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Freshchat’s proactive campaigns trigger messages based on visitor behavior. Done well, they recover abandoned carts and rescue confused users. Done badly, they are the SaaS equivalent of a mall kiosk salesperson.

The three rules of proactive

  1. Trigger on intent, not pageviews
  2. Cap frequency per visitor per session
  3. Suppress on known-customer pages (logged-in app)

Intent triggers worth using

  • 30s+ on pricing page with no scroll past fold
  • Cart value above threshold + 60s idle
  • Documentation search with zero clicked results
  • Failed checkout (Stripe webhook → contact event → trigger)
Campaign: pricing-rescue
Trigger:
  page_url contains "/pricing"
  AND time_on_page >= 30s
  AND scroll_depth < 50%
  AND session_messages_sent = 0
Message: "Quick question — would custom pricing for your team size help?"

Frequency caps

Default cap should be one proactive per session, three per week. The Freshchat campaign editor lets you set this per campaign and globally. Set both.

Suppress on logged-in app pages

Subdomain app.yourdomain.com is your product. A “want help getting started?” pop-up to a power user is irritating. Use the Visitor Properties API to set is_app_user and exclude from campaigns.

window.fcWidget.user.setProperties({ is_app_user: true });

Personalize the opener

A generic “Hi! How can I help?” loses to “Saw you’re looking at the Enterprise plan — happy to share a sample SOW.” Write three variants per campaign and rotate.

Measure handle rate, not just send rate

Track opens, replies, and conversations-converted-to-CSAT-positive. A high send rate with a low reply rate is a metric that hurts you.

A/B test message length

For most campaigns, a one-line opener outperforms two lines by reply rate. Test before committing to long-form.

What to do this week

Audit your active proactive campaigns for pageview vs intent triggers, set the per-session and weekly caps, suppress on app subdomains, and rewrite the top campaign opener with personalization.

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