Avatar photo Michael Cooney
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May 25, 2021

Live chat is a great way to boost your website conversion rate. But it’s not enough to just set up live chat and watch leads roll in. Taking just a few extra steps can help you maximize the value of your live chat.

It’s all about understanding where your leads come from and guiding them from conversion to close. This ensures you secure more of them as sales. If you can understand your leads and prioritize the most important ones, you’ll be able to close deals more efficiently.

Here are three ways you can use lead data to improve your live chat:

Tracking your leads

The best marketers are like scientists. They love to run experiments and track results. You can test which channel performs best or figure out which web page generates more leads. Either way, you’re always assessing and tweaking your work. That’s how you optimize for the most leads.

Why all the experimentation? Because it gives you the understanding you need to spend your marketing budget more effectively. For example, if you find that text message leads convert more frequently than website chat leads, you can adjust your script to direct chat prospects to send a text message. This ensures you’re directing your leads to the most effective conversion funnels.

You can track chat leads with marketing attribution in WhatConverts. A typical chat lead might look like the one below, with details that can then be turned into reports.

Tracking your chat leads back to the marketing source helps build a smarter budget. Are leads from organic searches starting chats more than paid leads? If so, you should devote more time to writing blogs! Are paid ads generating more chat leads? Then you can put more money into ads and expect a positive return.

Effective lead management

Live chat providers like ApexChat can automatically deliver online leads directly into a CRM. However, the work isn’t done once a lead enters your CRM. You still have to close the lead. If you’re not storing and organizing lead data, you’re making it harder to close leads.

Managing your lead pipeline effectively will help your team focus on the prospects who are most likely to convert into deals. In fact, on average 50% of prospects aren’t a good fit for what you’re offering. If your team is spending too much time on those leads that’s potential profit gone down the drain. Unfortunately, it’s easy to waste time on those leads when you’re working off an unorganized list of prospects.

Effectively managing leads starts with making sure they’re qualified during the chat. Using a lead management tool like WhatConverts allows you to filter out unqualified leads.

What makes a qualified lead? At the bare minimum, leads should provide their contact information, live within your business’s geographic service area and be interested in a service you offer. But not all qualified leads are created equal.

When your team is focusing on the most valuable chat leads, you can maximize the return your business enjoys from chat.

Using web chat reporting

Finally, you should be keeping track of lead performance and reporting on it. Web chat tracking and web chat reporting help you recognize larger trends that can help you make informed business decisions. Using a platform like WhatConverts makes that process simple.

For example, imagine a business adds ApexChat live chat during work hours. Day-to-day leads appear to fluctuate between calls, chats, and form-fills. However, over time a clear trend builds as more leads come through chat than any other source.

By reporting and reviewing that data, the business can decide whether it's wise to extend chat hours by implementing a 24/7 live chat service to convert more visitors into leads.

Additionally, web chat reporting can help you build the case for more marketing spend. If you can use a series of metrics to build a rock-solid case that certain marketing channels are driving chat leads, you’re more likely to secure more marketing support for live chat.

For instance, let's say you're a dentist's office running PPC campaigns targeting certain keywords. You could use a report like the one below, from WhatConverts, that shows how many types of leads come from each marketing campaign.

Below are some lead metrics you can track and report on. All of them can be applied to chat specifically, or to your larger lead generation strategy. Use them to determine how your marketing is performing and narrow down to chat to see how that channel stacks up against the others.

 

  • Lead Value: Assigning value to leads will help you identify your most profitable marketing channels. Marketing campaigns that deliver high-value leads are more profitable than those that deliver a large number of low-value leads.
  • Conversion rate: What percentage of your website visitors are taking a specific action? Or taking any of several actions that result in a lead generated? Typically this refers to the percentage of visitors who convert into leads.
  • Cost per lead: This is the total amount you spend to acquire one lead. Add up any costs during a given period associated with generating leads such as software subscriptions, paid advertising, or marketing content. Divide the costs by the number of leads generated during that same period to find your cost per lead.
  • Return on investment: How much are you spending on generating leads and how much do you earn through the resulting customers? You can filter down to specific channels as well; such as ROI on your landing pages or on live chat.

Taking the steps above will help you build a more thorough understanding of your leads and how you’re coming by them. Additionally, when you have a live chat provider like ApexChat and integrate WhatConverts to track those leads, you can use that data to improve your lead generation strategy. That knowledge is essential to making informed strategic business decisions that result in positive long-term growth.
Read WhatConverts reviews on G2

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Michael Cooney

Michael Cooney is a co-founder of WhatConverts. Connect with him on Twitter or via email at michael.cooney@whatconverts.com.

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