Blue Sky Factory helps customers achieve email marketing success through a combination of stellar proactive account management, superb creative services, and solid technology.

Blue Sky Factory is working with Velaro to offer a special incentive for Velaro customers.

1. $350 off the set-up fee (a $500 fee reduced to just $150 for this promotion only)
2. Free dedicated IP address (if needed)
3. Free pack of 4 campaign preview and inbox monitor event tests
4. Free creative or campaign assessment/consultation (30 mins)
5. 30% off e-newsletter and/or email template design

In addition to the incentive above they are also offer the base price for $250.00 a month vs $300.00 and add in 15% off all CPMs!

To find out more, visit them on the web at:

http://blueskyfactory.com/velaro/

Velaro’s Going to be Coast to Coast in 7 days – Come Join Us!

First Stop: Online Market World in San Francisco –

Online Market World is the premiere event for online sellers and marketers dedicated to taking their businesses to the next level. For companies that market and sell on the web, Online Market World 2008 brings together the best innovative minds in the industry, to help people learn how to market products better; how to exploit the growing list of online markets (such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Facebook, Shopping.com, etc.) while implementing successful multi-channel sales and service strategies.

If you’re going to be at the show, Velaro is at booth #325. Please stop by and say hi.

Next Stop: Computer & Technology Showcase in Charlotte –

Computer & Technology Showcase is a business to business event that brings decision makers, IT professionals and executives from all segments of the business community together.

If you’re going to be at the show, Velaro is at booth #309. Please stop by and say hi.

Customer Success: All Top Books

Books and Beyond Company Overview

Books and Beyond operates an Internet bookshop, www.alltopbooks.com, serving the general public. They aim to regularly offer prices that are lower than those of Amazon and similar online retailers. All prices on their website already include UK postage. They have built up a loyal base of repeat customers, including large scale bulk buyers such as educational establishments, law firms and event management/corporate consultancy companies. They are based in London, UK.

The Situation

Books and Beyond were asking themselves questions to try and improve their customer offering. Why, for example, were people arriving at their web site and then leaving without taking advantage of their “get a quote for a book not in stock” service? Books and Beyond visitors were coming to the web site via search engines with direct links to products.  But then they would leave. Potential customers, having read about the product they searched on, left the site leaving Books and Beyond with more questions. Was there a way to engage these people, by proactively contacting them to see how near to buying they were? If people were not motivated enough to ask for more information about the company, and were considering becoming affiliates or bulk buyers, how could they raise the level of the visitors’ interest and convert them into long-term customers?

The Solution

Books and Beyond chose Velaro’s hosted live help solution for use on www.alltopbooks.com in order to create an accessible and trustworthy online shopping experience for their customers, as well as boost conversion rates, and keep customers on the site to place their order. They particularly noted Velaro’s flexible approach to customer support. With instant international phone calls from the sales and technical people, the two companies were able to reach a pricing solution that no other provider of chat could match. This was important, as Books and Beyond needs to ensure that it’s expenditure is kept within tight limits.

The Results

Using Velaro’s hosted live help solution, www.alltopbooks.com immediately noted significant benefits in customer contact. The number of people using the chat was substantially higher than was the case with their previous chat providers. They also noted that the chat button loaded far more quickly, with chat uptime being much more reliable. No more embarrassing situations where the chat provider’s hosted product crashed during a chat with an All Top Books customer.

Achievements extend beyond the intangible benefits of more customer confidence. Sales have increased too, with the value of customer orders increasing by on average 10% plus.

Likewise, Velaro chat has given All Top Books customers confidence to negotiate far bigger deals than previously achieved. For example, they recently negotiated a contract that will be 700% larger than their previous largest contract. It has also made it far easier for the media to contact them and get instant replies in writing than by having to use email or phone (no written record available.)

