We all work very hard to prepare for the largest etailing show in the world, and we extend a thank you to the folks at Internet Retailer who exert tremendous effort to ensure a quality show for attendees and exhibitors alike.

We would also like to extend our sincerest thanks to Jon Abt and everyone at Abt Electronics for their tireless assistance in preparing for this show. On June 9th, Jon, alongside Bold Software’s Director of Marketing, spoke during a session entitled “Is Live Chat Right for You?” The turnout was excellent and Jon’s talk about live chat’s impact was compelling.

For those who took advantage of the cell phone charging station we sponsored, you can now say that you’re “BoldPowered.”

In case you missed any of the news we released during the show, here are the other announcements we made:

Bold Software Now Featured in Palo Alto Software’s ‘Start, Run, & Grow’

Bold Software Introduces Beta Version of Web Client

Bold Software Shares Live Chat Insights from 7 Internet Retailer Top 500

While we always like to generate new prospects at IRCE, it’s not the only reason we attend the show. We also like being part of this industry and attending an event that brings a huge cross section of that industry together. We live and work in an Internet world so it’s nice to shake the hands and look in the eyes of business partners, vendors, and customers alike.

I spent the better part of last week in sunny Orlando, Florida with two of my colleagues. While we didn’t spend much time enjoying the warm weather (a welcome change from the brutal cold here in Wichita), we did spent hours upon hours inside a trade show booth.

For anyone who’s ever worked a trade show, you already know the following to be true:

1. Comfortable shoes are a necessity. We’re talking imperative. Don’t leave home without them.
2. You can never have too many business cards.
3. Mints, water, and inviting smiles must be available at all times.

But that’s just scratching the surface. With every tradeshow comes more knowledge. Here’s some of what I picked up this time around:

1. Splurging on extra padding and thick carpet from the trade show supplier is worth every penny. Not only does the booth staff experience less physical anguish, but it keeps their spirits up. A comfortable team is a more productive team. If all you can think about is collapsing onto your hotel bed and resting your aching feet, you probably won’t be as focused on engaging booth visitors. So spend a bit now and get a bigger return later when those leads turn into sales.
2. Giveaways, while sparse during today’s economy, are appreciated if they are useful and relevant. We gave away BoldChat branded stickers from Foundog.com that can be stuck on cell phones, iPods, laptops, cameras and, really, anything you don’t want to lose. If you happen to, say, leave your Blackberry in a cab and someone finds it, they can call the number on the sticker and report it. Foundog gives them instructions for shipping the phone and the finder receives a reward. The best part of all? You get your Blackberry back. Everyone who picked up our little piece of swag commented on how useful it was. Several booth visitors slapped the stickers on their cell phones right then and there (and grabbed one or two for their kids’ iPods once they got back home). Needless to say, the BoldChat logo now adorns a significant number of mobile devices.
3. Have fun and make friends. I suppose this seems obvious, but after last week, I can assure you it’s not. Of course scoring a good booth location helps with traffic, but so does enthusiasm and friendliness. After sitting in sessions all day long before making their way into the exhibition hall, plenty of the conference attendees were there just for the open bar. But once they started walking around and checking out each booth, they were way more likely to have a chat with a group that looked like they enjoyed being there versus those who looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. Several booths were staffed by people who never stood up or looked away from their laptops. These booths had very little traffic. Is it any surprise? So smile. Get to know more about the business of each visitor to your booth. Listen and when it’s your turn, teach them about your product and why it’s a good fit. Enjoy making new, meaningful connections. These are the kind that last after you return home.

What are some of your tips for a successful trade show?

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.

“Mastering Customer Capture on Your Website” appeared in Website Magazine not to long ago and was authored, in part, by Bold Software’s CEO.  The article, like the WSJ one, is focused on ‘after-click’ marketing.  It’s primary concern is helping businesses to think about capturing contact information from visitors in a way that drives bottom line improvement.   Even if a visitor can’t be immediately converted to a sale, capturing their information is a step toward making them tomorrow’s customer.

The article discusses using visitor monitoring, live chat, and other tools to assist in information capture.

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.

There’s an even bigger upside, the article said: the fact that people who engage in chat return to shop is “a particularly important point during the recession, when customer retention is crucial.”

The article also included research that indicates some browsers prefer phone contact for certain types of customer service, especially when it comes to very complicated transactions. We agree. That’s why we created BoldCall Express specifically for these types of calls. We’ve found that real estate agents, doctors and lawyers are succeeding with click-to-call.

Want the full scoop? Read eMarketer’s live chat article here.

Download the most recent research on live chat effectiveness here.

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.

For these reasons, and others, we have enacted the following:

1. We’ve changed the name of our company to Bold Software, LLC and launched a corporate website at www.BoldSoft.com.   Our new name is descriptive at the same time it pays homage to the heritage of our flagship brand.  Bold Software has a clean aesthetic and this blog now wears its look.
2. We announced a new BoldChat product called BoldChat Premier.  This offering is our most robust chat-only product and is tailor made for businesses that intend a significant live chat operation.
3. We launched BoldCCM for enterprises that require a consolidated suite of website communication tools.  From one interface, companies can manage live chat, click to call, inbound email management, and more.  Two new suites are sold under the BoldCCM name and the Enterprise version includes a new remote control capability.

The changes we’ve made mark an important milestone for Bold Software.  As ambassadors of live chat, click to call, and other website communication technologies, we now have a corporate, brand, and product architecture that allows us to advance a mission begun more than six years ago.  We create software that empowers websites to optimize their performance and we offer it for the greatest value in the industry.

