A complete guide to Gorgias chat campaigns

If you run an ecommerce brand, you know that proactive chat is one of the closest things you have to a helpful sales associate greeting a customer in a physical store. Instead of a generic "Can I help you?" pop-up, you can engage shoppers with the right message at just the right moment. When it’s done well, this can make a real difference to your bottom line. In fact, Gorgias reports that brands using their chat campaigns see a revenue lift of up to 13%.

That's a number that's hard to ignore. But before you jump in headfirst, it’s a good idea to understand exactly what you're getting. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Gorgias chat campaigns, from how they work and what they cost to some of their biggest limitations.

While Gorgias gives you a good starting point for proactive chat, you'll see that businesses aiming for truly smart, scalable automation often need a more powerful engine running in the background.

What are Gorgias chat campaigns?

At their simplest, Gorgias chat campaigns are automated messages that pop up in the chat widget on your website. You can think of them as smart pop-ups, designed to engage visitors based on who they are, where they are on your site, and what they’re doing.

Their main job is to bring that helpful in-store experience online. Instead of letting a potential customer browse in silence and maybe click away, a chat campaign can spark a conversation, offer a timely discount, or answer a question before it’s even asked. They’re built to be less annoying than a full-screen pop-up. If a customer replies, the conversation gets routed directly to a human agent, turning an automated nudge into a personal chat.

How Gorgias chat campaigns work: Triggers, types, and features

These campaigns run on a set of rules you define. You pick the conditions, write the message, and Gorgias does the rest. Let’s break down the key parts.

Key triggers and targeting options

The real power of proactive chat is in the targeting. You don’t want to show the same message to everyone. Gorgias lets you trigger campaigns based on a few core conditions:

• Current URL: This is the most common one. You can target specific product pages, collection pages, your homepage, or, most strategically, the checkout and cart pages to help prevent abandonment.

• Time spent on page: If someone is lingering on a page for a minute or two, they might be on the fence or have a question. This trigger lets you engage them right when they're deep in thought.

• Cart value: You can set up campaigns that appear when a customer's cart hits a certain dollar amount. This is perfect for offering free shipping or a small gift to encourage them to complete the purchase.

• Shopify customer tags: For stores on Shopify, you can target campaigns to specific customer groups you've already created, like "VIP," "repeat-customer," or "first-time-visitor."

• Exit intent: This trigger tries to catch visitors just as they're about to leave your site, giving you one last chance to convert them with a special offer or a helpful message.

Light campaigns vs. convert campaigns

Gorgias splits its campaign features into two tiers, and it's important to know the difference.

• Light Campaigns: These are the basic version available to everyone on a Gorgias helpdesk plan. They're limited to simpler triggers, mainly Current URL and Time spent on page. You get a few of these per chat integration, and they're a decent place to start.

• Convert Campaigns: This is the more advanced version, which requires an extra Gorgias Convert subscription. It unlocks more powerful targeting using deeper Shopify data, like what's in a customer's cart, their purchase history, and those customer tags we mentioned earlier.

Feature	Light Campaigns	Convert Campaigns
Availability	Included in all Gorgias plans	Requires Gorgias Convert add-on
Primary Triggers	Current URL, Time spent on page	All Light triggers, plus...
Advanced Triggers	N/A	Cart value, purchase history, Shopify customer tags
Best For	Basic proactive messaging	Advanced, data-driven engagement

Common campaign examples

To give you a better idea, here are a few ways you could put these campaigns into action:

1. Product Page Help: A visitor lands on your most technical product page. After 20 seconds, a chat campaign pops up: "This one has a lot of features! Have any questions I can help with?"

2. Stopping Cart Abandonment: A customer has been on the /cart page for over two minutes with items in their cart. A campaign appears with a message like, "Psst! Looks like you're ready to go. Use code CHECKOUT10 for 10% off your order."

