Meanwhile, IT departments are looking for “best practices” that will “increase efficiency” while executive teams are encouraging “paradigm shifting organizational changes.”

Though it may be counterintuitive, we think that enterprise-sized e-tailers can save money by thinking inside the box. Here’s what we mean:

Consolidate Communications: We know from our own proprietary research that a website visitor’s communication technology preference is dependent upon where they are in the buying process. In a given moment then, there are people on your site who want to chat with you, initiate a click to call with you, email you, be actively assisted, or have no communication with you at all. Putting each of these communication methods into its own box and under its own management is wasteful. Enterprises should consolidate all of these methods under one umbrella with the same interface and staff. We recently launched an integrated suite to accomplish just that. Learn more about BoldCCM.

Get in the Driver’s Seat: Taking control over your own live chat, click-to-call and email management solution is valuable to an enterprise for two reasons. First, it saves money in the short-run because it avoids costly fees associated with ongoing professional services engagements. Secondly, it enables companies to build intellectual capital around an increasingly important competency. We recommend, at least, that firms develop a working knowledge of live chat reporting metrics and proactive invitation logic.

One Chat Resolution: Many enterprises who utilize live chat for support should consider an active co-browsing or full remote control capability. If your product line is complicated or if you sell computer-related items, the ability to actively view and interact with a target customer’s PC could allow you to resolve their buying or support issue in one session. This not only provides a positive experience for the customer, but avoids costly escalations.

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.

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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.

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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.

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We were asked to allow the campaign to run for two weeks.  After two weeks, we saw the following:

• Better CTR
• Better visitor behavior (more pages per visit, more time on site, and less bounce)
• No movement in conversions

Thinking that the improvement in behavior would eventually translate into buyers, I allowed the Google optimized campaign to run for the rest of the month.  The complete results we saw by using the campaign put together by the team at Google for the entire ~3 week run were:

• 11% improvement in CTR
• 11% improvement in the number of pages per visit
• 20% improvement in average time on site
• 13% change for the better in bounce
•  A three-fold increase in cost per conversion

The last bullet was, obviously, disappointing.  Based on that, we have reverted back to our own campaign and the ways of the sage AdWords master – Mr. Marshall.

My dealings with Google were extremely professional and they too came to the same conclusion.  I believe we benefited from this interaction in several ways – not the least of which was the slew of new negative keywords recommended by the optimization team.  These were great suggestions and they remain a part of our campaign today.

This also taught us that a huge part of AdWords management is domain expertise – not just with search engine marketing – but within the realm in which one does business.  For us, knowing the live chat buyer certainly helps us to craft better PPC advertising. The Google team expressed interest in taking another crack at our campaign and I’m totally willing to try it.  If Google wants to continue to learn about our business in order to bring us more conversions at lower cost, the door’s open.

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Thanks to products like the iPhone, Blackberry, and Google’s G1 Android-based phone, SMS communications and mobile email continue to be primary functions of a mobile device, rather than secondary functions. I’ve had an iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm Treo and, while call quality was a factor in my purchases, the main value these phones offered was easy access to other forms of communication. So it may seem like a natural progression for business-oriented live chat software to be compatible with mobile phones.

I disagree. I don’t think conducting live chat on a mobile device will help businesses with sales and customer support. In fact, I think it can harm them. Here’s why:

1. IM and SMS communication has given the world a new form of communication that is based on abbreviations and shortened phrases. How comfortable would you be as a consumer if the operator on the other end of the chat inevitably used this informal, casual type of language to communicate? Not very.
2. While 3G and Wi-Fi are becoming more readily available, how much are you willing to bet your sales on them? In my experience, Wi-Fi is hit or miss and often not available (or very strong) in most of the places I travel to – except my home, where I have a laptop with a full sized keyboard and 802.11n speed connection. 3G is still not as fast as Wi-Fi, meaning lag time between the customer message and the agent response. Does your customer know they are communicating with you over 3G on your iPhone? Is that the best representation of your business?
3. Historically, the number one complaint against live chat is the quality of the communication from the agent. If you are on your Blackberry – in any situation – is that the best environment for you to provide the quality of customer service that will differentiate you from competitors and close sales online?
4. One chat at a time. The biggest value chat can provide your team is the ability to have multiple chats at a time, reducing the cost of each interaction and increasing productivity. How many chats can you fit on your iPhone interface, while keeping the font size readable? Realistically not more than one. The easy argument back is that one is more than zero, but if you are providing an abbreviated, slow, semi-professional response to your customer, they might disagree. Can you help them navigate the website easily? Are you getting information about the visitor that improves that quality of the interaction and your ability to help them find the right product quickly?
5. Scalability. One agent answering one chat on one phone device is not the definition of scalability, therefore the very small increment of value that a mobile device could have offered is even further diminished by the fact that it doesn’t scale well.

