Live chat monetization is powerful to grow an engaged audience. Read this post to discover the 2 ways you can use it to grow revenue.
Audience Engagement
September 24, 2022
What if you could bring new revenue to your business by engaging your audience more deeply? With Arena Live Chat, there are advertising and non-advertising methods to get more revenue from your website with Live Chat. Depending on your business model, you can use both methods to add new revenue streams to your company.
There are two primary business models to earn revenue from an online property today: selling access to your audience to advertisers and using the audience to directly sell your products.
The direct method is to sell advertising - a popular strategy used by major media brands, bloggers, and many others. There are multiple ways to generate advertising revenues. You can earn a fee for displaying ads (i.e., display advertising). Alternatively, you may earn a fee for recommending products (i.e., affiliate marketing). Some businesses generate revenue by creating sponsored content like reviews. These revenue streams require a creative approach, relevant advertising, and an engaged audience. Live chat can help you develop and grow your audience.
A key advantage of advertising revenue is that you do not need to create, manage or offer products or services of your own. Instead, you simply use an advertising platform (or make direct deals with advertisers) and start generating revenue! However, advertising revenue generation has its limitations. Advertising revenue tends to fluctuate throughout the year - the fall is often more active than the summer. In addition, your content and audience need to meet the needs of advertisers. If advertisers don’t like your website, they can go elsewhere.
The other way to unlock revenue streams with live chat is to sell your products and services. The specific model you use will depend on how your business works. For example, an enterprise software company will likely be focused on lead generation for the sales team. On the other hand, a website with an online store may leverage live chat to sell its products directly.
Generating revenue directly from your audience is different from advertising. Generally speaking, you can earn much more revenue by selling your products. The downside is that you must invest in a sales and marketing process. For example, your audience may not be interested in buying an expensive product when they first hear about it. Instead, your sales team will probably need to reach out and engage leads. If you sell lower-priced products, following up with email marketing may be all you need.
An engaged and growing audience is the fuel that powers every online business. Without an audience interested in your content and online experiences, your growth possibilities become constrained. Without an audience, you will unlikely be able to generate meaningful advertising revenue. After all, why should an advertiser pay you if they don’t get access to a large audience?
A non-advertising business model can still operate without an audience. Yet, growth becomes far more complex. In essence, you will need to rely on other methods like an outbound sales program, advertising, and events. While all these methods work, they are more challenging to scale. In contrast, global brands like IBM, Accenture, and Goldman Sachs invest in building an engaged online audience.
Whether your goal is to generate advertising revenue or sell your products, an engaged and growing audience is vital. Adding Arena Live Chat to your website is one of the best ways to nurture an engaged audience.
Using a live chat session to generate additional revenue (i.e., live chat monetization) is easy when you use the right tools. Arena Live Chat is a no-code tool you can install on most websites in a matter of minutes. You can use two approaches to live chat monetization: directly using Arena Live Chat monetization features or using live chat to grow an audience and monetize them differently.
Arena Live Chat helps you to grow audience engagement with a few key features:
Arena Live Chat. Today, Arena Live Chat offers three different monetization capabilities: Donation, Gifts, and Tip Jar. There are a few different ways to use these options, so let’s take a closer look at how to use these features.
With a donation, a user directly gives money to you. Before accepting donations, it’s essential to set clear expectations with your audience. Some people, they associate the word donation with a charitable organization. If you are running a fundraising event for a nonprofit, using the donation monetization option makes sense. For-profit companies should generally avoid using the donation feature because it may confuse their audience.
Both of these live chat monetization features are useful in a few circumstances. For example, an ecommerce business might invite an influencer to a product launch event. The primary focus of the virtual event is to promote the product being launched. That said, you may want to give your audience the chance to send a gift or tip to the influencer participating in the event. Also, the gift and tip car monetization features are relevant if you are hosting a concert. As with the donation option, requesting tips may not be appropriate for companies to use.
Let’s say you generate significant revenue from your live chat session. Your finance team will want to know if these funds will be tracked and managed. Arena makes this process easy through the payment integrations available through the Enterprise plan. Other Arena users can use PayPal to receive revenue.
Don’t use PayPal? Don’t worry - Arena is also working on developing an integration with Stripe. Stay tuned for more news on that front!
After you receive funds, take some time to analyze the results. For example, are there any users who sent unusually large amounts? If so, it’s wise to reach out to thank them. This extra effort goes a long way to keep the most passionate members of your audience engaged.
The most powerful way for a company to leverage live chat monetization is to view it as a marketing platform. Start by using live chat as a way to build awareness and trust with your audience. By hosting a series of live chat events over time, your audience will become more familiar with your brand. As a result, they will be more likely to positively respond to marketing messages such as an invitation to join your email list, buy a product or meet with your sales team.
Many Arena users use live chat experiences as a way to generate conversions. For example, you can use Arena conversion cards to focus your audience on a conversion goal. Conversion cards can be used for several objectives like getting a prospect to sign up for your list, following you on social media, visiting a landing page or making a purchase.
Today, there are a few popular you can leverage Arena conversion cards in Live Chat and Live Blog to grow your business.
Of course, you’re not limited to these options. Want to invite people to sign up for a paid, exclusive live chat experience? You can do that! Want to grow your following on TikTok instead? You can use conversion cards to advance that goal.
For the best results, it is smart to augment your conversion cards in the event itself. Let’s say you are running a virtual conference event with Arena Live Chat. Ask your presenters to verbally reinforce the call to action mentioned on the conversion card (e.g. “And now, please click the link in the live chat to get updates about our next virtual event!”). This approach is especially effective if your audience is new to use Arena Live Chat and conversion cards.
As you start to become more familiar with running live chat experiences, you’ll gradually collect more and more data on your customers. Use the Arena customer data platform to put your customer data to good use. Without a CDP in place, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your live chat monetization opportunity.
You’ve discovered all of the ways that a live chat app can help you monetize your website audience. A more engaged audience means more pageviews and time on site which directly impacts potential advertising revenue. That’s not all. When your audience engages with you and others in a live chat, they are more likely to like and trust your brand. When you add live chat to your website, you’ll start to find that lead generation and sales become much easier. Learn more about Live Chat here.
