How I got visitors to engage with my live chat

I've had a Drift chat widget on timestamps.fm for over a month, but until this week, I had literally 0 conversations, despite having ~50 visitors a day.

Here's 2 dead simple tips that increased engagement.

1. Make the bot pop up automatically

This is obvious, but at first I hid the widget to not be annoying. Even though the widget had good contrast against the color scheme, I don't think people knew what to do, or didn't have enough motivation to click.

2. Write good prompts

Good prompts require minimal effort to respond to.

My first prompt was something along the lines of

Welcome! Let me know if you have any questions!

This requires the user to have a well formed question. Maybe they do, but more often I think people have general, nebulous confusion.

Have you ever been in a class where you're not keeping up, then the teacher asks "Any questions?", then you say nothing because you don't have a specific question and you really just need a recap of everything?

I rewrote my prompt to be aimed at this kind of generally confused user.

Welcome! Do you understand what timestamps.fm does, or would you like me to give you a quick recap?

This is a much simpler question to answer- they simply have to say "yes". This is much lower response effort, and I believe is what caused my bot to get 6 chats this week, for the first time.

I used this message on my "Success" page, after a user has completed a purchase.

Thanks for using timestamps.fm! What's your Soundcloud/Spotify?

My target users are DJs, and this exploits the fact that everyone likes to self-promote :) This also requires no thought to respond to, and DJs are used to sharing links to their profiles online. I also saw some success with this.

Conclusion

The point is simply to get any engagement at all. You do this by making it literally as easy as possible to engage:

• Automatically pop up the bot so they don't have to click
• Phrase your prompt such that they don't need to think to reply