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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under tight economic conditions, why would any company give up business to their competitors? There are several perfectly rational (and economically sound) reasons. Here are a few:

1. If your product can be used a particular way, but really shouldn’t be. Our BoldMail solution is extremely powerful and our customers use it with tangible benefits to their business. However, it is a tool intended for the management of inbound emails. We turn away prospects who want to use it as an outbound email marketing solution. It can be used this way, but because it wasn’t designed to be, it would ultimately fail to satisfy them. To see how BoldMail works, check out this short video.
   Read the rest of this entry »

If you have yet to check out the April 2009 issue of Internet Retailer, be sure to take a look. This month’s cover story, Survivor: e-Retailer, features BoldChat customer, Appliance Zone, as one of several smart retailers that are finding opportunities to reach price-conscious consumers just when brick-and-mortar stores are scaling back on staff and inventory or closing their doors all together.

Don Davis, Internet Retailer’s Editor-in-Chief, spoke to Appliance Zone about how the rapidly growing e-retailer keeps customers happy by consistently delivering rock-bottom prices. One of the reasons they’re able to keep prices so low is by encouraging their customers to use live chat software at the website.

In addition to Appliance Zone, the article also covers online retail strategies from Staples, Blue Nile, Title Nine, Drugstore.com and Newegg.com. The story wraps with a list of “5 recession-beating tips for e-retailers.” We especially like #5: Promote the Use of Live Chat to Reduce Call Center Costs.

Congratulations to the team at Appliance Zone for their part in a great story!

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:
Read the rest of this entry »