“We do believe customer confidence is the way to clinch more sales”, said Dilip Sinha, managing director of Books and Beyond. “It’s very difficult to convince people that you are different from the other websites – we call ourselves ‘the difference in online bookselling’ – and Velaro’s pricing, reliability and virtually instantaneous support when needed allow us to use a tool which enables us to deliver instant answers to customers questions. This allows us to demonstrate our fast response in sourcing books and our personal pricing, which leads customers to go ahead and buy.”

Live Chat Best Practices
How do I add automated chat requests to my web pages?

September

Velaro’s real-time visitor monitoring script provides the additional capability to make automated chat requests to visitors. Automated requests are very powerful in that they do not require your agents to manually try to initiate a chat session with each visitor. In addition, once you have automated requests set up correctly they will only be displayed to visitors if an agent is online and available to take a request.

You can configure automated request on each individual web page to be displayed after the visitor has been sitting on that page for a specific amount of time.

You can configure you’re account to only show an automated requests 1 time for each visitor within a specific amount of time. That way, you can ensure that your visitors are not getting inundated with too frequent auto-requests.

To set up automated requests, you first need to ensure that your web pages are properly constructed. After making sure your web pages are set up properly, follow these easy steps:

1. Log into the Velaro control panel at http://login.velaro.com
2. Select Deploy -> Visitor Monitoring Scripts from the main menu.
3. Select the “Auto-Invites” option below the default script that you are presented.
4. Enter the number of seconds you want a visitor to be idle on a page before an automated chat request is presented.

5. Click Update

6. Make sure that you set any other visitor monitoring script options that you will require for your web page(s).
7. Copy this script to your clipboard.
8. Paste that script into all of the HTML pages within your website which you want an automated request. Velaro recommends that it be inserted at the BOTTOM of each page, immediately before the closing </body> tags.

After the scripts have been added to the page, you should configure the frequency that you want auto-initiated requests to display. To configure this option, select the “Setup” -> “Visitor Filtering” option from the control panel menu.

By modifying the “Auto open chat frequency” option you will control the timespan that Velaro will use to display multiple auto-initiated requests to an individual visitor. For more information on the frequency please see this article in our knowledge base

http://www.velaro.com/kb/KnowledgebaseArticle10011.aspx
If you want auto-initiated requests to show up all the time, set this value to 0.

Velaro’s Live Chat may be on its way to space. Live chat will let the Mars Rovers chat back and forth to one and other when they are off the clock. Recently the Rovers have been complaining that when their work is done for the day they get pretty bored, citing a lack of “stuff to do” on the red planet. Scientists approached Velaro about setting up Velaro’s Live Chat service in hopes of keeping the Rovers from heading off at night and causing a ruckus.

Editor’s Note: The above article is a fiction written by our intern, Bob.

Velaro’s Live Chat for Netsuite Expands CRM Functionality

SAN MATEO, Calif. – Velaro announced the release of Live Chat for NetSuite. This new version of the company’s live chat software features tight integration with the NetSuite on-demand business management suite and takes full advantage of NetSuite’s powerful ability to present a 360-degree view of customer information by leveraging core functionality in CRM, ERP and Ecommerce. Live Chat for NetSuite provides key benefits to businesses including: real-time visibility to all customer data; accurate and error-free documentation of customer support notes; and elimination of transferring data from one application to another, thus saving time and money. For more information about Live Chat for NetSuite from Velaro, visit www.velaro.com/netsuite.

» Read the full Press Release

Livefluence Moves to Its Own Home

Velaro’s latest product, Livefluence, has a new home: livefluence.com

Livefluence learns about your customers using Progression Analytics™ and Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts. Livefluence then engages the right visitor at the right time, converting more of your website visitors into customers, leveraging Live Chat, Click-to-Call, Co-browsing, and Survey Management. Finally, with Livefluence’s Content Targeting and CRM & Enterprise Integration Livefluence reacts to your customers in a real-time environment.

Along with the its new home, we’ve also released a white paper: “Best Practices for Increasing Online Conversions.”

