Do you know a thing or 2 about the benefits of link tracking? The first benefit of link tracking that always pops into my head is increased conversion rates.
Why increased conversion rates? Well sure, link tracking can help you optimise campaigns to get more traffic, but it can also help you convert more of that traffic. And that’s important, because what good is all of that traffic if you can’t convert it?
For your website to hit its targets (e.g. revenue, sales, leads…) you need to have traffic and an optimised website experience. People that visit need to have a reason to buy. And to make sure that you’re offering the right reasons, to as many people as you can, you need to enlighten the website experience.
If you’re still following, this is where link tracking comes back in. Use link tracking to help you get more traffic AND use link tracking to help you offer personalised experiences and advice that provides visitors with the information they need to convert.
What’s the best way of offering personalised experiences and advice? Well at The Chat Shop we’ve had some pretty impressive results tracking link clicks and targeting visitors using live chat. We offer a personalised invite to chat based on the tracked link and have a warming conversation with the website visitor. We find out how we can help them, and give them what they need to convert.
Looking for ways to get more traffic? This isn’t the post you’re looking for. You could try some of these catchy blog title tips though, or how about a little guidance on increasing traffic from social media?
Looking for ways to engage visitors, offer personalised experiences and increase conversion? Well, I can help you out there. Here are some tips on increasing conversion with link tracking and live chat.
You need to increase engagement
How do you get more people to convert? Make sure that they have everything they need in order to convert. It really isn’t rocket science.
Your visitors need the right reasons to buy based on their personal wants and needs, and your web pages alone might not be supplying all of this information (and visitors only read half of the page anyway).
In theory your content and copy contains all of this information and you’re tracking visitor progress with a tool like Google Analytics. But…people don’t always follow this path. If your Goal Flow has big red dropouts at any stage, you need to be engaging these visitors before they exit.
Take a look at the example conversion path above, use your imagination and let my words paint a picture.
A customer searches for a product on Google (for arguments sake, Product X is fudge), they see your advert and click through to your site (woohoo!). After spending some time reading the fudge page, they add the product to basket.
Looks like this is the fudge for them and they’ve found everything they were looking for. They’ve now headed to your initial checkout page (action 4 in this conversion path – awesome!).
But wait, they’ve now been on that page for a whole minute. Does it really take that long to decide if they’ve visited your website before? I hope not (might need a more memorable brand experience otherwise). Because they haven’t progressed to the next step (order completion – where they add payment and delivery details), this is probably a good time to interact with them.
The visitor should be invited to live chat, so that an agent can facilitate the conversion.
By creating an invitation based on the referral URL (that fudge advert) you’ll encourage the visitor to engage with you. “Has our fudge got you stuck?” seems personal…something beige like “Can I help?” doesn’t.
Once you create an interaction (through a personalised invite) you can provide a personal conversation, where you meet the specific website visitor’s needs. This not only increases your conversion rate but makes for a great brand experience.
How to engage with personalization
It’s all very well and good me saying that you need to start engaging to increase conversions, but how do you engage with the right message to the right visitors, at the right time? You need to combine your link tracking with proactive live chat.
Proactive live chat allows you to program your live chat software to invite a visitor to chat, once they have shown preset characteristics (a sort of qualification criteria, if you will). For example, once they have clicked a specific link, viewed particular pages and/or spent a certain amount of time on your website.
Proactive live chat, done properly, allows you to get personal with your invites. That means chatting to more people that click your links. Follow up the highly targeted invite with a relationship building chat and you’ll increase conversion too.
Right message
To be able to point website visitors in the right direction (i.e. give them the information they need to convert) you need to get them to chat when you ask them to. If your initial message isn’t personalised, then even a visitor that wants to convert and needs your help to do so, won’t chat. You’ll just be left shouting into the abyss!
If you’re using link tracking, you can set up your proactive live chat invites to be personalised to the visitors referral path. Be really relevant to visitors and it’s like you are chatting to them face to face, almost as if this initial message isn’t pre-programmed in any way.
“Can I help?” to every single visitor really doesn’t say personal touch.
Some better examples:
Scenario 1:
Visitor clicks a PPC advert for a jewellery sale.
Invite: “Hey there, is there a certain brand you’re looking to get a deal on?
Scenario 2:
Visitor clicks an email campaign for your latest software.Example invite: “So are you ready to take the new software for a spin? Let me know if you have any questions.”
Hardly anyone will chat if your invites are super-generic. You just appear robotic. And robotic responses don’t work anymore. Add a little human tone to your invites and chat about the visitor’s wants and needs.
Right visitors
You don’t want to chat with everyone that clicks that PPC or email link. Interacting with those that are already having a great website experience can actually distract them and disrupt their conversion path.
To interact with the right visitors (visitors that show interest but are having trouble converting) you need to use more than link tracking data. You also need to use data that shows what actions are being taken on the website.
Has a visitor added a product to basket but is spending over 2 minutes on the initial checkout page? They probably need some help. They are likely to abandon if their problem is not resolved soon.
Has a visitor added a product to basket and is progressing through each checkout page? They don’t need your help…looks like they’ll convert just fine on their own. Keep reactive chat available though (just in case).
But that’s just one basic greeting. You need to map out your whole conversion path for your various referral paths, landing pages and buyers. Then look at average time on pages and actions you expect interested visitors to complete.
If visitors start to move down the funnel but go backwards, take too long to progress or miss out certain actions…you should invite them to chat. Remember to personalise invites based on the specific problem though; you need an invite for each and every potential problem (and personalised based on the links they’ve been clicking).
This website analysis and planning step is where it gets a lot more like rocket science! But these are still just the basics to getting more conversions with link tracking and live chat.
Right time
You’re trying to stop the best fish from slipping through your net. Error codes, breaking the conversion path or intent to leave your website are all reasons to interact. Stop exit intent and help your visitor.
Getting the timing right on your live chat invite can be hard. Yes, if an error code appears or the basket is abandoned this is a time to interact, but you can’t read minds. There could probably be a doctorate for the right message to the right visitors, at the right time…so I’ll only go into the basics of timing here.
Besides error codes and breaking the funnel, a key time to interact is when visitors take too long on later stages of the funnel (i.e. take ages to enter card details on an eCommerce website). How do you know when someone is taking too long? Well your website analytics should be able to tell you that. Look at the average time on page of conversion pages – people going over that are starting to look like people you need to interact with (hint, hint).
If your invite is too early, you’ll start irritating people that are having a good experience. Reign your invite back by adding in more qualification criteria and by waiting longer to interact.
You need a deep understanding of your website, plus some thorough testing and optimisation, to get the best results. Setting up a proactive is the easy bit. Optimising it is the hard bit.
So if you somehow didn’t realise that link tracking could help you do more than increase traffic, wake up and smell the conversions! Targeting visitors with live chat, based on the link that they have clicked, isn’t the only way to do it of course but it fuels some powerful interactions. In our experience, this method has allowed our team to increase website engagement by up to 50% for some clients. And personalised conversations can result in conversion rates 5 times higher than those that don’t chat.
Personalisation allows you to resonate with your audience and with live chat you have the unique opportunity to speak with potential customers who are in trouble. You’re able to open up a conversation and facilitate conversion.
With some thorough website visitor analysis, the right strategy and testing, you’re able to engage and convert far more visitors. It isn’t easy but it is worth it.
This blog post originally appeared on the ClickMeter blog.
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