Increase your sales with an E-commerce chat
Of all the tools commonly used in e-commerce, there is one that usually isn’t associated with conversion and it’s a strategic error not to do so.
We talk about live chat and its spectacular sales potential and we’ll give you a few tips that you can apply starting today.
DO E-COMMERCE CHATS REALLY MAKE SALES?
Yes, of course. In most of the e-commerce stores you analyze, you’ll see that it improves sales indirectly.
It may take more for us to see the relationship between a chat and sales at a glance, but there’s a clear link between a business’s level of service and its conversion.
E-commerce is becoming increasingly more of an experience. The customer buys a product as well as a lifestyle, a brand, an ethical position in the market, an excellent level of service, etc. There are too many aspects and complex messages to trust only in what the customer understands or how they’ll manage the situation themselves.
That said, this is where e-commerce live chat comes into play. The oldest and most obvious weakness of electronic business as a channel is precisely the absence of human contact.
All questions that arise while browsing an online store must be answered by the e-commerce users themselves. There’s no such thing as a salesperson we can turn to for advice like we do in retail. Therefore, we as clients have to make the effort to clarify these questions, either on the page we’re currently on or by searching again (using a manufacturer’s page, for example).
It’s been proven: the more complicated the buying process is, the more the rational part of the brain comes into play, making it easier for doubts to crop up.
But the problem isn’t only hesitating on an impulse buy, there are also a multitude of different inputs in the digital ecosystem that makes it easy to lose the customer’s attention and, with that, the possibility of persuading them to make a purchase in our store.
Therefore, yes, live chats make sales indirectly in our e-commerce, thanks to the ability to enrich the interaction with the store through human touch.
SELLING DIRECTLY WITH LIVE CHAT IN OUR E-COMMERCE
This is a characteristic that many people forget about or don’t develop correctly. Live chat opens a communication channel in real-time that allows us to adapt our sales pitch to the client, understand what they need and offer them the best product to meet their needs.
Suddenly, e-commerce goes from being a list of products with technical descriptions to a solution or response to a need, which isn’t so easy to achieve with other tools.
Let’s look at some active live chat sales tactics for our online store:
#1 – ANTICIPATION
Gauging service times is critical to facilitating a sale. If we jump the gun we’ll be intrusive, if we wait too long, we might be too late and miss the opportunity.
What can best help us find that perfect moment to start a conversation is to use automation combined with Artificial Intelligence. These triggers learn from the overall behavior of the website and give a response based on data managed by an algorithm.
#2 – RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION
In any business, it’s essential to get the most out of the resources we have. And furthermore, e-commerce gives us quite a few variables when it comes to paying things off and scaling.
Thanks to the live chat, even if a department doesn’t generate revenue, if it’s strategic, it pays for itself. Customer service and support are non-negotiable, but if you make them compatible with sales work, they generate return, especially in unproductive hours.
Additionally, a single agent can easily attend to several clients simultaneously and the customer feels taken care of in almost real-time.
We can even increase productivity if we combine the live chat with chatbots.
#3 – CROSS SELLING AND UPSELLING
We have an extra trick up our sleeve with the persuasiveness of an agent. Something as common as the modules we see on Amazon and other stores, those sidebars with “related products” are included in the cross-selling strategy. A person can read someone’s intention to make a purchase better than an algorithm and see additional needs that should be covered.
We can also implement upselling, which is, quite simply, taking advantage of the conversation we’ve had with the client and persuasively offer them a higher-end product.
In either case, we’re able to increase the average ticket of our online store.
#4 – PROMOTING RETURN
When we humanize the relationship, it makes it easier for us to go back to a website. Somehow we trade the interaction with a cold system for the sensation of having someone with eyes and a face behind the screen, someone to ask for help if you need it.
At the end of the day, it’s a way to bring the e-commerce experience closer to traditional sales and have contact with the salesperson.