Upcoming e-Commerce Conferences & Webinars

A number of conferences are coming up in the next couple of months. Velaro will be attending Online Market World in San Francisco October 1-3, then we will at CTS in Charlotte, North Carolina October 8-9, and finally Ad Tech in New York City on November 3-6. If you are planning to attend any of these events, please let us know. As exhibitors we occasionally receive discount offers for attendees. We’re always happy to pass them along to customers.

Velaro now offers weekly webinars on our Live Chat service. If you are new to Velaro and would like to attend, please fill out the registration form. Webinars are held every Wednesday at 2:00pm Eastern time.

Customer Success: OfficeBundle.com

Based in southern Louisiana, OfficeBundle.com is an experienced independent dealer created to compete directly against the impersonal national office supply retailer.  After the devastation from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, they decided to change their business model and expand their customer base outside of their geographic area. Though OfficeBundle.com has national reach, they remain quite accessible.  OfficeBundle.com exists to help make their customers’ buying experience easy and rewarding.

The Situation

Tommy Moore, Chief Executive, wanted to let his online visitors know that OfficeBundle.com was there to help answer their questions and make the online shopping experience as personal as possible.

The Solution

OfficeBundle.com deployed Velaro’s hosted live help solution in order to create a relevant and enjoyable online shopping experience for their customers as well as boost conversion rates and keep customers on the site to place their order.

The Results

Using Velaro’s hosted live help solution, OfficeBundle.com immediately realized a significant return on their investment.  OfficeBundle.com has all but eliminated returns.  Now, OfficeBundle.com employees can help their customers find the right products for their business needs.  Such a large decrease in returns allows OfficeBundle to focus more on growing their business rather than refunds and shipping and handling charges.  Adding live chat to OfficeBundle.com has also significantly improved customers’ perception of the website and increased consumer confidence.

Pleasantly surprised by how many other features Velaro has to offer, OfficBundle.com also sees the advantage of Velaro’s web analytics.  Velaro’s web analytics has dramatically helped OfficeBundle.com grow their online business.  Now, OfficeBundle.com can pinpoint specific times of day when the site is most active, which companies are frequent visitors, etc.

“Not only does Velaro’s live help solution demonstrate our concern for customers’ immediate needs, but the analytics tools give us the insight we need to continue growing our online presence.” – Tommy More, Chief Executive

We thank Office Bundle for taking part in our case study.

We are always looking to profile our customers. If you are interested in having your company featured in a case-study, white paper or press release, please contact our marketing team. Previous customers have seen a significant increase in website traffic, brand awareness and online sales when participating in one of our marketing initiatives.

Next month we will be profiling Books and Beyond.

Live Chat Best Practices

HowTo: Unblock an IP address.

There are two ways to unblock visitor IP addresses.

The first way is for you to do so through the Velaro Agent Desktop.
If you have blocked an IP in error, and wish to restore the IP do the following:

1. In the Velaro agent desktop go to Tools-> Options -> Visitors
2. Select the IP address you wish to no longer block from view or from chatting.
3. Click the “Remove” button.
4. Press Apply
5. Press OK

The other way to unblock IP’s, is for your administrator to unblock them in the Control Panel.

1. Log into the Control Panel with an administrative account at http://login.velaro.com.
2. Go to Set-up-> Visitor IP Blocking
3. Click Remove next to the Visitor IP that you wish to restore

This visitor will now to be able to be seen by or chat with your agents.

Velaro’s Retention Policy

Velaro’s data retention policy can be found here.

…Would have been our title this month, however Mr. Buffett was not available. But fear not readers, we’ve sent our intern, Bob, to hide in his trashcan. We’ll get that endorsement yet. In the meantime we’d like to wish everyone a happy summer! In the last two months we’ve rolled out a new website and our brand new product, Livefluence.

