How to Correctly Use Live Chat on Your Website | Ep. #428

In Episode #428, Eric and Neil discuss how to correctly use live chat on your website. Tune in to learn how you can target the right people using live chat and convert them into sales.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Correctly Use Live Chat on Your Website
  • 00:51 – Live chat isn’t just about talking to your website visitors, it can actually detect potential customers
    • 01:34 – Segment your audience and only show the live chat option—it’s your best bet
  • 01:50 – Intercom is doing well for live chat
  • 02:00 – Eric just switched to Drift which has the ability to set appointments for people
    • 02:47 – The appointment setting becomes a revenue generating tool
    • 02:58 – Drift Enterprise costs $2K a month, but they have the another version
    • 03:38 – Eric’s clients like Drift
  • 03:50 – Just make sure you’re not showing your live chat to the wrong people or you’re wasting money
    • 04:31 – “You can’t hit everyone”
  • 04:35 – Marketing School is giving away a free 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool
  • 04:50 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. Only target those who will likely convert to sales when it comes to the live chat feature.
  2. If you’re talking to the wrong people, you’re just wasting time and money.
  3. Live chat can become an income generating tool if used well.

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Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics form entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today we are going to talk about how to correctly use live chat on your website. So this has been growing in more popularity in recent years with Intercom, you have Drift, technology is just getting better overall. I mean, Neil, how are you doing live chat right now?

Neil Patel: I don't use it as much as you do. I know you use, is it Intercom or Drift that you're using?

Eric Siu: I've switched to Drift and I'll talk about that in a second.

Neil Patel: Yes. The thing with live chat is it's not just about using those old, live chat softwares where you put on your website, people can start typing, and you chat back with them kind of like the support does. Technology is so sophisticated now, you can figure out who you should pop up the live chat to, and who you shouldn't. For example, someone comes in from Google or a specific page that you know is very relevant towards the services that you offer, live chat is worth showing up on those pages. Or if someone's coming up from paid advertising campaigns or within regions that you target. For example, we do a lot more business in the United States than we do in India. I love India, but most of our customers are in the United States because we're based out of here. So it doesn't make sense for us to show live chat in regions that we're not in. The whole point is segment your audience and only show the live chat to the people who are the best bet.

Eric Siu: The live chat tools out there before [Zopim 00:01:41] I think which was acquired by, I think it's Zendesk that bought them; and then you had Olark in the past. A couple of years ago, Intercom really started to take off. They're doing really well right now. Intercom is just you can basically send certain chats to people that have visited a certain page or they're behaving a certain way, and things like that. Now Drift, I started using Drift recently. I've just switched to [inaudible 00:02:03] because Neil gave me a tip, and then I actually switched over to Drift because they actually have updated their technology quite a bit.
With the Drift now, you have the ability to set appointments with people. You can have the bot. It becomes a bot. My bot, for example, might say, "Hey! Are you spending money on paid advertising?" So Neil gave me that idea. They click yes, then it might say, "How much are you spending in a month?" Then we give them like five bubbles and it talks about the budget. If their budget is less than let's say $10,000 a month, it filters them over and it says okay, they're not a fit for single grain but it might push over to one of our referral partners. Then anybody that is qualified, the counter automatically shows up for the account executive. It shows the calendar, and you can book a meeting directly within there. That way, you basically have an inbound sales development representative for you, qualifying these leads for you. It starts to become a revenue generating kind of tool for you. That's why I like Drift. I mean that's Drift Enterprise. It does cost $2,000 a month.
They have smaller versions too, but I like how they have different play books, basically, templates that you can take and swipe and deploy. What I started doing this week, we started pre-selling a tool. We're pushing people from the email list to the page. We have a little Drift button that asks them if they have any questions about the tool. Now, people started asking questions, and then I decided to hop in and start answering those questions. It took me probably 10-15 minutes each time. I think on the chats that I got on, maybe I got on like four chats, I think I converted 50%. They paid for the pre-sell for the tool just because I answered a couple of questions.
A lot of people on Sass, when I looked at product hunt talking about Drift, they were saying, "Wow! This is a great tool because we're actually converting people." I converted two people for 50% for a tool that's not even out yet, so there is value from it.

Neil Patel: Yeah, you should be using live chat. Pick whatever software you want. Just make sure you're not showing it to the wrong type of people. If you show it to the wrong type of people, you're going to have someone on your team manning chat and they're not going to be generating sales from it. They're going to be wasting their time and this can be causing you money. That's really important, because what's going to end up happening is your guys are going to complain and say, "Oh, we need way more people to man the chat. We're getting so many inquiries." Well if they're all irrelevant, you're just wasting time and money.

Eric Siu: Yeah, 100% right. I mean, when I looked at Drift, the way we have it at segment and we're only looking for people in the United States or perhaps from that list, visits the case studies page or the pricing page that they get a message for booking a sales meeting. You don't want to hit everyone on their site, especially if you look at a site like Neil's where he's getting close to a million or over a million visits a month. You cannot hit everyone.
Neil, anything else?

Neil Patel: I'm good at mine.

Eric Siu: All right. Before we take off, we are doing a special giveaway of Crazy Egg for 90 days. That's $300 a value. Forget the one week giveaway we're doing. This is available for everyone. So just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more about it, and we will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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