conversations and leads our team has generated are 37% and 22% higher, respectively, than they would have been without it.

Our new Exit Intent Proactive is just one of the many ways in which we are helping our clients to optimise their websites for lead generation, all whilst providing the prospect with a better experience. Instead of the prospect leaving without the information that they probably want, we interact with them and create an experience that sticks with them as they consider their buying options.

We don’t want to interact with everyone (and we certainly don’t want to be one of those annoying ad-like pop ups) so we intelligently stack instructions. This ensures that our Live Chat Experts can have truly valuable conversations with individuals that will get a real benefit from live chat.

Learn more about how our sales enablement programmes can generate up to 50% more leads from your website.

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