How To Use Live Chat for Lead Generation: Features to Turn Your Website into a Lead Gen Machine

 Web Chat / By  Mobilise Solutions

Using live chat for lead generation, in addition to customer support, is one of the best multi-purpose tools your business can currently take advantage of.

Live chat can produce more than a 40% increase in overall website conversion rates. That’s pretty significant when you consider that on average, only about 2% of website visitors become leads. Live chat has the highest customer satisfaction rate.

Without doubt, there’s an opportunity to live chat for lead generation to both significantly increase your revenue, and to get out ahead of your competition.

1. Greet website visitors with a chatbot welcome message

Chatbot welcome messages generally include a nice greeting, some basic information about the site or page the visitor is on, and then different options that engage and offer to start a conversation. The bot will also ask for name, phone number and email that means when a returning visitor land on the website the chatbot will automatically greet them and ask what we can help with. otherwise, it will ask for phone number and name, an operator will contact the visitor at their earliest convenience.

A website bot is like your website translated into a bot with highlighted features and visual menus. Create a menu and ask the visitor what they’re looking for. It’s better to create a guided conversation than to use open-ended text or to immediately try to capture their contact information.

Possible menu information to add:

• Blog link
• Opt-in to subscription updates
• Links to product or service description pages
• More info on pricing
• A way to get in touch with customer service or sales

Experience the website bot template on Messenger to see for yourself!

2. Gain more leads with Omnichannel chatbots

Webchat powered by Facebook Messenger automation has its advantages to plain live chat. 

For lead gen purposes, the number one advantage is clear: If a website visitor is one of the 1.3 billion Facebook Messenger users out there, and they’re logged in, you can instantly capture that person as a lead.

Additionally, with our OmniChat technology, you get the best of both worlds. If users are signed into Facebook, you get that instant lead capture. If they aren’t signed in to Facebook, you can still accommodate them with all of the same capabilities.

Other amazing benefits to having our chatbot with Messenger automation on your website include:

• Persistent conversations that track customer history
• Default contact data from Facebook including name, location, language
• The ability to send follow-up messaging and do remarket to Facebook chat visitors

3. Opt-in for SMS, Messenger, and email updates

Website visitors engaging in live chat are good prospects.

So it makes sense to invite them to sign up for marketing updates via SMS, Facebook Messenger, email and more, during a chat conversation.

There are a ton of awesome opt-in strategies to consider for your live chat for lead generation campaigns, such as offering VIP access or running a contest/giveaway. 

And if you’re looking to take on a channel that your competitors are likely not engaged in, SMS opt-ins are the way to go.

4. Use your captured data and bot analytics to your advantage

In order to drive the most leads possible from live chat, your live agents (and even your bots) should know who they’re talking to. 

Combining auto-captured Messenger data, tags, notes, chat histories, custom variables and attributes, you can create rich customer profiles and that is guaranteed to boost lead conversions.

Some key areas to focus on are:

• Traffic insights – Are you getting qualified visitors and leads? In your live chat dashboard, consider looking at the referring link, number of visits, location, operating system/device, time on site, number of chats.
• Product opportunities – Are people asking for things you don’t do? Use tags and add commonly asked for items to your product team lists.
• Missed opportunities – Are people asking about things you clearly offer? It’s possible your website is not communicating this well enough.

5. Generate leads 24/7 with live chat support automation

You can use live chat for lead generation by utilising automation tools when offline. However, you need to consider your strategy when only your chatbot is available to help your website visitors.

If your chatbot can’t answer a visitor’s questions, and all your chatbot does is go in for the kill, trying to capture a new lead, you’re forgetting to care about the customer.

Some examples of common questions or phrases for your chatbot to recognize might be, “forgot my password” and “Forgot my username.”

Alternatively, you can opt to provide links directly to resources on your website that address those issues.

Interestingly enough, if a customer question is too complex, and they can’t get the answer they’re looking for, this is a great opportunity to use live chat for lead generation. 

What you want to do is use an exit statement. For example: “I’d love to get your question answered by one of our experts, who I’ll pass your details to, ASAP.”

From there, capture their contact information and let them know that someone will respond within a specified timeframe.

The best way to get started using live chat and bots together is to have your sales and product teams handle support requests for about a month with the goal of building up your knowledge base of questions and answers. 

6. Use a pre-chat survey

Pre-chat surveys automatically ask your visitors some questions before the conversation starts. 

If you don’t already have the customer data, use your survey to ask for a name, email address, and/or telephone number.

Regardless of how the conversation ends, you already have your visitor’s contact details and you can use it later for marketing and sales purposes.

The best part about using your live chatbot to conduct a survey is that you’re adding to a customer’s profile. Additionally, you can use that data to create audiences and inform future chatbot marketing follow-ups.

7. Engage visitors leaving your site or abandoning their cart

There are many reasons for cart abandonment. Perhaps the visitors did not find the information they were looking for or the shipping costs were too high. To put the shipping cost into the product will solve that problem. Then it looks like it is free shipping and always have an option to do visitor check out.

• Having to create a new account
• Conducting research to buy later
• Concern about payment security
• Long and confusing chek out
• No express shipping available
• Website had errors
• The credit card was declined

The reasons can be many so it is important to find simple and quick solutions for the problems.

But, what if the reason was more trivial? Such as – the visitor put some items in the cart to come back and pay for them later.

Regardless of the reason, you can make the best of every visit. 

A chatbot can engage a visitor who tries to leave the website or shopping cart and ask them some questions that’ll end in getting a lead, or some feedback, at the very least.

8. Use conversation routing, lead alerts, and live chat takeover

You never want to miss a hot lead.

In fact, according to Dr James Oldroyd. The odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. Similarly, the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.” 

So, as if live chat with chatbots weren’t versatile and powerful enough, lead notifications make them even more so.

• Email notifications and mobile app push notifications
• Trigger notifications based on any criteria you want
• Capture leads from Facebook and website chat
• Set up different notifications to anyone on your team

The essence of chatbots is to automate a lot of time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks, so get started as soon as possible.

9. Optimise for user experience with mobile-friendliness and personalisation come from mobile devices.

More then half of all live chats come from mobile.

Webchat display rules and Messenger for web chat are the perfect tools to provide website visitors with great user experience on any device.

Messenger chat is always mobile-friendly for users, unlike many live chat applications.

Using Mobilise Solutions, you can also set a webchat widget to display on different web pages, user devices, and to new and returning users with advanced display rules.

To display a different webchat widget greeting on a pricing page or a product page, a contact page or a shipping rate page, just create new webchat widgets for each scenario and set display rules accordingly.

This is a way to use live chat for lead generation. If a visitor is spending a good amount of time on a specific product feature page on your site, you can set up triggers to instantly send them a message asking them if they’d like more information about that feature, and learn more about what they’re thinking.

That information can now be used to create personalised presentations of services via email, SMS, and retargeting ads. All of which can be fully automated on the Mobilise Solutions platform.

Once you have the lead, there’s a lot more you can do.

Start using live chat for lead generation today!

Talk to us today by using our website bot in messenger. Click here