Livefluence takes the Internet Retailer Conference by storm

_{Our intern, Bob}

Livefluence is generating a lot of buzz in the industry. Since we launched Livefluence, Fortune 500 companies have been calling night and day, competitors are plaguing us with questions, and our intern Bob has been sought after by beautiful women. To learn more about Livefluence and what it can do for your e-commerce site, please visit: http://www.livefluence.com/nl/ Also, we discuss the full details of the IRCE 2008 in our Industry Focus section.

Velaro expands its market share in Q1

Velaro would like to welcome some of its newest customers to our family: US Style Inc. (apparelus.com), SHOEBACCA.com (shoebacca.com), Emporis GmbH (emporis.com), Mecklenburg County NC (mecklenburgcountync.gov), and Walser Automotive Group (walser.com). Over fifty companies joined Velaro in the first quarter of 2008. For more information please read our official press release.

Companies flock to e-commerce conference

We’d like to thank our current customers who stopped by Velaro’s booth at the IRCE 2008 show in Chicago last week. There was a very strong turnout for both e-commerce in general and for businesses interested in Livefluence.
Registrations for the Internet Retailer 2008 Conference & Exhibition in Chicago on June 9-12 ran 20% ahead of last year, re-affirming that more and more businesses are turning to the web to increase sales. In particular, the Livefluence booth had over 200 companies stop by to learn more about the power of Online Conversion Management.

For those of you who registered to win the free iPod, we will be announcing the winner shortly.

Customer Success: Walser Automotive Group

“Walser Automotive Group is committed to engaging our customers and providing the best service possible,” said Nick Cybela, Interactive Marketing Manager. “We pride ourselves on delivering the highest level of customer service possible and the Velaro Live Chat tool has enabled us to deliver that service on-demand. Velaro provides features and usability that we need and has increased our customer conversions.”

We thank Walser for taking the time to write such a glowing review of our live chat tool.

We are always looking to profile our customers. If you are interested in having your company featured in a case-study, white paper or press release, please contact our marketing team. Previous customers have seen a significant increase in website traffic, brand awareness and online sales when participating in one of our marketing initiatives.

Best practices for increasing online conversions

As part of our new product release (Livefluence), Velaro has put together a white paper detailing the issues facing e-commerce companies today. This brief and to-the-point white paper addresses the issues and provides clear and concise practices for increasing online conversion rates. We invite you to download a copy.

Download Best Practices White Paper

There are only a couple of weeks left before Velaro turns the industry upside down. Our developers have been locked up all winter working on a secret project so big, so cool, that we can’t risk letting them go home until summer. Sure they get grumpy, but every week or so we open the basement door, throw in a crate of Mountain Dew and a barrel of Hot Pockets and they’re right back to work. We’ll be making an official announcement soon with all the bells and whistles.

Happy Birthday!

Last month Velaro turned seven. Amazing isn’t it? Velaro is one of the most mature live help vendors in the market. The other kids in the live help sandbox aren’t even out of diapers yet while we’re handling millions of chat transactions every day. We’d like to thank all of our customers for helping us become the most successful privately held live help vendor in the industry.

Velaro Admin Guide Available for Download

It’s new, it’s pretty and it’s ready to go. The official Velaro Administration Guide is available for download. The guide covers every aspect of administering Velaro’s chat service. Topics include an in depth look at: Workflow Management, Security Roles, Account Management, Departments, Visitor Monitoring, Co-Browsing, Surveys, Click-to-Call, CRM Integration, Reporting and much much more. To download your copy, click here.

10 Tips for Employing Live Chat Profitably

At Improvement Direct, if chat is unavailable a customer who clicks on that button will get a message asking them to send an e-mail or to try again when chat is available. Chat agents typically are available from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, says Ryan Brewer, vice president of operations at Improvement Direct, which uses chat technology from Velaro.
By Don Davis – Read the full article at Internet Retailer

Customer Success

“Due to the customization possibilities of our product lines, our clients tend to have a lot of questions…the chatting function is a quick, hassle-free way for our customers to get answers by chatting directly with a customer service rep. Each day we get a good number of customers who use the chatting function and I am confident in saying that the Velaro software has impacted our sales positively by helping to simplify the ordering process.”

