What is a Live Chat Widget and How Can It Improve Your Website Performance?

If you’ve visited us before, then you’ll know that here at Social Fox we’re all about optimizing our clients' businesses to improve their customer experiences. This can be done a lot of different ways, but for today we’re focusing on: improving customer engagement by offering a live chat widget on your website or funnel. 

We’ve talked before about how we think SMS marketing is the bee’s knees and along those same lines we think adding a live chat widget experience to your web pages is great for creating a more engaged and satisfied audience. 

The best part? It’s as simple as popping a little bit of code into the backend of your website or funnel and poof that little chat bubble appears in the bottom right corner of your website. It’s just like magic!

The theory behind both SMS marketing and live chat widgets is similar: People are interacting more and more through a text-style interface and they’re now expecting this as a way to communicate with businesses. 

The fuel on the fire for live chat widgets stems from the social media presence that most businesses have online which opens up customers' ability to create a chat with a brand at any time. The great part is that this doesn’t just have to be isolated to social media channels. A live chat experience can easily be an element of your website as well. 

In fact, live chat widgets on websites have the highest customer satisfaction, with an estimated >80% satisfaction (even compared to social media and phone interactions). Not only are customers overall more satisfied with a live chat widget for support, adding these to your website and funnel pages can actually lead to increased sales.

For small businesses that are looking to grow their brand and their sales quickly, adding a live chat widget might be just what you need to give you that extra boost and set you apart from your competition.

Which webpages should have a live chat widget?

Now, we know that we need live chat widgets on our website, but where? Great question!

You can think of a live chat widget as a built in live Q&A with you about your brand. That is, afterall, what the customer is expecting. They’re looking for human interaction when browsing your site. 

If you’re offering a live chat widget on your page, firstly make sure that you, or a member of your team, is available during business hours to answer chat questions. The longer people have to wait for chat support, the less satisfied they’ll be. 

You also want to make sure that you show up authentically in your live chat support. These days more than half of website traffic is from mobile origin [creeping up to more like a 60/40 split mobile vs desktop] so keep that in mind when you’re formulating responses or setting up your initial messages. From the customer perspective, they’re texting you a question, make sure you speak to them like a human, not an automated bot.

If you need ideas for initial live chat widget messages on different areas of your website, we’ve got a free guide to get you started quickly and take the anxiety out of formulating your live chat messaging strategy. 

Sales Page

Since live chat widgets are intended to provide customers an easy way to get their questions answered you want to prioritize placing them on sales pages. In fact, businesses that have implemented a live chat widget have seen increased sales overall [to the tune of about 4%]. 

It’s estimated that >75% of companies that added a live chat widget support option to their sites experienced an increase in not only sales but also in customer loyalty and overall revenue. If that weren’t enough, there’s also an estimated 10% increase in the order value of those customers who utilize a live chat widget. 

Home and About Me Pages

Sales isn’t the only area where a live chat widget can be helpful though… chat support can be used to drive traffic to sales-forward areas of your website. This can be done from the home page and the about me page of a traditional website. 

In this way, you can use the live chat widget to increase awareness of your marketing campaigns by sharing promotions, product sale information, and even offering a low value coupon for interacting with your live chat widget, or signing up for your email list. 

This makes an effective way to both drive traffic to your sales pages and increase sales or upsell your customers.

Funnel Page

If you’re using a funnel style system to sell your offers, a live chat widget can be extremely helpful here as well to provide specific information to your potential customer relating to the single offer on your funnel.

Just as with a varied sales page with multiple products, there’s the opportunity to utilize a live chat widget to bump or upsell to an add-on or higher priced offer through your conversations with potential and current customers. 

Blog Page

One of the best benefits of adding a live chat widget to your site is the increased customer engagement. This can be done not only for sales pages but also for blog pages!

You can even use your live chat widget as an easy way for people to subscribe to your email list to get blog updates. As with all marketing, it's important to get as many customer interactions in as you can because this is what builds trust and customer loyalty, so don’t sleep on adding this to your blog where you’re likely already providing lots of value to your audience.

Thank You Page

Our goal as business owners should always be to continually improve on our customer’s experience. You can use a live chat widget tool to do just that by adding it to your thank you page.

All feedback is good feedback right? By asking your customer how their shopping experience was you get valuable information on how you could improve or streamline your process as well as what aspects of your sales process you are totally nailing!

A live chat widget can be utilized in a number of different ways throughout your website to improve the customer journey and experience from the start. This type of support option can both increase your conversions and boost your revenue by connecting in a more personal way with your customers.

How to Choose the Right Live Chat Widget For Your Business Needs?

There are a lot of different live chat widgets on the market today, some better, some worse, so let’s cover what you should be looking for!

Customization is king. You should seek out a chat widget that lets you customize the messaging, colors, and information collected from your customer. This lets you create a live chat widget that looks and reads like it fits your brand. 

Easy Website Integration. The last thing you want is to have to hire someone to help you set up your live chat. It should be easy and quick to get up and running on your site.  It’ll most likely require a little bit of copy and paste of specific codes to get a live chat widget functional but there is an easy button for this. 

Some marketing software providers, like Social Fox, actually provide a built-in live chat widget option which allows for extremely easy integration to your website or funnel page. If that weren’t enough, Social Fox actually houses all of your marketing efforts under one digital login by providing all the necessary pieces to make your marketing system flow like a dream. 

Team Management. It’s likely that eventually you’ll need another team member to help manage your live chat widget customer engagements. Make sure that your chosen chat provider has an easy interface that allows for multiple team members to be included in the chat widget response process. 

BONUS: Live chat widgets that have the ability to respond via web and mobile or app interface should be prioritized! There will come a time that you’re on the go and need to be able to pop on quickly and answer a customer question and you’ll be grateful that your chat widget allows for mobile responses.

CRM Integration. You want to make sure that you’re able to keep up with the live chat widget transcripts so you can know who reached out and for what. By integrating with your CRM software, you can keep a continuous record of your interactions through the chat widget as well as your other communications [SMS, email messages, social media messages, etc]. This gives you the full picture of how your customer is engaging with your brand.

Ultimately, getting started with a live chat widget is easy! Not only is it easy, it can increase your customer engagement, brand loyalty, revenue, and conversions simply by chatting with your customers. 

Be sure to jump on our free Chat Widget Messaging guide to take the stress out of getting the conversation going and get out there and chat!