Chat provides so many benefits as a business tool. And while the prospect of seeing business live chat go mobile is exciting, when you really analyze what live chat is supposed to do to improve your business online, it quickly loses its shine. There is no doubt that more and more consumers as well as businesses are using mobile devices and that software for these devices continues to become more robust. I enjoy playing a variety of games on my iPhone, checking in on Facebook and Twitter, and being able to get up-to-the moment email alerts (and responding when necessary). For asynchronous communications like email, SMS, and social networking, mobile devices are great. For real time communications, a phone is still better as a phone and chat is better left to people sitting at real keyboards typing 40+ words per minute, with access to canned messages, real time visitor analytics, cooperative browsing technology, and customer history.

Vendors who provide implementations you can install yourself will be tempted to reduce the sophistication of the product they offer you OR you will be faced with a maintenance contract to make sure you pay for the support you will need. Finding the razor’s edge will be tricky. Full-featured installable solutions are simply more expensive. With a hosted solution, one simply focuses on what level of sophistication of the solution you wish to implement on your site.

Sure, DIY’ers get control (or more accurately, the feeling of control) when they bring a live chat solution in house, but with it comes the responsibility that a hosted live chat vendor takes on every day. Hosted live chat providers can typically be found in high availability hosting centers, typically on-net with SAS-70 certifications. They staff their teams with database, infrastructure and security specialists to make sure the performance of the solutions is fast, available, and safe. If the solution goes down, they take the call in the middle of the night.

When you do-it-yourself, you may be tempted to cut some corners – especially the costly ones. Discarded are SAS-70, hot spares, network analysis, negotiated bandwidth, vendor certifications, and specialty knowledge in favor of control and potentially saving a few dollars.

We suggest to prospects that they ask themselves this question, is hosting a live chat solution core to your business’s survival in these times? Isn’t your time better spent honing your website, improving SEO, tweaking your SEM, evaluating and enhancing your product line, and training your staff to be effective using live chat rather than paying your IT person to implement and support it?

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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:

• Careful analysis of keyword type matching (broad vs. phrase vs. exact)
  • live chat vs. “live chat” vs. [live chat]
• Focus on CTR
• Religious split testing of ad variations
• Dynamic keyword insertion
• The use of “Official Site” in copy for our own keyword ad variations
• Negative keyword research using the Search Query Report

Suffice it to say that those of us with primary responsibility for this channel have sliced it, diced it, puréed it, filleted it, oiled it, and boiled it. We’re confident that we haven’t left many stones unturned.

The result? It’s better than when we started. It would be hard, however, to classify it as a resounding, world record breaking success. It’s, well, better than when we started.

A few weeks ago, we were contacted directly by Google. The very nice and professional young woman I spoke with offered us a special consultation and a free optimization of one of our campaigns. I took her up on it. (Note: if this kind of offer is made to you, you should verify that you are really speaking to Google – you can do so because the representative will be able to access your account and affect it directly.)

We’ve spent another couple of weeks reviewing their work and just this week, we took the experiment live. The surprising thing about the optimization is that most of the advanced techniques we’ve employed over the past year were utterly stripped away. Dynamic keyword insertion remains in a couple Ad Groups, but all keywords are broad match, many of our keywords have been deleted, no misspellings are being bid on, bids are consistent across keywords, and the ad copy is amazingly similar throughout the campaign.

We’re incredibly curious about how this will do over the course of the next few weeks and we’ll keep you posted right here on the BoldBlog. I wonder if others have utilized this service with good results.

This 11-word question has a 1-word answer – data.

Management-types have a strange affinity for numbers. Raw data makes them smile, spreadsheets can warm their hearts, and graphs make them downright giddy. It is said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, the way to management’s top-of-mind is through data.

