Getting started with Live Chat pop-up messages
Apr 7, 2023
Want to proactively capture the attention of your website visitors? Use Live Chat pop-up messages to send your website visitors a simple, URL-based, timed notification.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to setting up your first Live Chat pop-up message in just a few minutes.
To get started with Live Chat pop-up messages, head over to the 'Notifications & Popups' tab in your Omnichannel Widget settings. From here, click 'Create new pop-up message' to go to the pop-up message configuration page:
Follow these steps to create your first pop-up message:
1. Set the internal pop-up message Name
This name will only be visible internally, to you and the rest of your team. It won't be visible to your customers. Choose a name that will allow you to easily differentiate between multiple pop-up messages.
Use this screenshot to see how we named our pop-up message, and to help you navigate through the following steps.
2. Write your Text (message)
This is the message text that your customers will see in the pop-up message. It's best practice to keep your message short and sweet, as long messages are generally less effective.
At the moment, pop-up messages only support text and emojis. Support for other media types such as images, GIFs, and videos will be added soon!
3. Set the Behaviour
Select the way the pop-up behaves on the widget.
'Show once per user session': if you have been shown a pop-up before and have interacted with the widget - you will never see that particular pop-up again.
'Show on every page load': a pop-up is displayed to you every time you go to a page, regardless if you have clicked on the pop-up before or not.
So if you have a popup set to 'Show once per user session' - it is possible that user A (who has clicked on the widget before) doesn’t see the pop-up showing up again while user B (who has not interacted with the widget before) will see the pop-up again every time until they start a session/click on the widget.
A user session starts when a user interacts with the widget on a given device browser. The session is saved to the browser.
The user session will stay as long as the device has enough memory, or until the widget function logout() is called. If a user is in incognito mode - then the user session would be lost if they refresh the page as incognito disables the cookies used to save a session.
4. Add Conversation buttons
Add clickable buttons with pre-written questions or responses.
Learn more about Conversation buttons here.
5. Display delay
Specify the length of time you want to wait before showing your pop-up message.
If you set this to zero, your pop-up message will be shown as soon as a visitor land on the page where you set the pop-up to be displayed.
6. Set the visibility Conditions
In this section, you can choose which pages you want the pop-up message to appear on, and which pages you want the pop-up message to be hidden on.
For example, you might create a pop-up message that you want to be shown on your homepage, but not on your Pricing pages. To do this:
Add a 'Show' condition. Select 'Exact match' from the drop-down menu, then add the complete URL of your homepage into the text field. This will ensure that your pop-up message is shown on the correct page.
Next, add a 'Hide' condition. Select 'Contains' from the drop-down menu, then add the URL string for the Pricing pages you'd like to exclude into the text field. Check out the screenshot below to see how we set this up.
You can only have one active pop-up message per page, so make sure you don't create multiple pop-up messages with conflicting conditions. Extra conditions for more detailed targeting are coming soon!
7. Preview your pop-up message
Preview your pop-up message by clicking 'show preview' on the right side of your screen. This will trigger a preview of your pop-up message after a few seconds, regardless of the 'time on page' trigger you defined in the previous step.
Don't worry: when you set your pop-up message live, your 'time on page' trigger will still apply. We don't show this in the preview so that you can rapidly test and change your message.
8. Publish your pop-up
Ready? Click “Save changes” to save your pop-up message and then enable it in the dashboard. That's it, you've created a Live chat pop-up message! 🎉
Not ready yet? Click “Save changes” to create and save your pop-up message as a draft but do not toggle the switch.
You can find your new pop-up message in the 'Notifications & Popups' section. From here, you can disable (turn off), enable (set live), edit, delete, and create new pop-up messages.
9. All done!
Head over your website and see the pop-up message in action 💬