(Updated 4-1-2022)
If your email lists are growing too slowly or not growing at all, your business is bound to be in trouble. Email marketing is a powerful tool, but you need to have means in place to collect leads and grow your lists.
Without segmented and targeted lists, your email marketing will fail. There are a number of ways to grow your email list, including but not limited to using lead magnets, giving incentives for newsletter signups, placing forms in high-profile positions on your website, and utilizing social media.
One of the best ways to boost your email list (and user base), however, is by integrating an intuitive live chat feature onto your website/app. Believe it or not, customers love it, with “41% of consumers preferring live chat support over any other channel.”
It’s hardly surprising as this real-time feature offers round-the-clock support to customers and, more importantly, helps gain leads throughout the customer’s life cycle and every step along the buying journey.
In this article, we will look at the top five ways in which an online chat can assist in building a fool-proof mailing list that captures information consistently and organically so that you can target customers the right way, at the right time, with the right message.
Table of Contents
What are the best ways to apply live chat to grow your lists (and your business)?
Live chat offers a ton of value for your brand if you use it properly. Follow along as we highlight ways you can leverage this powerful tool to grow and thrive.
Let’s start with the one that many business owners don’t think about. Typically, live chat is looked at as a tool to simply answer your audience’s questions. But the value goes far beyond that, starting with the ability to grow your email list.
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Live Chat for Boosting Your Email List
“73% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing companies can do to provide them with good customer service.” – Forrester
Live chat tools, such as this one from Acquire, can help your brand connect with website visitors seamlessly and qualify leads. Take a look at the all-in-one live chat software:
As you can see, users can instantly subscribe to the brand’s newsletters by putting in their email address (if they wish to do so). They have an opportunity to connect with a representative who can help answer questions and solve any problems they may have, and they’re encouraged to sign up for the newsletter to stay in closer connection to the brand.
The CTA is clear, up-front, and convenient for the users. As more and more users sign up, your email lists get a boost, and your ability to target your contacts with personalized messaging grows. The data collected can be analyzed, which you can use to further your email marketing campaigns. Based on the information collected, you can also target chats to specific groups and pave the way for a user experience that is tailor-made at every step of the process.
According to studies, using live chat results in a 35% increase in sales conversations. That’s a pretty solid stat, right? With this in mind, it’s pretty clear that live chat pays for itself.
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Contact Form Helps Gather Leads by ‘Filling Up’ the Time Gap
Let’s say that your customer logs onto the website; however, no service agent is free to take up their request at the moment.
Would you risk having them wait and ultimately leave out of pure frustration and anger?
Certainly not, right?
Especially since research indicates that the “average wait time between a customer submitting a live chat request and the first agent response was only 46 seconds.”
I guess you can simply play the number game and assume you’ll lose a few opportunities here and there, right? Or, better yet, do you think maybe it would make a bit more sense to engage the customer with a short form that can capture the basic yet essential information in the meantime? The latter would make more sense, right? Sometimes, it may not be possible to instantly answer every live chat inquiry. Fortunately, there are options available through various live chat tools that allow you to add value for your audience, collect some info, and buy your team some time to get caught up and answer the chat.
Here’s an example of how this works:
Contact forms like the one shown above can help gather leads as the data captured can immediately be forwarded to your email list. Notice how detailed yet short the form is. With a Contact Us live chat form, you can build a useful email list – without wasting any time or effort while at the same time achieving better results.
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Live Chats Extend Proactive Support that can Convert Visitors into Leads
“Virtual stores that use proactive chat have a 105% return on investment (ROI), while those that don’t use it have only 15%.” – Forrester
It is one thing to help customers in response to their queries; it’s a different ballgame altogether if you proactively ask customers whether they have any queries or not. Being proactive is important in business. If you jump in to look into whether a customer is struggling with something before they reach out to you, you’ll instantly win their favor. If they have no issues, at least they know you’re there. If they do have issues, you’ll be able to solve those issues before the problem grows deeper. Check out the example below to see how this works.
