How to Use Olark Chat to Gain More Conversions

These days having the ability to chat with a business directly on their site is almost essential. The days of texting are upon us, which means that more and more users prefer to be able to chat, and therefore multi-task, than pick up the phone for a call that they assume will put them on hold. With this in mind, if you have just started to entertain the idea of getting a chat feature on your website we recommend Olark Chat. We personally have found that this software is one of the best for increasing your conversions.

In short, Olark allows you to see who is on your site and what they are doing, and it even provides details about what is in a customer’s shopping cart, which means it offers data that other tools (such as Google Analytics) just can’t provide. Below examples how it all works when it comes to customer insights, as well as what else is offered.

Customer Insights: How Improve Your Conversion Rates and Gain More with Olark

Communicating with your customers directly is one of the easiest ways to see feedback and know what you need to do to improve your product and experiences. Of course, having live chat isn’t the end of the story. There are several other things you can do to improve your conversations and improve the type of customer insights that you are gaining from chat. Some examples include:

Sync Up Your Live Chat With Your Google Analytics

The problem with solely relying on chat for customer insights is that it can be slightly misleading. If you look at chat transcripts and cross reference analytic stats and trends you are seeing, you can begin to get a fuller picture of what is going on. This is probably the number one thing that makes Olark more appealing than most other live chat tools out there.

It is also known for being one of the platforms you can really integrate with other software that you are using as well as with Google Analytics. Some of these include Shopify, Salesforce, Big Commerce, Zen Desk, HighRise, and NutShell.

Targeted Chat

Cut down on time that you spend interacting with those who are ultimately not destined to become customers. With Olark’s targeted chat you can figure out how to avoid the chat feature popping up on troublesome pages.

Selectivity

One of the reasons Olark works really well for customer conversions is that you can be selective in when you want the chat to appear. Rather than having the chat bombard visitors, you can try out different targeted approaches and see what ends up working best for your analytics.

Conversion Transcripts

Perhaps one of the best features of Olark is their conversion transcripts. When you use a feature like a live chat, you are constantly learning from and interacting with your clients. Once you can develop a better understanding of your customer (alongside of other conversion strategies such as A/B testing) you are one step closer to increasing your profits and having conversion rate success. By collecting data through the Olark conversion transcript feature you can begin to analyze your data and design a plan.

Understanding Qualitative Data

There are a lot of things you can learn from quantitative data (or data that relies on numerical information), but qualitative data can give you insights that numbers cannot. Conversion transcripts provide valuable information about user behavior, or their goals and interests in your business, that sometimes numbers can not capture! You can look to this qualitative data to see themes emerge which help you to optimize your website.

Two Examples:

(1) For example, let’s say a lot of people are asking a question related to your check-out process that just isn’t clear on your website. You can use this transcript data to improve this feature of your check-out process and get more clients to “finish” their purchase.

(2) Another example may be a question that keeps popping up regarding a certain product or service. Maybe your description isn’t clear enough, or maybe you need to provide more content such as a blog article or a webinar, so that people do not have as many reservations. In any case, these questions can actually help to inspire new site ideas and changes.

Note: If you need help analyzing your data, Olark has help for you available. For a step-by-step process for analyzing Olark chat transcripts and increasing conversions click here.

Create a Word Cloud

One of the recommended steps after conducting transcript analysis is to create a word cloud. Once you’ve analyzed at least 20 transcripts and you are to the point of adding them to the “Real Quote” column, you can navigate to this site and paste all of the entries to discover the most used words.

What are the top 5 words that showed up? How can this offer insight into what people are talking about and what is going on in your live chat? Sometimes this method can really shed light on what people are really focusing on and can help you to strategize when looking at all of your transcripts gets too overwhelming.

Customizable Options

Olark is also extremely customizable, allowing you to change the text, font, color, and API. There is a lot that is in your control so you can give your account a little bit of personality for both you and your users to see.

Pricing

In doing a comparison of live chat software, many companies do not list a price up front or say it “varies” by site and project. In comparing those that do, Olark is definitely one of the least expensive options for all of the features it offers, and the product also offers multiple levels and different packages depending upon what your business actually needs.

In the screenshot below you can see the kind of packages they offer:

Don’t Forget: Get as much information as possible and always follow up

Remember that Olark isn’t everything—you still have to make sure you’re gathering your own information and following-up. You want to get as much information as possible from each customer chat. This means beginning the conversation with information collection early on. You want to start out the conversation by getting a name and email address at the very least, that way you can follow up (with specific information) after the chat finishes.

When you collect email addresses and have the ability to follow-up about customer experience on your website, you open up so many more possibilities in terms of converting potentially lost customers. Make it a top priority to follow up with everyone you engage with conversation with, and you will definitely see a noticeable change in conversions using this software.

Getting Started with Olark and the Takeaway

It is extremely easy to add Olark Chat to your site. As the Olark site suggests, you just copy your Olark code, paste it to your website, and then login to chat. The screenshot below from their website shows how it works:

As a marketing company we are always concerned with strategies to help our clients improve their conversion rates. Olark is not only a company we support and learned to love, but it is also one of the best out there in terms of features. If you are looking to improve your qualitative (and quantitative) data analysis with a program that integrates well with existing software at super competitive prices, look no further for a live chat platform. In using transcripts and word clouds, you will easily identify some of the top issues your clients are concerned about and be able to optimize your site in response to their needs.

Have you tried using Olark or another live chat? Let us know in the comments section below.

We received no compensation from Olark for writing this review.

About The Author

Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.