Offering support to your online visitors is crucial in order to increase conversions, grow your brand and show that you are a legitimate site. Visitors can quickly get discouraged or lose interest in finding answers to their questions on your website.
That is why it is so important to offer support to your visitors so that they can ask immediately, without the need to spend too much time searching on your site for answers – and perhaps not even finding them. In addition, when they get in touch with your support, you have a direct way of contacting them and have a better chance of selling them your service or product and even upselling them additional services.
There are several ways to interact with your visitors.
Depending on your type of website, brand, and products being sold, here are some of the best ways to do it:
Emails
Emails are a go-to channel for communicating daily with customers, business partners, leads, and everybody else. They are simple to use, understood by everybody, and offer an instant way to get in touch with website owners. This is either done via a contact form or by directly sending an email to the support, found on the website. Emails are also used for sending campaign notifications – mass emails sent to every subscriber and customer they have in order to notify them about their special offers, promotions, or company news.
The downside of email is that on average they are checked 15 times a day and are not that successful when sending mass notifications. These types of emails, campaign emails, usually have an open rate of 20% and a click-through rate of 3-4%.
They also tend to go into the promotions or SPAM folder making them ineffective for communicating and keeping in touch with your customers.
Push notifications
Push notifications are a technology that is mainly used with news sites where visitors can subscribe to get notified via their browser about new posts on the site. This is a one-way communication channel, where visitors opt-in to get notifications, and websites just send a notification that there is a new article that can be read on their site. Clicking on the notification redirects visitors directly to the link in the push notification.
Of course, one does not need to be limited to news sites as some brands also use them to send notifications to their customers or followers about new offers. This can be effective if the site has strong brand recognition.
The downside of push notifications is that the recipients need to be logged in to the browsers from which they have subscribed to receive them. Still, they can be an effective solution to keep your subscribers up to date with new information that is on your website.
Online chat
Having an option to instantly write to support directly on the site and getting an immediate answer is a great way to offer support to your visitors. Getting an instant answer to your visitors is a great way to increase conversions as sometimes your customers just do not know how to find a specific answer or even complete a purchase – and live support can do that for them.
There is a downside to online chat support as you need somebody to be there, ready and available to answer various questions that are given to them. In addition, the support staff must have the answers quickly prepared so that the visitors do not lose focus on what they are there for. The quality of the language and given answers is vital to keep your visitors reassured that the site is legitimate.
Social media
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok are some of the most powerful ways of keeping in touch with your existing customers and getting new ones. Depending on the brand, one can share various information on each platform – from news and blog posts, company pictures, new products, and special offers – you name it.
People spend a lot of time on social media and like seeing what new is going on with their favorite brands. In case a company has several social media accounts it is typical that they post the same information on all platforms, so they only need to spend time making one. But it is important that they post regularly as social platforms do offer better exposure to profiles that post on a regular basis.
Having various social media accounts grows brand recognition and gives more trust to the customers that the company/brand is a well-established brand. In addition, all social media platforms offer communication between the visitors and them, so customers can get in direct contact with you.
Support forums
Support forums are one of the least used ways to interact with your online visitors. In most cases, it is used by eCommerce companies that offer software to their customers as other sites usually do not need additional support to their customers after the purchase has been made.
The benefit of using support forums is that other people can see the questions already posted and answered so that they do not need to write their own ones. In addition, other people can join in on the conversation, making it a more interactive way of communication.
With support forums, there is no need to have support staff that is immediately available as it is enough that the answers are given in a normal time manner – which depends on the number of questions and the activity of the whole forum by all the members.
Text messages
Using text messages in order to communicate with your shop visitors offers one of the best and most direct ways of communication. Although it is mostly used as a one-way communication channel for sending notifications – mostly sending abandoned cart notifications and special offers, post-purchase offers, and notifications about upcoming emails, the results of text messages are the best from the complete list.
Text messages have an open rate of 99% and a click-through rate of 37%+, making them the best communication and marketing channel out there. Using text messages to interact with your website visitors offers instant results as more than 93% of text messages are opened in less than 3 minutes after receiving them.
Want to read more about the statistics about text messages? Read our article Abandoned cart text message statistics.
The main problem with text messages has so far been the problem with integration in the websites, but CartBoss has solved the issue by making the whole process, from registration to sending the first messages, fast and seamless, making it possible to start communicating with your customers within 5 minutes.
What solutions to activate on a site
Having an omnichannel presence is the best solution for any company so that you never lose any customer/visitor, no matter their communication preferences.
Each website has its own type of visitors and sometimes it can be difficult to support every communication and marketing channel available. It is best to choose the ones that best fit your visitor’s profile and be as active as possible on those ones.
