Increase Chats With Proactive Messages

Sending targeted proactive messages to your visitors is a great way of increasing the number of chats.

The most effective way of sending proactive messages to your visitors is by using Automation Rules to tailor specific messages to certain types of visitors. The key components for success are reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message. Automation Rules can be created and edited at https://www.olark.com/automation.

Let's take a look at an example you can try yourself.

Target Visitors on Your Pricing Page

For many businesses, the pricing page or its equivalent is a high-value page that can see visitors bounce without a further interaction.

Let's make a rule where we start a conversation with a new visitor to your website who has been on the pricing page for long enough to have digested the information.

To achieve this with Automation Rules, we might set these conditions:

• When any agent is available to chat
• If current URL contains /pricing and number of visits to my site is 1 and seconds spent on current page is more than 20
• Then once per unique visitor, send this message to your visitor '👋 Hi there. Did you have any questions about our prices I can help with?'

It's important to create impactful Automation Rules and to remember the general rule that "less is more." Visitors to websites are increasingly familiar with chat widgets, so imagine what sort of message might capture their attention. It needs to feel relevant to them for the task they're trying to accomplish, and you also do not want to send them too many notifications.

Planning Your Messages

Another option is to notify your agents when visitors are on your site. Instead of sending a message to the visitor, you can send a notification to the agent to let them know there's a visitor on the site that they may want to reach out to. This will allow your agents to send more tailored messages, but it is more labor intensive.

To achieve this with Automation Rules, we might set these conditions:

• When any agent is available to chat
• If current URL contains /pricing and number of visits to my site is 1 and seconds spent on current page is more than 20
• Then once per unique visitor, send this message to your agent 'There's a new visitor on the pricing page - consider reaching out and saying hi!'

Recap

• Use Automation Rules to send proactive messages to visitors on your site.
• Plan for targeted and timely messages that are specific to a group of visitors.
• Automation rules do not follow an ordered list, they always fire if the conditions are met, so make sure you do not have conflicting rules that may result in your visitor receiving too many automated messages.