I'm a Google Analytics Addict, and that led to a discovery

I’m an addict. I admit that I often have a window open on my computer, watching how many people are visiting the CustomerParadigm.com site at any given moment.

To me, it’s fascinating where they’re coming from (all over the world) and what they’re looking at (we have a lot of content pages).

One of the frustrating things is seeing so many people visit, but not convert. Then last week, I had a flash of inspiration. Read More Below >>

Google Analytics - Real Time Stats

Reducing Barriers.

We’ve done a lot to lower the barriers. I’ve often preached about creating a site experience that makes it as easy as possible to contact us.

For example, someone picking up the phone to call is a little higher of a commitment activity than filling out a contact form. Picking up the phone, you have to talk to a real person. Filling out a contact form is a lower commitment, lower involvement activity. When you fill out a form on a site, you pass the psychological baton to the company to follow up with you.

In order to get people to fill out contact forms more easily, I’ve limited the number of fields: first and last name, phone number and email address, and comments. From their phone number, I can find out their area code and understand their geographical location. From their email address (it usually contains their domain name), I can glean the company name. And the comments… why we pre-fill them so that people don’t even have to type in much if they don’t want to.

We strive to answer the phone as quickly as possible when it rings… sometimes we answer it before it starts ringing on the customer’s end (which can be a bit spooky). I’ve plaster the company phone number around the site, and made it clickable from mobile devices. We have a toll free number, just in case long distance still matters to someone these days. And a local 303 phone number, so that people can see that we have a physical presence and we’re not hiding overseas behind a toll free number.

But is that barrier even too high?

How can I reach out more to that end user’s computer and get them to say hello?

That’s the frustrating part of being addicted to real-time Google Analytics.

Now I do realize that a lot of the people who visit our site don’t want or need to actually talk to us. They’re there for information – such as a tutorial on how to set prices in Magento, for example. We have more than 1,800 pages on our site indexed by Google.

Believe it or not, one of the top pages for mobile users is an article someone wrote about how to write a Google review from your mobile phone. And my 12,000 word page with a 48 minute video that goes over the difference between Magento Community and Enterprise generates a lot of traffic.

Testing Out Live Chat

So, I tested out a live chat feature on the site. I did a quick search, and had it up and running in under 10 minutes.

Real Time Chat on Site

I have it set so that if nobody is logged in as an operator, it won’t show up on the site. If someone is logged in as an operator, then the live chat shows up on the site like this:

Within an hour of turning this on, I had someone contact me for a live chat. While that didn’t turn into a paying customer (yet), we’ve had more successful chats online.

What I don’t know is whether or not a live chat person is a better prospect than a live phone call or a contact form. But we’re willing to test that out.

I’m of the opinion that I want to lower the barriers as much as possible for someone to contact us. I’d rather call someone back than put up barriers that help us with “nice to know” information like their address, budget and other information.

What part of your site raises barriers? What can you do to convert more visitors from your site? Let me know if you’d like me to take a look and make a few recommendations…

Thanks,

Jeff FinkelsteinFounder, Customer Paradigm