How to Boost Your Conversion Rate by 45% with Live Chat

Source: Neil Patel Digital marketing has seen quite a few innovations in the last few years. From video marketing to customer-driven contests, ther

Digital marketing has seen quite a few innovations in the last few years.

From video marketing to customer-driven contests, there have been tons of new methods to market your brand, drive more traffic, and increase your conversions.

One of those methods caught my attention: Live chat.

You’ve seen it before. You may have even used it!

For example, here’s what happened when I visited one website while researching this article.

I saw a “Chat Now” button at the bottom of the page.

I clicked it and boom — instant customer service!

When live chat was first becoming popular, it made so much sense to me. There’s a lot of power in being able to interact directly with customers in real-time on a homepage or landing page.

It also helps you build personal connections with your customers. If customers can reach you directly for a personalized response, they’ll automatically be biased toward you.

The only problem? I see a lot of businesses using it poorly.

Live chat can be a game changer when you use it correctly, but it’s so new that most businesses don’t know how to make the most of it.

Even I’m still learning new ways to use live chat to its fullest. But so far, I’ve settled on some strategies that really work, and they’re easy to implement.

In fact, I helped one of my clients use live chat to up their conversion rate by 45%.

That’s not an isolated success. I’m going to share with you some of the tips I shared with my client, and you’ll be able to use it right away to increase your conversion rates.

Why live chat works

In marketing, I think it’s absolutely critical to know why things work. That way, you can understand why you succeeded and replicate those successes.

Live chat is no exception. So let’s take a look at exactly why live chat works so well.

At first, a live chat box looks unassuming, and many times it might be hiding in plain sight. Here, it’s hiding in the little comment box in the lower right-hand corner.

Click on the icon, and the chat box will pop up.

This little box is a big deal to your visitors.

Before live chat, you had two main options to contact companies if you had any questions: phone and email.

This was problematic. Phone calls could turn into a game of “listen to the automated prompts, press the right keys, and wait for 10 minutes.”

I don’t know about you, but that kind of annoys me. It takes a lot of time, too!

And besides, many people just don’t like talking on the phone.

Email is great, but it often takes a business a few hours or even a few days to respond.

Neither choice is ideal if you’re on a site and want to learn more about a product or service. And that is the gap that live chat filled.

Now, instead of dialing a number or composing an email, you can type a quick message into the chat box and have it answered almost instantly:

You know me––I wouldn’t make these claims without substantial evidence to back me up. So here are some statistics that emphasize the power of live chat.

If you’re thinking “live chat can’t be that good,” prepare to change your mind.

Here’s exactly why customers love chat and the science behind it.

Live chat is super convenient. When customers want to learn about a product or service, live chat is one of the easiest ways to do that.

A chat box sits calmly in the corner of the screen (usually the lower right corner) until the user decides to bring it up. And when someone types in a question, that question usually gets answered in a flash.

That’s why most people (about 79%) use live chat.

Interestingly, this chart shows that the #2 reason people use live chat is because they can multitask.

That’s another case in which live chat is convenient for customers. They don’t have to stop what they’re doing to call or write an email.

That’s why live chat is so popular with customers.

Live chat helps in the customer’s decision-making process. Many times, customers who use live chat are either considering making a purchase or in the process of making a purchase.

Communicating with customers at this point is crucial, and it works. Forrester Research found that roughly 44% of online customers say that having questions answered by a live person while purchasing something is one of the most important features of a website.

That’s right––the simple act of answering a customer’s question can mean the difference between a sale and a bounce.

Here are some statistics from SoftwareAdvice.com that back this up:

Live chat leaves customers feeling satisfied. Because customers get questions answered quickly and easily, they leave the interaction with a positive view of the site.

Live chat outranks many other forms of B2C communication:

People just love the ability to communicate in real-time and get questions answered in a jiffy. If your customers are on your website, they’ll be able to get instant help without waiting at all.

I know what you might be thinking: “Will live chat really increase my conversion rate by 45%?”

If you follow the steps I’m going to share with you, I’m absolutely confident that live chat will do just that.

Here’s something that doesn’t get mentioned too often. The average conversion rate is actually pretty low, only about 2.35%.

At the same time, the top 25% of sites have conversion rates of about 5.31%, and the top 10% are at around 11.45%. (These stats are from WordStream.)

But a white paper released by Digital Marketing Depot found that “live chat can increase online leads by an average of 40 percent.” And that’s just an average.