Consumers are increasingly looking at businesses to offer them better, more accessible ways of communicating with them. And businesses are taking notice; most are available on social media, email, phone – and increasingly more are starting to use live chat on their website. You might’ve noticed if you follow my blog, that I’ve recently added live chat to my website – and I’m honestly asking myself why it took me so long, especially because it comes with a very, very handy feature – website tracking. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to boost your website leads, conversions, and sales using live chat.

I love spy tools. There, I said it. And I particularly love tools that help me take a deeper look into my website visitors – after all, the more you know about your visitors, the easier it will be to improve your website so that it leads to more conversions.

The thing is, audiences are different; websites, too, will perform differently based on who forms your audience. That’s why a landing page that worked wonders for a particular business can make no noticeable impact when added to your own website. That’s also why you can see big differences in conversions for pages that look almost the same at first glance.

This is where website tracking comes in; when you keep a close eye on your website visitors and understand what makes them convert (or leave your website), you can make a huge improvement to your overall success and conversions.

Introducing Zoho SalesIQ

The simple answer? It’s live chat software. But, the truth is, there’s so much more to it than a live chat window for your website.

Beyond using it as a tool for chatting with your website visitors, you can also use Zoho SalesIQ to track your website visitors in real time; this feature has proven to be so useful, that it almost feels like cheating – just imagine the possibilities for your business, when you can easily track the visitors on your website, see where they are, and then, if you so wish – initiate a conversation with them using the live chat window.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

Who is it for?

Any business with an online presence – i.e., a website – can benefit from using Zoho SalesIQ. Small businesses, corporations, and everything in between need better customer service, they need quality leads, and they need to convert more leads into customers – and that’s where Zoho SalesIQ comes in.

Why your business needs Zoho SalesIQ

Before I get into how Zoho SalesIQ works and how it can be used by businesses, I first want to go through the benefits of using it:

• Capture more leads – for one, it’s easier for people to contact you directly when they’re interested in your products or services; beyond that, though, you can also initiate conversations yourself: if you notice someone is on a certain page of your website or has visited enough pages, for example, then there’s a chance they could be interested in what you’re selling – and you can jump on that immediately because of the live chat feature.
• Better lead scoring – visitor tracking also allows you to score your leads more appropriately. By observing their behaviour, you can form a much better idea of the quality of those leads – i.e. what stage of the buying decision process they’re in. Furthermore, when you score leads, you’re essentially prioritizing leads in terms of their importance, which also leads to more conversions

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

• Understand how people are interacting with your website – this can help your business in a multitude of ways. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a great way of identifying and capturing quality leads, as well as a more accurate way to score all your leads. But beyond this, this feature can also help you improve your website, so that it converts more of your visitors. You’ll be able to understand what paths your visitors are taking, what makes them close your website, what keeps them from reaching the pages you want them to reach – and if you gather and actually use this information, your website will be better prepared to generate leads for you, as well as help you make more sales overall
• Convert more visitors into customers – I’ve already touched upon this point in the previous one, but you can also convert more visitors by using intelligent, automatic triggers designed to convert.
• Better customer service – whether it’s a potential customer making the decision, or an existing customer that needs some help, the live chat window will allow you to offer this help at a much greater speed and in a more efficient way than by email, social media, and even by phone.

How does it work?

The first thing you see when you log into your Zoho SalesIQ account is who is on your website – in real time:

At a glance, you can already see some very useful information:

• A flag that allows you to see their location
• The time spent on your website

The question is, what’s with the circles?

This is how your visitors are organised, so you can easily identify the best leads. Basically, the closer someone is to the centre, the higher their priority. But, you can customize your visitors’ allocation to different rings:

Each ring can be personalized; for example, you could set it so all visitors who have spent more than 2 minutes on your website are on the purple ring. Or, you can make sure you immediately see any returning visitor by automatically setting them to appear in the ring closest to the centre.

It’s all up to you how you organise your visitors; the goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to identify any good opportunities.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

Once you see a potential lead, or you want to find out more information about one of your visitors, simply click on them – you’ll have access to a wealth of very useful information:

As you can see from the screenshot above, you’ll be able to:

• See the exact path the visitor took on your website, complete with exact times – and in real time (as well as older visits)
• Identify whether they are a new or returning visitor
• Find out what is the first page they accessed on your website
• Find out where they came from – in this case, a Facebook post
• The city and country they’re from (and their IP address)

All of your visitors are automatically allocated a number – but, if you know them (i.e. you’ve already talked with them via live chat, or you have them in a connected CRM tool), their name will automatically appear instead of the number.