Aarin
Name Tag, Inc.
Marketing Manager

How do I add automated chat requests to my web pages?

Velaro’s real-time visitor monitoring script provides the additional capability to make automated chat requests to visitors. Automated requests are very powerful in that they do not require your agents to manually initiate a chat session with each visitor. In addition, once you have automated requests set up correctly they will only be displayed to visitors if an agent is online and available to take a request. You can also track how many of your automated requests actually turn in to chats.

Read the full article

Recently Velaro added a new option for agents. In the control panel if you go to “Setup > Visitor Filtering”, there is a new checkbox “Agents see only survey responses in chat”. Selecting this option will remove information from the agents view they may not need, leaving only the information from the pre-chat survey when the chat begins.

Industry Focus: Online Retailing Grew 19% in 2007, Live Chat Ups Conversions Tenfold

Growth drivers include:

1. More people are shopping online.

2. Online shoppers are using the Internet to do more of their shopping, including in non-traditional Ecommerce categories such as cosmetics, apparel, shoes and home furnishings.

3. Retailers are improving the online and multichannel shopping experience making it smoother and easier.

If you have any questions about Velaro’s Live Help tool, please contact us.

Best Practices: Setting Up Click-to-Call

Recently Velaro profiled our Click-to-Call capability. We received an overwhelming response to that article. As so many new and current customers are requesting click-to-call, we wrote up a knowledge base artcile to assist companies with the set-up process. Read more about Velaro’s Click-to-Call feature here.

Feature Sneak Peak: Progression Analytics

As part of our commitment to make this year extraordinary for our customers, Velaro is introducing something truly revolutionary. Our developers have been working night and day for almost a year on an industry secret: Progression Analytics. Progression Analytics provides multi-step conversion tracking. You will be able to track actionable events on your site and see which events lead to sales. We’re looking for a handful of companies that are interested in beta testing this cutting-edge feature. To find out more, please contact our Product Development Team.

Industry Focus: Click-to-Call and Click-to-Chat Grows

Technology and services supporting customer service were up, with 32% of the sites offering live help versus 29% the previous year; and 87% of call center agents answering questions correctly, versus 75% in 2006. Click-to-call functionality, though still relatively rare, grew dramatically to 16% of the sites reviewed versus only 3% the previous year.

Velaro Click-to-Call is included with all SMB and Enterprise accounts. For set-up questions please contact support [at] velaro [dot] com.

Customer Success: signs R us

One of our valued customers has taken the time to send us a great story about how live help continues to increase his conversions:

“I always believed live chat had potential. But with an average of only 1-2 chat requests a day, we just weren’t satisfied with the results we were getting from LivePerson’s service.

However, the day we switched over to Velaro’s online conversion management system, our response rate literally exploded. Instead of only 1 or 2 chats a day, we’re now getting an average of 20-25 chat requests a day with the same traffic.

What made the difference? Velaro. The system automatically prompts our visitors to interact with a Sign Consultant at key decision points. We’re not only witnessing higher conversion rates, our clients are commenting more than ever about how impressed they are with our customer service. But the only change has been the switch to Velaro.

To see a live example of Velaro in action, just go to www.signsRus.com. As you surf the pages within the site, you’ll see firsthand how the system automatically engages our visitors.”

-Tim

We greatly appreciate Tim taking the time to send us an unprompted testimonial. Velaro is always looking for customer stories for press releases, case studies and to display on our heavily trafficked website. If your company would like to share your success stories with us, we’ll pass that information along and give you some great publicity. Please contact our marketing department for more information.

Best Practices: Offline Messages

A few of Velaro’s customers asked for the ability to redirect customers to an alternate page instead of having the standard “Not here form.” We thought it was a great idea and wrote up an article on how to do just that.

Read the full article