Sort of.

In today’s world, we all have access to piles of statistics about our websites. We know about time-on-page, bounce rates, and conversions by keyword. We know about geo-IP, referring URLs and other sophisticated visitor monitoring information. Emailing daily reams of data to management with may seem like a good idea, but 

is likely to get you nowhere fast. Yes, management likes data. But what really gets them excited is data-driven analysis.

Here’s a five step plan for using data to get management’s attention regarding your website:

Step #1: Keep quiet until you’ve got the data

“Our website needs to integrate insert-latest-technology-here because our competitor’s websites have it,” isn’t a solution to a problem – it’s a data-less recommendation. Maybe your company is smart to keep things simple. Maybe they aren’t. Long story short, if you start the conversation this way, you’re stumbling into a deep hole.

Step #2: Seek secondary data

Let’s continue with our example begun above. If you notice competitive sites implementing a certain kind of technology, do some secondary research on it. You’ll probably find whitepapers, studies, and other third party materials regaling the benefits of the latest whiz-bang whatchamacallit.

Step #3: Augment the secondary research with your own targeted data

Another reason to do secondary research is that it helps you to identify specific areas where a deeper internal analysis would be beneficial. If, for example, one of the whitepapers you downloaded in step #2 said that the latest technology is particularly good at increasing conversions in later stages of the sales funnel, you now know that you’ll need to pull your own data from those particular stages.

Step #4: Use the data to tell a story

Cutting and pasting targeted data from your analytics tools into a document or email is better than where we started, but it isn’t great – yet. Instead, take the time to craft a narrative around your goals and simply use the data for punctuation and power. You can present the narrative in written form, slide ware or even in conversation.

We noticed several of our competitors were implementing xyz technology on their sites. We’ve considered it in the past and given these developments, we had a closer look. Some reputable research is available out there and we spent a few days digging through it. A good whitepaper by John T. Expert showed that several firms were able to increase conversion rates when they implemented the technology in late-stages of their sales funnels. We have X people each day exit those stages of our funnels and in the past quarter, it’s increased by Y%…

Step #5:Always include measurement systems

Somehow, data begets data. Don’t fight it – embrace it. If you’re going to recommend changes, always recommend one or more ways to measure the impact of those changes. You’ll not only get management’s attention – you’ll keep it.

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With that in mind, here are 5 technologies that may be helpful for your business in a tight economy:

5. Pitchengine:  Pitchengine is a great way to publish your own press releases, for free, and have them indexed by search engines quickly. PR is valuable, but can be expensive and Pitchengine provides an inexpensive option for self-managed PR.  If you have to make cuts to your PR budget, Pitchengine can help you keep PR alive during the downturn.

4. GoToMeeting: GoToMeeting is a low-cost alternative to Webex, and is a no-brainer for any firm looking to reduce expenses.  Does EVERY meeting need to be face-to-face?  Is it really the best option to leave tomorrow for a same-day trip?  If you can, schedule meetings via web/teleconference using GotoMeeting.  It’s near impossible to find a flight for $49- GotoMeeting’s per month rate for 1 license.

3. LinkedIn: LinkedIn helps keep you connected until the next conference or tradeshow.  Get involved in groups, build your own group, request introductions through existing contacts.  Linkedin offers a free version with huge value to sales/marketing teams looking for ways to grow their network and find prospects.  Most importantly, it keeps you connected with contacts you’ve already made in between those face-to-face encounters. Get further involved for more top-of-mind awareness. Being more active and involved on LinkedIn will generate results.

2. Email management software: Ignore the obvious bias; adding this technology will improve your business- I guarantee it.  You will improve the response time on emails for sales and support, you will have better accountability and reporting and it’s simply more efficient than any other method we’ve seen.  BoldMail solves a real business problem and in a tight economy provides the big three – low cost, high efficiency, increased productivity.

1. Live Chat: Here’s the obvious point – you can have many quality chat interactions at one time and only one call.  No matter how you slice it, chat is inexpensive and helps you connect with more potential sales with less resources.  In this type of economic environment, if you want to capture more sales online, there is no faster way to do it than to add live chat to your website. Live chat improves conversion rates, helps reduce shopping cart abandonment, and will positively impact customer satisfaction.  Name 1 other technology that you can implement in minutes that will do all of that.