How to Leverage Live Chat for Better Customer Service and Sales
Guest Post by Pete Boyle. Pete is the founder of Have-a-word and content manager / chief copywriter at Recart, an all in one eCommerce marketing solution that helps merchants recapture lost revenue and increase their profits. So far, Recart has helped their merchants recapture over $90,000,000 in lost revenue.
If I dangled a crisp $100 bill in front of you, promised I’d hand it over if you worked ridiculous hours on setting up your store and funnels, and then only handed you $20 when you were done, how would you feel?
Pretty pissed, right?
And rightly so. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if you took a swing at me or threw words you don’t use in civilized company my way.
You’d be well within your rights to be angry.
But here’s the thing. This is the exact same issue the large majority of ecommerce store owners face every single day. An issue most simply roll over and take whilst muttering some lame excuse about “that’s just the way the business is”.
What’s the issue I’m talking about?
Cart abandonment.
According to ReachDynamics, 78% of shoppers abandon their cart.
Basically, for every $100 worth of your products added to user carts, only $22 makes it into your bank account.
Or, more simply, you’re losing $4 for every $1 you make.
Crazy right?
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is the biggest problem facing ecommerce brands today. And if you want to grow your store, it’s something you need to tackle right now.
Don’t Worry, I’m Already Running Email Abandonment Campaigns
Cart abandonment emails have, for a long time, been the go-to method to help stores recapture the revenue they’re losing.
And they work pretty damn well. But they’re not exactly the most effective method for driving revenue gains.
Let’s take a second to break down a few numbers.
We already know that ~80% of your users are going to abandon their cart, right? So if we assign a $1 value to each customer, that’s $80 leaving for every $100 added to cart.
OK, now let’s look at email marketing stats. Within ecommerce, you’re looking at a ~23% open rate and a ~3.5% CTR.
What this means is that, out of 100 people adding items to your cart, the 80 people who receive your cart abandonment emails return the below stats:
- They’re opened by approximately 18 people
- They only redirect around 3 (2.8 to be precise) people back to your store
And it’s pretty realistic to expect that 1 of those three will convert into a sale.
These are, of course, general email marketing stats and not specific to cart abandonment. In my experience, cart abandonment tends to have higher engagement rates than general email marketing.
But the point stands, email is not as effective as all these massive brands out there would have you believe.
Why Isn’t Email as Effective Anymore?
The short answer is pretty simple.
User expectations and habits are changing. The most effective marketing always leverages the highest engagement channel.
That’s all marketing is, right? Create a killer message before getting it in front of your ideal audience.
Email’s been the king of ROI for so long because it was pretty much the only direct channel to your consumers. It was the best way to get your message in front of them.
And so, brands across the globe hit their email lists. And they hit them hard.
As consumers, we’d be subjected to unsolicited flash sale notifications, purchase follow-ups and up sells, welcome sequences, re-engagement campaigns, and the ever-present support follow-ups.
It’s too much. When the average day sees 111 billion consumer emails being sent every single day, it’s no wonder that whatever doesn’t fall into the spam and promotion folders is often ignored.
Email is still a viable channel but thanks to those spam and promotion folders, the prevalence of spammers, and often shoddy customer service that takes days rather than hours (or even minutes), it’s becoming less effective.
Modern users are fed up of receiving endless sales promos and having to wait 24 hours plus for assistance, and so they’re turning away from email to focus more heavily on channels where they have more control.
They’re turning to live chat solutions.
Should I Abandon Email Marketing for Chat Solutions?
No!
As I mentioned above, email is still a viable solution, it’s just not what you should be pinning all your hopes and dreams on right now.
Personally, I think that email reached its saturation limit a year or two ago. People tune out the sales promotions that are sent to them simply because of the amount of spam that’s sent through the channel.
But that’s not to say it still doesn’t work.
In testing email for cart abandonment at Recart, we still see a pretty decent level of success with email marketing.
If you ignore the Messenger stats there for a second, you can see that this is still worth your time. But, you’ll also see that there’s a huge portion of your abandoners who aren’t being brought back to continue their purchases.
You have to double down on your existing email campaigns. Whether you’re using them to welcome new users, bring back abandoners, offer customer service, or simply build relationships you have to you have to look beyond email.
You have to supplement it with the channel they prefer; chat solutions.
If you take even a very quick look at the stats for live chat you’ll see that it’s what your customers want. In fact:
- Live chat has the highest customer satisfaction ratings at 73% (source)
- It’s become the most preferred digital content method of communication (source)
- 77% of customers won’t make a purchase if there’s no live chat solution, and live chat leads to a 40% increase in conversion rate (source, source)
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that live chat is no longer a nice addition to your site. It is a must-have element for you to continue growing your business.
The thing you’ve got to understand is how best to leverage chat for your brand.
The Two Primary Chat Solutions
So when it comes to chat solutions, you’ve got two primary tasks to achieve;
- Help consumers who are on your site achieve their goal of finding the right product
- Bring abandoners or previous customers back to your site to complete their purchase or cross-sell them their next purchase
The methods of achieving both are quite different, so I’ll look at each one individually.
On-Site Chat Assistance
When you’re at a physical store and either can’t find what you need or want some advice, what do you do?
You ask the assistant, right?
