Lead generation is the bloodline of every business—the more leads you have, the more opportunities for conversion. And there is a myriad of tool and strategies to help you with your lead generation endeavors. At the forefront of all these is the customer service tool or otherwise known as the live chat.

Consider what it can do for your business as a lead generation tool:

• 42% of companies say live chat is their leading source in the online environment
• It can bring in between 100 – 500 prospects a month
• Customers who chat are 3 to 5 times more likely to convert
• A typical live chat has a 300% ROI

Aside from the impressive statistics it shows, live chat support is cheap. In fact, you can do A/B tests with live chat even on a very limited budget and time.

Great Data are Nothing if You Don’t Make It Work for You

Every impressive statistics has an opposite, and that goes the same with a customer service tool. If you do not know how to use the tool, it can affect your conversion negatively.

Well, you might ask, don’t you just set up the live chat tool and you’re good to go?

Primarily yes, but don’t you want to utilize it as an effective lead generation tool?

Here’s how you do it:

Utilize the Power of Data

It all starts with data. Use the data from your live chat tool and Google Analytics to find out visitor behavior and the pages that convert the most. Take note of all the pages that have a poor conversion rate.

Find the Conversion Rate of Each Page

Next, find out the conversion rate of each page and divide it between your business hours and after hours. Also, find the average time how long the customers sign up or enquire from the moment they enter your page. For example, it takes 30 seconds for a visitor to sign up to your newsletter the moment they hit your page, and another 30 seconds to submit the form.

Choose What Your Ideal Customer Looks Like

After you get the conversion rate, your next mission is to find who your best type of customer persona is based on your visitors’ behavior. This is a critical step so you can eliminate the time wasters early on and focus on those who are genuinely interested with your product or service.

Here are some questions you can ask to find your best customer:

• Where do they come from?
• Which pages of your website do they often visit – homepage, products page, FAQ, etc?
• Where can your best customers login or get support in your site? (You don’t want to waste their time looking for it. It should be in the place they expect to see it when they need it).

Setting Up Your Live Chat to Increase Leads

Now that you’re done with the data, it’s time to set up your live chat and make it work for you.

Using the data you got, choose the pages where you want to place your live chat. Carefully pick up the best-performing pages in your site, so you reinforce them through a ready support when they need it at that point.

Next is to think of the greetings for your visitors. Every visitor is different; thus, they also need different greetings. Create conversation triggers that will churn up pre-programmed responses to specific visitor behaviors.

Smart Tip:
During a conversation with a prospect or visitor, let them do more of the talking but take control of the conversation by asking well-meaning questions to know more about them.

Turning Your Chatbox into a Lead Magnet

By adopting the right strategy, you can easily turn your chatbox into a wonderful lead magnet. Little by little you will see your CRM filling up automatically with every new conversation, along with loads of essential data about your contacts.

Lastly, remember that even though the tips we gave you here focus on lead generation,  it has other features that you can utilize to help your business grow.