3 Advanced Chat Greetings That Drive Conversions

Live chat can be a great customer service tool to help visitors directly to your website. But if you use live chat strategically, you can drive a lot of conversions directly because of chat also.

The major factor in driving conversions with chat is using live chat greetings. Greetings enable you to invite someone to chat based on actions they are taking on your website. They can be incredibly powerful to spark up conversations and drive sales, but they can also be very annoying and kill conversions if you get the settings wrong.

Hint: It's not about time on-site or # of pages. It's about activity and mindset.

If you get to greetings set right, they happen at the perfect time for visitors and lead to powerful sales conversations. It will feel natural for the visitor and natural for your team to get into a conversation that your team can turn into a sale.

At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. We've done millions of chats and driven over $10 million in chat revenue. A major part of this success has been due to how we methodically test chat invites and the entire chat process.

We have the live chat greeting strategy down to a science. In this post, I will share a few advanced chat invite triggers that can work really well.

Let's dive in...

Track Checkout Velocity and Invite When Slowing

It's important not to interrupt somebody in the middle of purchasing a product. But if you realize they are starting to leave, this can be a great opportunity to trigger a chat invite to help them with whatever is causing them to slow down.

Here are the basics of how this can be done:

• Track the velocity of the visitor as they move through the different steps of checkout. For example, on Shopify, they move between the checkout info page, the shipping page, the payment page, etc. You can pass this data into a tool like Google Tag Manager to log the activity.
• Once you track the velocity, you can gauge if someone is slowing down between the checkout steps. If you want to get advanced, you can compare their speed with other visitors to determine if it seems like they are likely to abandon. Again, this can be done with a bit of wizardry in Google Tag Manager.
• And, of course, if someone goes backward in the checkout process, you can assume they have a question or something that's confusing them. That's an easy data point to track.

Once you know that someone is slowing down or otherwise confused in the checkout process, you can trigger a chat greeting in your live chat software to spark up a conversation. This leads to a "perfect timing" feeling in the visitor, which drives up the conversation rate and ultimately the conversions from chat.

Failed Search or Navigation Attempts

The self-service aspect of an e-commerce store is great. Being able to quickly navigate the site to find the right product, or to simply search and find the right product can be a great experience.

Unfortunately, the navigation and search process is not always great and can lead to missed opportunities for sales. If your visitors can't find it looking for it, they will eventually leave. But if you track this activity, you can invite someone to chat when it seems like they are starting to get lost on your site.

• Track usage of your search or category / layered navigation. For example, if someone is applying filters to your category pages that's a simple thing to track based on page URLs or other methods. This can then be passed into Google Tag Manager as a data point.
• If someone performs a search that leads to few or no results or does this multiple times, that's definitely a data point to track.
• And, of course, if someone keeps retrying their navigation process, you can assume they're getting confused.

By tracking how difficult it is for someone to find what they're looking for using your search or navigation, you can invite them to chat at the perfect time. By offering to help them find what they're looking for, you naturally spark up a conversation, you get them where they want to go, and you will often close the sale.

Back and Forth Product Comparison

Part of what makes e-commerce great is that customers can study products in depth. They can dig deep to determine if the product is right for their needs. But depending on what you sell, customers might get confused between two different products and not be sure which one is right for them.

This is a great opportunity to spark up a chat conversation to help them understand the difference between the products and which to buy:

• You can track groups of pages with repeat visits in the same session. In short, as it is going back-and-forth between two related product pages.
• Once you have that data, you can trigger an invite to happen after a certain amount of time on one of the pages in the sequence.
• By tailoring the wording of a chat invite, you can spark up a conversation to help them understand the difference between the products to figure out which one is right for them.

What's Next?

It's super important to use chat greetings to spark up conversations. 70% or more of your chat volume will originate from chat greetings if you get the settings right. Hopefully, these tips will spark ideas that you can use to drive your own sales with chat.

Here are a few additional resources:

• Want to see how to use live chat to significantly decrease check-out abandons and supercharge your card recovery emails? Check out this blog post: Supercharging Cart Recovery Emails (with Live Chat)
• We run live chat teams for over 100 stores (i.e. our agents chat with their visitors). The biggest question people have about this is how we learn the business. Here's a video walkthrough
• Want to see how many conversions we can drive for you with our live chat strategy? Visit www.helpflow.net‍