You can add a welcome message with a friendly personalized tone and offer a predefined list of areas of interest to the user so that they can choose the relevant option and get going. A guided menu helps enhance the user experience and can convert website visitors into potential leads.
Alternatively, you can set up automated messages informing users about your product/service information, pricing details, subscription plans, etc. depending on which page the user ends up spending time on. This helps you target your efforts more effectively. As you can see below, you’re able to select the particular page, the amount of time someone needs to spend on a page, or the percentage of the page that they need to scroll down before the form comes up.
This type of setup allows you to send targeted messaging depending upon what your customer is looking at when proactive support pops up. This ultimately adds an element of personalization and helps you guide visitors to become buyers.
You can also ask users for their email addresses so that you can send your blog posts to them from time to time or redirect them to the blog section of your website and drive traffic. You can also send targeted emails with special discounts or deals based on their habits or the products they’ve been viewing. This type of targeting can seriously improve your conversions.
Did you know?
Intuit increased its average order value (AOV) by 43% on its checkout page, conversion rate by 195% on its lead generation page, and sales by 211% on its product comparison page by using proactive live chat:
Those numbers are pretty impressive, right? If you were able to use live chat to achieve those numbers for your business, you’d certainly consider it a win.
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Offline Forms for the Win
The beauty of the live chat tool is that even when agents aren’t live, the online chat tool can roll out ‘offline forms’ to capture a visitor’s basic information. This is essentially the concept of the chatbot.
While people do tend to prefer a live chat agent to a chatbot, they’d also rather have something in place to get an answer to their question than have to wait until the next day. Using this method, no leads go unnoticed – be it at 5 a.m., during lunch hour, on a Sunday morning, or on public holidays.
You have a system set up in place to provide help and gather info. All in all, offline forms work 24-7 to gather leads and store useful information about customers:
Keep your site visitors happy and informed, even when you can’t be there to personally answer their questions. Putting this in place is far more effective than asking your visitors to submit a query via your contact form and then twiddle their thumbs for a day or two while they wait for you to respond.
- Live Chat Enhances the Overall UX
“Keeping in touch through live chat will increase conversions by roughly 8 times.” – Smart Insights
Trust us when we say that it takes a lot for a customer to willingly type out their email ID. It all starts with a seamless user experience (UX). Live chat is the perfect way to make this happen by helping you create an experience for your site visitor that allows them to find what they need in multiple ways while knowing that you are right there in the live chat box at the bottom of the screen if they need you.
Customers today want speedy and effective service. Our patience has worn thin in this constantly moving world. This is where live chat can work its charm. If you add to the mix personalized and relevant email marketing, rest assured that you’ve got a winning combination at hand. Long story short, both these elements used together can boost customer engagement, maximize conversions, and increase sales. A win-win for all.
Closing Thoughts
“The average customer satisfaction rating for live chat globally is 83.1%.”
There’s no doubt that live chat helps deliver high-quality customer service as it can extend more dedicated time and attention to users, night or day. But as you saw above, live chat can also act as your handy guide to capture critical user information so that you can start building an email-driven rapport with your customers. From sending personalized emails to rolling out customized deals and offers, the world of email marketing is always on, as your live chat should be.
Thoughts?
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- 4 Ways to Use Live Chat to Boost Your Email List - March 5, 2022
Informative post!
Thanks for reading, Maria!
Hi Shruti,
What an amazing share! I think live chat is one of the best ways to boost the email list. I incorporated the live chat feature into my website a few months back, and it was very beneficial for me. I was able to gain several benefits and streamline my operations as well. I have been suggesting it to several of my friends and I am helping them incorporate this feature into my website as well. Thanks a lot for such a helpful share, it was a great read!
Hi John, live chat is definitely valuable. I haven’t brought it into my own operations, but I’ve definitely used it for clients, and it’s proven effective. If you don’t have the team in place to always be on when it comes to answering live chat, have a chatbot set up to answer FAQs and direct people to answers or collect their info to enable your team to reach out to them later. Thanks for reading!