How to Setup Chat Greetings to Drive Sales

Live chat can drive a significant amount of sales if you get the strategy right. A key part of driving sales is using automated invites effectively. But if you get greetings wrong, you interrupt visitors and will lose a lot of sales. Not a good thing.

So what’s the right approach with live chat greetings?

We run 24/7 live chat to use for hundreds of e-commerce stores and have tested this across literally millions of chats. The right greeting strategy is simply a function of website engagement and getting the wording right to spark up a conversation.

In this post, I will walk you through the key parts of our greeting strategy that you can apply easily on your site.

Predict When Someone Is Slipping Away And Automatically Engage Them

The first step is to figure out the right timing for a chat greeting to pop up.

• Basic timing on site and number of pages rules work a little bit.
• But where you will really see big results as being able to invite somebody to chat two or three steps before they are going to abandon.

You basically need to predict when someone is going to abandon and engage with them automatically before that happens. But much sooner than an exit popup.

The best way to do this is to analyze Google analytics to figure out a model to see when someone abandons what the typical pattern is.

• You can use a mix of Google analytics segments and other features to figure out at a high-level view of what steps and patterns somebody takes that typically leads to an abandon.
• From there, you can configure a chat invite to show up a few steps before the abandon.
  Now you’ve got the timing right, but what should the chat greeting say?

The Best Live Chat Greeting Messages

You can test the exact wording of the greeting that feels best for your brand, but what’s most important is to have it be non-salesy, low pressure, and not to make it personalized.

For example:

You can test the exact wording of the greeting that feels best for your brand, but what’s most important is to have it be non-salesy, low pressure, and not to make it personalized.

For example:

• Don’t make your greeting simply an announcement about the sales promotion or an offer for a coupon. Visitors mentally filter that out and your engagement rate will be very low. Then you miss out on the opportunity to convert them with a conversation.
• Don’t personalize the greeting to the actual product they are looking at or any user information about them. Again, they suddenly know this is automated and will close the chat invite. This is also what interrupts people.

What we have seen work best is some variation of:

“Hi. Just wanted to let you know I’m online. Do you have any questions I can help with?”.

When you get the timing right and use a question like this, it will lead to a lot of responses of “Actually yes...”, and then they ask their question. That’s when you know you have it tuned right.

Even if your timing is a little off, having a low-pressure clearly helpful greeting like this will avoid interrupting visitors with sales spam and causing them to leave.

What’s next?

If you’re already running live chat, they should be easy to test in your software. Use the automatic invites or greetings section, configure the wording, and try different timings based on what you see in Google Analytics.

If you’re not using chat yet, you should be. Visitors that chat convert far higher than visitors that don’t. You can save a ton of abandoned check outs and you can drive average order value and subscriptions significantly with chat.

Happy to discuss about your specific greeting questions and how to get this right on your site in a Strategy Call.

If you’d like to see our approach to driving live chat conversions, check out the video at www.helpflow.net/lp/video-overview