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.

If you believe the industry gurus over at Gartner, live chat technology is still pre-mainstream. As such, any competitive bustling in the market can only serve to raise awareness of the category at large – and that’s good for everyone.

With that in mind, here’s the one step plan that many current BoldChat customers have used to switch away from LivePerson. It’s pretty simple, really; Give us a try.

We think trial behavior is good for the market. Taking test drives of other live chat software deepens understanding of the technology and encourages discussions about its proper place in the organization’s communication strategy, time to benefit, ROI, and other useful metrics. We want folks using other products  to try our software not only because we believe its greater power to impact their business will be readily apparent, but also because it generates conversations inside the firm that will help our category at large. We think trials are a great place to start – especially if you already understand the basics of live chat.

Does all of this talk about category building and overall market goodness mean that we are encouraging our customers trialing competitors? Heck no – we come to work everyday focused on how to increase the value that our customers get from our offerings.

We will say this, however. We’d much rather have a customer leave us and become a LivePerson customer than to abandon chat altogether. If they stick with the technology, we’ll get ‘em back someday.

(Image Source)

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:

1. Pay attention. Twitter is a virtual focus group that never stops. Leverage the Twitter Search feature to keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand, your industry, your competitors, your products and your services.
2. Talk to your customers. Companies like Comcast, Starbucks and Whole Foods are using Twitter as a way to reach new customers, address customer service issues and provide an additional channel of communication outside the usual phone/email/live chat paradigm.
3. Discover sales opportunities. Take what you’ve learned from tip #1 and start following people who are twittering about what is relevant to your business. Reply to them if it’s appropriate. Many users treat Twitter as their own personal search engine and if they’re asking the Twitterverse which live chat service they should evaluate for their business, you can bet I’m replying back and telling them to check out BoldChat. The response has been positive thus far.
4. Don’t spam – engage. Twitter users don’t want to follow someone who only posts links to their website every day. And it’s unlikely that you’ll get many followers if you’re not following anyone else back. Twitter is based on reciprocation. It’s about participation and conversation. So go ahead and post news and links to information that you think your followers might find interesting, but make sure you’re talking to them too.
5. Be human. Part of Twitter’s appeal is the ability follow users without requiring approval. For many, it’s a much more intimate way to connect with celebrities, enterpreneurs and brands than has ever been possible before. Don’t forget that while you are representing your business, your followers want to know more about the people behind the Twitter username. So post TwitPics of your team, talk about office outings and show your personality.
6. Follow us. Ok, so this isn’t really a tip, but we would be honored to have you follow BoldChat on Twitter. We’ll even follow back.

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.

The screenshot above highlights just some of the information we know about website visitors who completed the conversion type – how they arrived on site, where they came from, how many times they’ve previously been on site, and so on.

You may be thinking, “…how is this any different from a goal in Google analytics, or a conversion in Google AdWords?” As my old roommates from Boston would say, “It’s wicked different.”

Most importantly, our website conversion system ties the conversion data together with chat statistics and this allows us to know if a chat occurred as part of the conversion process. Did the visitor have previous chat interactions? With whom did they chat? How long was the interaction? And so on. This, coupled with our software’s ability to pass conversion value information, makes sophisticated analysis around live chat’s ROI, specific agent commissioning, and marketing program pay-back reporting easy to accomplish.

Image Source

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.

Does it work? You bet. Here’s one of our ads that regularly achieves over a 4% click-through rate – a full 1% better than competing ads we’ve written not offering the download. (Note: the display link is different than the actual target landing page.)

Here are a few tips that I’ve learned the hard way through frustrating trial and error.

1. Create whitepaper ads for Ad Groups that contain obvious “information seeking” phrases – “compare”, “statistics”, etc…
2. Whitepapers are especially useful for Ad Groups of competitive keywords – but your copy needs to change.
3. Dynamic keyword insertion will drive up CTR, but could adversely affect conversion because of the possible disconnect between the search term and the actual content of the whitepaper.

One last thing – don’t forget to collect information before allowing the download. Someone who downloads a whitepaper from a PPC ad is at the beginning of the sales cycle and needs nurturing.

(image source)

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.

1. Answering the same questions over and over is a sign that something is wrong. Most live chat software includes a canned messaging capability making it easy for chat operators to respond to common questions. And even though this functionality reduces the time it takes to answer a chatter’s inquiry, answering the same questions repeatedly from different website visitors is a strong sign that your site isn’t preemptively providing the information that people are looking for.
    
2. Good selling can be taught – but identifying the teacher is important. If you are using live chat for sales (and you should be – see the live chat software research report post), then you will have the ability to tie conversions to chat interactions. BoldChat accomplishes this through proprietary conversion code, which enables us to see – for example – that I am a terrible salesperson.
   During the reporting period, I achieved 3 conversions – only one of which occurred during the same session in which I chatted with the visitor. Apparently, I need some training and it is quite clear formthis report that my training should come from Shea. She achieved 20 conversions, 16 of them coming during the same sessions in which she chatted with visitors. That’s an 80% same visit conversion rate and replicating that will clearly improve our business.
    

Using proactive invitations as a research tool. While our independent research shows that live chat proactive invitations are an exceptional selling tool, they can also be used to engage visitors in conversations about other topics. For the past several days, we’ve been doing this on the BoldChat website. I set up a special invitation (including an offer) to talk to people about our website:

 
I’ve talked with a bunch of folks and learned a lot about what people like and don’t like about our site. Based on one user’s feedback, we made a change to our homepage imagery.

Image Source