A few months ago I addressed incorporating live chat into your web site. Getting visitors to your web site is great, but then what? If you have a strong call to action on your site, you might get an email. But look at it like this. A visit to your web site is an “active” engagement by a person. What I mean by this is unlike a cold call, or direct mail where you are fishing for a customer, a web site visit is, in most cases, an individual who is looking for you, your product or service. So why not take advantage of that and make available an immediate opportunity for a conversation? You would not have an open house and not speak to people who walked through the door would you? So why would you not make yourself available to interact with a visitor to your web site?
Every visitor to your web site could be a potential customer. Most of the time, these potential customers want their answers fast. Any delay in responding to their questions means an increased chance in losing their business. Conversely, if you can engage them as they visit your web site with a live chat that enables you to answer their questions immediately, your chances of converting visitors to customers becomes significantly higher. This basically means that you can engage your visitor to have a conversation by pushing out a chat request or you can wait for them to click on your “live help” or “operator online” button to chat with you. Live chat software also gives you information about the visitor, like which page they are on in your web site and more. Other benefits of incorporating live chat into your site can be:
- Increasing your sales through a higher visitor-to-customer conversion rate
- Improving your customer service response time
- Lowering the rates of visitor abandonment on your website
- Measuring the traffic patterns on your web site
A few great features of integrated live chat are:
- Chat with multiple clients simultaneously
- Co-Browse with customers
- Page view history (know what pages on your site they have been to)
- Private messaging
- Canned answer library
Cost from most chat software providers is fairly low. They range from $19.95 a month to $99.00. This depends on what added features you are looking for. The most obvious requirement is that you need to have someone monitoring your web site once you have it integrated. Otherwise no one will answer the chat request from your customer. You could monitor it when you are at your desk or if you are fortunate enough to have an assistant or receptionist, they could do the monitoring for you. When there is no one to monitor for you, you can simply set the chat button on your site to read “not operator online”. I think that integrated online chat is one of the most cost effective and valuable additions to include in your web strategy. It’s one more way to increase the ROI on your search engine optimization or pay per click campaigns.
~Evans Wroten – RealtorMarketing101.com
Posted by realestatemarketing101 