They’re the professional here, the one who knows the products better than anyone else and who can quickly point you to the right department.
Now imagine if you had to wait 17+ hours for the response from that inquiry. What would you do? You’d go home, right?
And 17 hours later, what’s happened to your desire to purchase the product? It’s massively diminished making it harder for the assistant to sell to you.
However, if they were able to help you in the moment when your purchase intent was highest, you’d likely have bought the product. You’d go home with a new thing to play with, the store is happy they could help.
This is what’s been missing in the world of online retail for years now, a missing element that live chat fills.
The best brands out there aren’t just reactive about this. They don’t wait until the user reaches out but instead actively offer help, much like a real-life assistant asking you whilst in store.
Giardinoblu Jewelry of Milan currently leverages Re:amaze’s proactive engagement triggers to prevent shopping cart abandonment automatically. Since implementing Re:amaze, this well known brand in Europe has seen over 20% reduction in abandoned carts!
For those of you not familiar with Re:amaze, it’s a helpdesk, live chat, and customer messaging platform designed to help eCommerce businesses create better customer relationships through amazing customer support. Re:amaze offers a full suite of support tools including a multi-channel helpdesk, shared inbox, live chat, proactive messaging, and FAQ.
Corset Deal, based out of the UK, also leverages Re:amaze’s proactive engagement features to easily increase average order values (AOV) and conversions. Since implementation, they’ve seen at least 15% increases in AOV.
And lastly, Dose of Colors, a beauty brand with an international presence including countries such as the United States, Australia, UK, and Ireland uses Re:amaze Live Chat to greet customers efficiently and encourages more conversations. Since implementation, Dose of Colors have seen over 30% jumps in customer engagement across all of their stores.
These are great examples of how to use live chat to help your customers find what it is they need. That assistance isn’t going to go ignored either.
As mentioned earlier, live chat can increase your conversions by 40%.
Here’s a few tips to make sure that your on-site chat solution is getting you theist results.
1 — Ensure it’s linked to user behavior
Make sure your chat tool tracks which pages the user has been to and how they’ve engaged. This will help your support team better understand how to help them, it’ll also help you send more personalized messages to get them to engage.
2 — If appropriate, collect the user’s email address
This will give you the option to send them a more permanent record of the transcript (which is just good customer service), and you’ll be able to remarket to them in the future through that address.
3 — Use templates sparingly
Templated messages can help you massively reduce the time it takes to answer your users. However, you also have to understand that people are using live chat for a more personal experience. If you template everything, you’ll come across as a soulless robot which will do nothing but annoy your customers.
Off-Site Chat Engagement
The one area email has always had an advantage is in how it can bring users who once visited your site (and either opted in to hear from you or purchased) back again for subsequent purchases.
You can consistently reach out to customers to inform them of flash sales, new products, educate them on how to use your product or service, or simply build relationships so they’re more likely to purchase during your next flash sale.
But of course, as already mentioned, the effectiveness of that outreach is dwindling. With average open rates hovering around 20–25%, the vast majority of recipients never even see your message.
This is where Facebook Messenger comes in.
You can, much like email, send cold outreach to users to get them to re-engage with your store and bring them back on site. Here’s an example of how the guys at Gearbunch are using Messenger to let previous engagers know about educational material to build better customer relationships.
It’s short and to the point with a relevant benefit for their users. I’d argue that the Gearbunch team should also be simultaneously hitting these same users with an email that details the same.
I know they do this with their abandonment, but it’d be worth doing it with these kind of promotional posts as well just to cover all bases.
A great example of linking both email and Messenger together comes from Ezra Firestone. Here’s an example of how he uses both channels to promote his webinars.
Facebook Messenger is not a replacement for email, but is a supplement for it. They work hand in hand to massively increase the effectiveness of your outreach and engagement.
If you’re going to link the two as shown above, a few things to bear in mind are:
1 — Ensure similar design is used across both channels
This will help you establish a stronger brand image and also keep users from being confused. You can see in the Ezra example above that the same message is used (just condensed for Messenger) and that the same gif was used (although I’ve taken screencaps when it changed).
2 — Be sure you optimize for the channel
There are a number of striking similarities between email and Messenger, but you also have to understand that these are individual channels. Channels which require their own specific optimizations. If you’re just getting started with Messenger, be certain to consult a good guide on how to write killer Messenger marketing messages.
3 — Don’t be a spammer
It might be a new channel, but that doesn’t mean you can just hammer users with your message across all channels. Be aware that hitting people with the same messages across two different channels at roughly the same time could be very annoying. Make sure you’re offering value and not just being a spammer.
Chat is the Future of Effective Marketing
Wherever you look it’s obvious that users are clamoring for live chat solutions over the more traditional support or marketing channels.
That’s not to say you should completely forgo any marketing through traditional channels, but you should also be offering relevant chat accompaniments.
With this article, I was hoping to alert you to the shift in consumer mindset you need to meet. However, if you want to get some more strategic advice on how to get started, be sure to reach out to either (or both!), the Re:amaze team or the Recart team.
Interested in what else we have to say? Make sure to recommend this article by clicking the heart and follow us for more stories about startup life, customer service, and tips on treating customers right.
You can also find our multi-brand, multi-channel customer service platform at https://www.reamaze.com. Follow @reamaze.
