Recently, the Wall Street Journal pointed to live chat technology as one of the “Three Best Ways to Convert Web Traffic into Sales.” (read it)  The article discussed a few tools to help businesses capture and accelerate the pace with which visitors moved through the sales cycle.

The topic clearly struck a chord for business owners evidenced by several days of the story being tweeted and retweeted. While we’d like to believe that it was a fascination with live chat technology that drove the excitement, we understand that the story’s real appeal was its unspoken message.  The idea that website owners aren’t simply beholden to the whims of their visitors but, instead, can effectively exert influence over the buying cycle is a powerful message.  Another recently published article discusses this as well.

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Live chat helps convert browsers into repeat online buyers, according to an article published today in eMarketer, a leading technology research website.

Using proprietary research from Bold Software, eMarketer found live chat “very helpful” for e-commerce sites. In fact, live chat was the preferred customer service option for questions about order status, promotions, shipping or cheaper services, the article said.

Live chat is valuable for “inducing shoppers to make a purchase and getting those purchasers to return to the site,” eMarketer noted.

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We’ve recently made some changes to our corporate branding, product naming, and available features that we’d like to share with both our existing and prospective customers.  Before we jump in to the individual changes, it will be helpful to explain why we made them in the first place.  There are several reasons, though two come to the fore.

First, despite the economy that surrounds us, we’re growing.  And, as we continue to grow, continue to win business from large preeminent brands, and continue to be relied on by media and analysts as experts in our field, we needed to establish a corporate presence beyond the brand names of the products we sell. Though many know us as “BoldChat”, that is simply one of the brands we manage.

Secondly, our growth has been fueled by two types of customers – small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses and significant enterprise engagements.  As such, the feature sets each of these customers require has changed over time.  We needed to react and build offerings appropriate for each.

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In certain marketing circles it’s considered sacrilege to use your competitor’s name in your own communications. “Why use your money to promote their brand” – or so the thinking goes. While I admit it’s not terrible advice, it’s not always the right advice either. There are certain situations when explicit mentions of direct competitors are not only appropriate, but encouraged.

When the industry in which you compete has not yet ‘gone mainstream’, a decent portion of your marketing effort is needed for education. This is true, in fact, for all the players in the space. In burgeoning markets then, a chunk of the collective marketing executed by all the competitors is being used for ‘category building.’ While marketing-types would like to use 100% of their budgets for brand building, it’s simply not possible until there is a robust market from which competitors can carve out a lasting position.

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Are you on Twitter?

Oprah is. President Barack Obama is. Martha Stewart is. Same with Shaquille O’Neal and John Mayer. Zappos.com CEO, Tony Hseih, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and AOL co-founder, Steve Case are all tweeting away too… and that’s barely scratching the surface of the popular microblogging service’s users.

But Twitter isn’t just for the rich, famous and successful. There are 6 million users currently signed up with the service and, according to predictions by eMarketer, that number could double by the end of 2009.

Twitter is also not just for individuals. More and more businesses are tweeting, to varying degrees of success. Should your business jump on the Twitter bandwagon? Signing up for an account may seem simple enough (it’s easy and free), but the question I often hear is “then what?”

Here are a few tips for navigating the Twitter landscape as a business:

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Here’s the link. Go ahead – click it. I know you want to. C’mon – click it.

When you click this link, the BoldChat system records your action as a specific type of conversion which we’ve set up called, “Clicked Blog Link”. Our live chat software allows us to report on these conversions in aggregate, or to browse them one by one as you can see below.

To be honest, the aggregate reporting is more useful for business decision making but as it’s not as cool looking, I didn’t include it here.

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To understand why offering whitepapers as part of a Pay-per-Click strategy works, you’ll have to get inside Google’s head. Scary thought, I know, but surprisingly easy to do.

The first line on Google’s corporate site is: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Why do people use Google? The question is perhaps pedantic (though amusingly alliterative), it is important not to lose sight of the answer; people use Google to find things. Most often, they are looking for information –as Google themselves states. As such, offering Whitepapers front and center as part of your Google ads seems to fit in with the very philosophy of search – providing information and making it accessible.

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I’ve struggled with this post because there are so many ways in which learnings from live chat can impact a business that it was hard to know where to start. Perhaps you can identify with my conundrum if the question were re-worded. “Can I improve my business by talking to my customers and prospective customers?”

You see my point – it’s about as wide open as the Atlantic. In the interest of brevity, and as a way to organize things, I’m going to talk about 3 distinct ways in which live chat interactions can drive improvement in organizations. There’s at least ten times that many, but “3 ways that live chat can impact your bottom line” is as pithy as it is relevant.

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Our grand experiment has come to an end and the results are in.  If you haven’t read my first post about Google’s offer to optimize our AdWords campaign for free, let me bring you up to speed.  Google contacted us and offered to put together an “optimized” campaign aimed at boosting results.  During email and phone conversations with the team assigned to our account, we were very clear about the definition of results; success was lower cost conversions.  Full stop.

We were asked to allow the campaign to run for two weeks.  After two weeks, we saw the following:
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A decent chunk of our marketing expenditure goes to paid click advertising and the vast majority of that spend is through Google’s AdWords system.  While many conversion types are possible on our website, the only one that matters with Google is a successful paid customer conversion. This is, in fact, the only conversion we track using the AdWords ‘conversion tracking’ feature. Over the past year or so we have systematically attempted to drop our cost per conversion by implementing and testing a variety of methodologies. We have relied most heavily on the advice from Perry Marshall and his AdWords course. Just a few of the things we’ve done include:

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