It’s been more than two decades since, Bill Gates coined the phrase “Content is king!” and the mantra is still very relevant today - after all, content is what drives the world of online. Creating valuable content is instrumental for acquiring and retaining customers. Moreover, consumers today are quite happy to consume brand content, with 90% saying they like the idea of businesses using custom content to engage with them online.
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The recruitment of students is competitive and if you’re not in the top tier of higher education institutions it can be challenging, to say the least. And with the current climate, applications have taken a dive - data from The Russell Group of leading research universities shows a 3% fall in EU students in the current intake, which is believed to be due to uncertainty over Brexit. Not only has the amount of international student applications plummeted, recent Ucas figures show a decrease of 1% in British student applications as well.
The interaction between businesses and consumers has completely changed, due to the increase in mobile usage and the rise in digital.
What is cart abandonment? Imagine a scenario where you walk into a supermarket and start filling up your shopping cart. While shopping you bump in to a neighbour, have a quick catch up, and following the “distraction” you forget all about your weekly shop and head off home.
This scenario is pretty unlikely in real life. However, in the world of eCommerce, it is just another day in the office. In fact, it is anticipated that four out of five shoppers leave their carts without converting.
Despite your well-laid plans, shoppers will visit your site and start shopping, only to be distracted by an email, a notification from another platform or even human intervention. And, they may never return. This forms the basis of cart abandonment. In simple, it happens when buyers add an item to a website shopping cart but never complete the transaction.
So how can you avoid shopping cart abandonment? Here are our top three tips to abandoned cart recovery:
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other major "holidays" can make any customer service agent sweat. Who can blame them though, as the service lines and chat windows pop up one after another.
The popularity of Live Chat has been growing amongst all ages but it’s quickly becoming the most desired method of contact especially (and unsurprisingly) for millennials. They are more likely to prefer chat over other generations, with two top reasons being limited wait time and convenience. And as the popularity of Black Friday and it's online equivalent Cyber Monday grows all over the world, customer service agents manning live chat services have had to up their game!
Live chat offers customers a great alternative, allowing them to interact with an actual person in real-time without having to make a phone call or wait for a reply. From a commercial standpoint, live chat certainly increases business potential, an infographic by Website Builder showed that chatting customers were 3 times more likely to become returning shoppers and bring in a 48% increase in revenue per chat hour.
Implementing live chat into your online store isn’t hard (in fact it's as easy as copy pasting a line of code into your website script), but you have to make sure to have the right online sales strategy, which will lay the foundation for effective live chat sales. Here are a few simple principles to follow to an ensure efficient live chat service during peak shopping seasons:
[Derived and updated from our previous blog by Petri Vilpponen]
With Halloween coming up, we have started thinking about the horror stories we face as businesses - Disappointed customers, high returns, low sales, cart abandonment...
And as we learnt from Game of Thrones, the night is dark and full of terrors, we wake up in the morning thinking things at work are as we left them, but that may not always be the case. With so much going on outside working hours, the experiences you deliver then can really make or break your brand in the eyes of your customer. Why? Because if something goes wrong, you need to be able to come to the rescue and deliver in the same way as you would during the day.
So how can you maintain your service quality and capture leads after hours, even with Michael Myers creeping on you?
Goal-oriented chatting is more than just live chat, it’s building a strategy of goals and measuring results to keep growing your business. So what is it?
Finland has been ranked number one among the countries that drink most coffee, and our Helsinki office is no exception. Our office practically runs on coffee and we take it very seriously. We brew a lot of coffee, around seven cups per person per day to be precise. In addition, our team is also particular about getting their coffee at its very best regarding optimum brew time and temperature.
The coffee supply had never been a bottleneck until we moved office to new premises little over a year ago. For, although our new office is otherwise a lot nicer than the old one, the downside was that most teams, consequently, lost direct visibility to the kitchen area and the two coffee makers. The problem was that in order to get the ‘current coffee availability status’, you had no other alternative than to walk to the kitchen and see for yourself. Besides taking unnecessary time and effort this frequently lead to disappointment and frustration as the coffee jug was often found empty.
An estimate of 4 trillion USD worth merchandise was abandoned in 2016. Every time consumers are asked for a reason for this behaviour one of the most common answers is higher than expected shipping costs. What this usually means is that either lower or free shipping costs haven’t been offered in the first place, or the customer hasn’t qualified for them. Either way, this is a great example of a situation, which could have been turned into a victory quite easily. In this particular case, for example, by reminding the customer of a perk (e.g. free shipping for orders over 100 EUR).
Then, how to identify these situations so that you can give the customer a gentle push towards completing the purchase? Like discussed in our previous blog, there are four (4) conditions that e-retailers should pay attention to when trying to turn online visitors into customers. Visitor's shopping cart information is the first one of these. That is why in this blog we will focus on explaining how having real-time visibility of visitor's shopping cart size and shopping history can create a lot of opportunities for enhancing online customer experience and increasing sales.
It’s dusk and your customer service is closing the chat service for the day. They are tired after handling up to 7 messages at a time for the whole day (like Finnair’s agents do).
They’ve been there when your visitor has felt lost. They’ve been there when your visitor needed details. And while helping, they’ve been collecting leads for the sales peeps, maybe in the dozens (like YIT does).
If you have a live chat on your site and your site's goal is to get leads through forms (like the one on your 'Contact us' -page), you are probably already using behavioral Rules to initiate a chat conversation with the visitors most likely to abandon those forms.
In our previous blog post we listed four ways to use automated Lead Call after your chat agents call it a day. This is a hands-on article on how to create a Rule that triggers a Lead Call asking for a phone number, name and an open-ended question when a visitor navigates away from a form-page without filling the form.
In our previous blog posts (here and here), we gave you hands-on instructions on how to create rules and how to do A/B testing. This time we are going to show you how to create a pop-up discount code which you can use to gently nudge your online store visitors towards making a purchase.
Like discussed in one of our earlier blogs, hesitant visitors are a common problem for many eCommerce stores. Still, there is no need to despair as there are ways to improve the situation and help the visitors to overcome their hesitance.
After you have identified the people that are hesitant, you need to decide which incentives you are willing to use to turn them into buyers. Adding coupon discount codes to your website can help you to draw more customers in, give them a great shopping experience and encourage them to come back and buy from you again at a full price.
In a previous blog post (here), we gave you hands-on instructions on how to create rules. This time we are going to show you how to perform A/B testing for rules to compare two versions against each other to help you determine which one performs better.
You can use A/B testing to e.g. compare proactive and reactive approaches against each other. For example, you can show half of the group a custom autosuggest chat message and offer the other half a static chat button element (which they can click if they want to start chatting). In addition, you can take an action, like autosuggest chat message or free delivery pop-up, modify it to create a second version (e.g. change the text, picture or color) and then, show half of your traffic the original version and the other half the modified version. Let's try!
One of the top most cited reasons for not purchasing online is the cost of shipping. Customers see shipping costs as the number one barrier to buying, and the situation is made even worst if there is no up-front information available about it. Since offering free shipping would also entirely remove this obstacle related to shipping costs, it is safe to assume that free shipping would make converting these visitors into buying customers significantly easier.
Therefore, to increase conversion rate, it is good to remind customers of an existing perk, like "free shipping on orders over xxx". Let us show you how!