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Download PDF versionUsing visitor data is extremely beneficial to targeting quality leads and increasing sales. But what if you have hundreds or thousands of visitors reaching your website per day? How is a company supposed to sift through visitor data to identify potential leads without wasting precious time and company resources – or without missing some great lead generation opportunities in the process?
Comm100’s Visitor Segmentation feature can help you more effectively organize your online visitors, as well as target visitors for proactive engagement.
In this white paper, we will define Visitor Segmentation and provide use cases that will help you reflect on how this feature can fit your own business needs. We will discuss the benefits of Visitor Segmentation and how you can use it to do the following:
Visitor Segmentation is a feature that enables your company to divide visitors into different segments based on pre-defined rules. With this feature, you can isolate visitors who are VIP, visitors of a specific region, visitors of a certain spending category, etc. into distinct segments. Agents can then monitor these segments in real-time and decide when to proactively engage visitors.
Visitor Segmentation at its broadest can be broken down into four categories, depending on which class of information you are using to segment your visitors. These information categories are as follows:
Next, we will explore a little bit of what you can do with each class of Visitor Segmentation information.
By segmenting visitors based on behavioral information, your company can effectively engage with certain visitors who are most likely to become customers.
So how can you use this information to target leads and increase sales? Take a look at the following example:
Diane has a website where she sells eBooks. By segmenting visitors who have visited her page two or more times, her live chat agents can see how many repeat visitors are online. Diane finds segmenting repeat visitors useful because based on her experience, repeat visitors are more likely to make a purchase than first-time visitors. Using the Visitor Segmentation information, her live chat agents proactively reach out to repeat visitors with the following message: “Hi [Customer Name], welcome back! Is there anything I can help you with today?” This initiates a connection with the visitor and encourages them to let the live chat agents help facilitate the purchasing process, which can improve conversion rates.
By segmenting visitors based on behavior, Diane’s live chat team can segment visitors into distinct group based on their knowledge about who is most likely to buy and then target them accordingly.
With geographic information segmentation, you can segment visitors based on where they are located.
To see how these different information elements might be used to reach out to customers, check out our following example:
Mark is the owner of a cruise company. By creating a visitor segment based on geographic information, his live chat agents can isolate who is viewing his website from a specific city. This allows him to send out proactive messages to visitors near coastal cities with port-specific cruise deals and packages. This makes it possible so that visitors who are viewing the website from Miami receive proactive messages with Miami-specific cruise offers, rather than offers of cruises leaving from Houston.
Through Visitor Segmentation based on location, Mark’s team shows visitors that they care about their business by ensuring that visitors receive information that is useful and relevant to them.
Visitor Segmentation based on source information makes it possible to find out how certain groups of visitors found your website.
Segmenting visitors based on source information can be useful for your company, as shown by the next example:
Gabriella has a company that sells merchandise for insect lovers. By creating a visitor segment based on the referrer page URL, she can track how many people found her website through Facebook and other social media platforms versus through search engines such as Google. She uses this information to find out with which platforms her website is doing well, and with which she is not getting enough exposure. She can then use the information to adjust accordingly by creating social media advertising campaigns, or by strategizing a plan to augment her search engine exposure.
By segmenting her visitors based on source information, Gabriella is able to find out how her customers reached her, and uses that information towards the betterment of her marketing strategy.
Sometimes your company might need to segment your visitors based on live chat data, or other custom information that you have created in designing your personalized live chat experience.
So how is this used? Let’s have a look at the example laid out below:
Alex has a business that sells high-quality music recorded by independent artists. By isolating visitors based on the custom fields in the post-chat survey, Alex can monitor how his live chat representatives are handling cases today, and can see if there is any way to improve the customer experience. By isolating visitors who gave a “no” as their response to the custom post-chat question, “Have you found what you were looking for?” Alex can follow up with visitors whose needs may not have been met after they have chatted with an agent. From there, he can get customer feedback on any additional services that he can offer, or music that he can special order to satisfy current and future customers.
By using custom information to measure customer satisfaction, Alex is able to provide his customers with an experience to remember.
Website visitors are like snowflakes: no two are alike. For this reason, it is only natural that your website visitors can and do belong to multiple segments.
But what might this look like? Let’s have a look at an everyday example of someone who is on a company website:
Sammy is a first-time visitor to an internet service provider’s website. She has recently moved to a new city and is in the beginning stages of doing research on her internet options. For her, part of that research includes a quick informational chat with a representative. In the eyes of the company, she belongs to all of the following segments:
While not all of this information may be useful to gaining leads, the company can use different Visitor Segmentations to obtain different goals. For example, they can use the search keywords to see what is working as far as their marketing department’s use of SEO, and pre-chat data to gain insight into why different segments of customers are chatting with representatives.
Because your company can create unlimited segments, and visitors can match multiple segments, it is important to set priorities for Visitor Segmentation. As only 3 segments will be displayed per visitor at a time, the priorities help determine which will be seen on the monitor. The segments with higher priorities will be displayed, and those with lower priorities will be hidden.
