Live chat boosts conversion when used properly – that is undeniable. Chat allows your online visitors – your potential customers – to have their questions answered quickly and easily. No more picking up the phone and paying for a call, no need to search for an email address, write an email, and wait for a reply. Nothing stands between you and the customer – except the chat button.
While all aspects of site design are important, it’s essential to ensure that your chat button ticks certain boxes. Here’s the lowdown on choosing the right button for your site.
How big should your chat button be?
While you want to encourage online visitors to chat with you, it’s important not to be too pushy about it. Obviously you want your button to be easy to spot, but don’t go overboard. Ever seen flashing neon buttons, jumbo-sized ones that take up a quarter of the screen, or irritating invitations to chat that scroll down the screen as you do? All of these are more likely to put people off than to tempt them to click on them.
The purpose of the chat button is to hook as many people as possible, while remembering that some people simply have no interest in live chat and will find the information they need in another way. Don’t get in their way in your eagerness to get that group to chat with you – they’re not going to anyway!
Tags: Customer Service test, test and test again
When it comes to the best colour for chat buttons, the jury’s still out. And likely to stay out, if you ask me. While orange is supposedly a great colour for buttons (especially payment buttons, at least according to Amazon and PayPal), the fact is that humans are simply not that straightforward. Avoiding psychedelic patterns can only be a good idea, but there are no hard and fast rulesfor determining what’s going to bring in those mouse clicks.
What does that mean for your business’s website? Choose a colour which is aesthetically pleasing and fits in with the rest of your site without blending into the background, and get testing. Only trials and comparisons are going to help you figure out what’s best for you.
Text: add a trigger
So we’re all done here? Not so fast. Don’t forget the area around the button, where you can place the text soundbites which copywriter Joanna Wiebe calls “click triggers”. These little extra boosts give an added impetus to your customers’ trigger fingers. With just a couple of lines of text, you can let people know what’s going to happen when they click on that button.
Your click trigger might be ‘Got a question? We’re here to help’, or a testimonial such as ‘Thanks for the fast and friendly chat help, Peter!’. Anything that acts as a reassurance to the customer that they are going to get the help they need if they just click that button, NOW!
Placement: it’s not rocket science
Even the most lovingly selected chat button and enticing click triggers aren’t going to do squat if you hide them away in an obscure corner of your site. So now that you’re all fired up to get started, you need to consider where to place your button. Again the moral of the story is test, test, and test again.
But a word to the wise: the bottom of the page might be just fine. Today’s web users have no problem with scrolling (we have touchscreens now baby, it’s just a swipe or two!), and it’s definitely handy to give people a moment or two to formulate a question properly before they start chatting. You don’t want to be dealing with questions like “what are your shipping charges” when “SHIPPING IS FREE” is written in bold just underneath the chat box …
However you approach the decision-making and testing process, do keep one thing in mind: your chat button choice is important, very important, and careful selection and testing are two of the most important things you can do to up your conversion rate. But never forget that you need to back them up with stellar customer service.
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