If you discover any potential leads and they’re not reaching out to you, all is not lost; you can use the box provided in any visitors’ information window:

Beyond visitors who are on your website in real time, you can also see a more complete visitors history: recent visitors, returning, and all visitors. At a glance, you can see where they’re from, their IP address, their time spent on site, what time they were online, and where they came from; but, you can also click on their names to get even more relevant info:

As you can see from above, each visitor is given a lead score, and their lead quality is presented as a percentage – in this case, as it’s a returning visitor with a total number of 104 visits, it shows that there’s plenty of potential there – therefore, 90.81% opportunity. You can also click on “visits” to see a complete list of what they visited on your website, as well as on “actions”, to see a list of their actions. Plus, if you add the javascript code to your website, you can track any buttons they clicked while on your website, as well.

Plus, you can leave your own notes about the visitor, in the right-hand column. Another plus – you can easily export, or email all of the information in your visitor history.

Up to this point, I haven’t really spent the time to really talk about Zoho SalesIQ main feature: the live chat software.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

The live chat window is super easy to install and looks great – you can see it on my own website, in the lower left corner. One of the things that make this live chat very convenient for small business owners, and businesses with few employees in general, is that you can also set it so you appear offline – users can still message you, but they know that you’re not online right then, so they’ll likely get an email back from you, later.

The live chat is also great for working as part of a team; you can set up multiple team members and easily assign different chats to different team members.

If you want to track these members of your team, you can ask for feedback from your visitors at the end of every conversation – these are all stored in your dashboard, so you can easily go through them and check.

One of the biggest issues with live chat, especially if you get a lot of daily inquiries/conversations and you don’t have the resources to hire enough people to manage them, is that it takes time away from your other tasks.

The good part is, you can predict a great majority of responses you might need; for example, answers to frequent questions about your products or services. With Zoho SalesIQ, you can save up to 200 canned messages – then, when you’re chatting with someone, you simply add a “#” sign at the beginning of your message and search through your canned messages to find the right response.

Apart from live chat and website visitor tracking features, the software also offers in-depth reporting. Here, you can see an overview of your business reports, which includes visitor handling time and department usage – all for any given time span you choose. Furthermore, you can see more detailed reports on your website visitors (not just those who used the live chat) and on the members of your team.

Earlier on, I mentioned lead scoring, as well as automation.

The tool will automatically score the leads visiting your website; however, you can actually set that up yourself, as you know best what makes a true quality lead for your particular business.

When you visit your settings, you’ll be able to see a full list of the scoring rules already set:

If you want to set your own, simply delete the existing ones and click on ‘add’ to set up your own rules:

Here, you can choose what conditions need to be met in order to add or subtract a certain number of points from a lead. It’s very easy to set up and you have the benefit of knowing exactly which leads you should be focusing on.

Apart from lead scoring, another stand-out feature for me is automation. There are numerous things that you can automate; for example, you could send a chat invite automatically whenever someone viewed a certain video on your website. Or, you could route certain visitors automatically to a particular user, and even “listen in” to your employees’ conversations with visitors.

Oh, and one more thing worth noting, Zoho SalesIQ integrates with other Zoho apps (Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, etc.), as well as other popular marketing apps, such as Mailchimp, Get Response, iContact, and Kissmetrics.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

Do you have a mobile app?

Although I don’t have a mobile app (yet!), I’m sure some of you do; if you want to get the edge over your competitors, you can install the Mobilisten in-app live chat.

This way, you can offer better customer support, as your customers and potential leads will be able to ask you for help or simply chat about your products, without having to leave your mobile app.

This makes it so much easier for the customer; they can easily tell you about any issues or questions they might have, as well as share photos, screenshots, and other files with you. Plus, you can also set up a workflow, so that chats are automatically routed to the right department or user:

Rest assured that you won’t lose any opportunities to interact with customers and leads; the app sends automatic notifications whenever someone contacts you.

[clickToTweet tweet=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho” quote=”How to boost your website #leads, conversions and #sales using Live Chat @zoho”]

Conclusion

What I like about Zoho SalesIQ is that it basically provides you a powerful tool that allows you to be truly proactive. Not only that, but it also helps you identify the best opportunities, the ones that you should be reaching out to first.