Let’s take another look at Sammy from our previous example. Sammy shows up in the internet provider’s system under the following three visitor segments:
Because the company’s number one goal is to generate leads on their website, their segment priority is based on which information is most likely to result in lead generation. This makes it easy for agents to see and work with the data that matters most to the company, which ultimately helps reach the company’s end goal.
With the Visitor Segmentation feature, you can define notifications for specific visitor segments. This means receiving visual pop-ups and/or audio notifications whenever a chosen segment comes online. These notifications can be set up for specific agents or departments who may oversee this group of visitors.
One example of this in action is that when a VIP segment comes online, the VIP customer’s account manager should be alerted so that he or she can best attend to the customer’s needs. Another example is that if a high-spending segment comes online, you can choose to notify the sales department in order to maximize the chances of a conversion.
Agents can control and disable these notifications in the chat console, which means that they have the power to customize alerts according to what is most effective.
Visitor segments are displayed in the visitor list under the “My Chats” tab. By viewing the colored segmentation code, you can see in real-time which visitors belong to which segment. By hovering over colored-coded blocks, you can view the segment title/label that is assigned to each color.
By viewing chat transcripts by segments, companies can ensure customer satisfaction and monitor agent performance.
Let’s study this with an example:
Steve is the CEO of a plastic redistribution company. By studying the transcripts of the live chats between visitors within his VIP segment and their account managers, Steve can make sure that his most important, biggest-spending clients are always being attended to in a way that will inspire continued loyalty.
By taking the time to view chat transcripts by segment, Steve manages to ensure the satisfaction of his customers – specifically, the VIP customers that generate most of the company’s revenue.
The chat transcripts of a specific segment can be viewed in the history section of the control panel. The history section contains a Visitor Segment filter so that agents and supervisors can access these transcripts with ease.
Visitor Segmentation can be used as a tool for sending out proactive chat invitations so that no visitor of interest goes unattended to. Among these visitors of interest are hesitant shoppers.
Let’s take a look at how you can use Visitor Segmentation to engage with hesitant shoppers and make the sale:
Jessica owns a business that sells athletic leggings and yoga pants. By segmenting her visitors based on their time on site, the number of items they have in their shopping cart, and their current page, Jessica can identify customers who may be having trouble finalizing their purchase, and send them a proactive chat invitation. By inviting hesitant shoppers to chat, Jessica helps her visitors put any doubts to rest, and take the leap into becoming customers.
By proactively contacting visitors who may be hesitant to make a purchase, Jessica boosts her conversion rate, and shows her commitment to customer satisfaction.
Segmenting visitors who are likely to give up on a purchase is a great way to actively take advantage of upselling opportunities. To do this with minimal effort, you can set automated proactive chat rules to ensure that select groups of visitors are automatically reached out to every time.
Let’s examine the following example to see how this can be useful:
Daniel is CEO of a company that sells stainless steel kitchen appliances. In order to ensure that his company takes advantage of upselling opportunities, he establishes rules for automated proactive chat invitation in accordance with his distinct visitor segments. Based on his rules, the following proactive chat request is automatically sent out to visitors who have less than $50 worth of merchandise in their shopping carts: “Hi [Customer Name], we offer free shipping for orders over $50. May I help you get to it?” Daniel also segments visitors based on the content of their shopping carts. His company automatically sends out the following proactive chat message for visitors who add the popular item, Set of 6 Stainless Steel Cups, to their shopping carts: “Hi [Customer name], most of our customers who bought our Set of 6 Stainless Steel Cups also bought our Set of 6 Stainless Steel Plates. May I introduce the details?” By using Visitor Segmentation to set proactive chat rules, Daniel’s company targets visitors who are most likely to take advantage of specific offers and product suggestions.
Daniel’s use of the Visitor Segmentation feature enables his company to effectively introduce different upselling opportunities to different segments of visitors, thus increasing his profits. Can you think of any ways that this would be useful for your company?
Sometimes, customers give up on a purchase before check-out. With Visitor Segmentation, you can reach out to visitors who may be about to abandon their shopping carts, and therefore increase sales.
Let’s have a look at how this can be achieved:
Mary runs a company that provides recourses for self-improvement and shifting corporate consciousness. In order to ensure that visitors don’t abandon their shopping cart pre-purchase, Mary uses her Visitor Segmentation to reach out to visitors based on whether they left an item pending in their shopping cart. Mary can then use information collected in live chat to send these visitors a message reminding them that their purchases have not yet been completed, and can offer them time-specific discounts that entice them to finish it.
By using Visitor Segmentation, Mary manages to reach out to visitors who may not fulfill a purchase, and provide them with incentive to do so.
Visitor Segmentation means that an information surplus is no longer a problem, but an advantage for your business. With the Visitor Segmentation feature, companies can better organize visitor information, agents can more easily identify target visitors, and visitors can transition into customers at a higher rate.
If this sounds like something that you are interested in adopting as a part of your live chat experience, then speak with a Comm100 customer service representative to set up Visitor Segmentation conditions, or upgrade to Enterprise today.