3. Welcoming a VIP: A customer with a "VIP" tag in Shopify visits your site. A campaign immediately welcomes them back: "Welcome back! As a VIP, you get priority support. Just reply here if you need anything."

How the pricing works

This is where things can get a little complicated. The campaigns themselves don't have a separate price tag, but the way they interact with your plan's billing can lead to some surprises if you're not paying attention.

How campaigns fit into your Gorgias plan

First things first: a chat campaign only becomes a "billable ticket" if a customer actually replies to it. If they see the pop-up and ignore it, you don't get charged.

But when a customer does reply, that conversation creates a ticket. That ticket counts against your monthly limit for your Gorgias plan (Starter, Basic, Pro, etc.). If you go over your limit, you'll start paying overage fees for each extra ticket, which can add up fast during busy periods.

The cost of AI agent interactions

Here’s the other piece of the puzzle. If you use Gorgias's own AI Agent to automatically answer a question from a campaign, it’s considered an "automated interaction." This could be anything from tracking an order to processing a return.

According to their pricing page, this costs $1.00 per fully resolved conversation on a monthly plan or $0.90 on an annual plan.

But here's the catch: that automated interaction also counts as one helpdesk ticket. So, you're essentially paying twice, once for the AI to resolve the issue, and again because it uses up one of the tickets included in your plan. This pay-per-resolution model means your automation costs scale directly with your support volume, which can make budgeting pretty tricky.

Limitations of Gorgias chat campaigns

Gorgias chat campaigns are a great start for proactive engagement. But as your business grows, you'll likely run into a few walls that limit how much you can really automate.

How basic triggers limit proactive support

While the available triggers are useful, they're based on pretty simple behaviors. The system can react to a customer being on a certain page or having a specific tag, but it can't really understand their intent. It can't analyze the nuance in a pre-sales question or spot a complex technical issue from the get-go. It's working off a pre-defined set of conditions, not actual intelligence.

A siloed knowledge source holds back answer quality

This is probably the biggest hurdle for automation. Gorgias's AI is built to pull information from your Gorgias help center and your Shopify store data. That's fine for simple questions, but where is the rest of your company's knowledge?

For most businesses, it's scattered everywhere. The detailed answer to a technical question might be in Confluence. An updated return policy could be in a Google Doc. Step-by-step troubleshooting guides are often buried in your team's past ticket history. The Gorgias AI can't access any of that. This creates a low ceiling on what it can actually resolve on its own, meaning more conversations get escalated to your human agents.

Unpredictable costs can grow with your support volume

We touched on this already, but it's worth saying again. The per-resolution pricing model is a real long-term challenge. As your brand grows and you get more customer questions, your automation bill grows right alongside it. This model can actually make you hesitant to automate more because every successful resolution adds a variable cost to your monthly bill.

Get more from your Gorgias chat campaigns with an integrated AI agent

So, what's the solution? You don't have to get rid of your entire helpdesk. A smarter approach is to plug a more powerful, flexible AI engine directly into your existing Gorgias setup.

This is exactly what eesel AI is built for. It integrates smoothly with Gorgias but gets around the limitations of a native, walled-off system.

Unify all your knowledge sources for smarter campaigns

Unlike the siloed approach, eesel AI connects to Gorgias and over 100 other knowledge sources your business already uses. You can instantly connect it to Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and even your historical support tickets.

This means when a customer replies to one of your chat campaigns, the AI has access to all your company knowledge. It can pull a technical spec from a PDF, a policy detail from a Google Doc, and a troubleshooting step from a past ticket to provide a single, complete answer. This can dramatically increase the number of issues you can resolve automatically.

Go beyond basic triggers with advanced actions

With eesel AI, you're not just stuck with basic triggers. You get a fully customizable workflow engine. Using a simple prompt editor, you can define the AI’s exact tone of voice, personality, and the specific actions it can perform. Need it to look up order information from a custom backend system? Not a problem. Want it to automatically tag and triage tickets based on the customer's question? You can build that in minutes. This gives you a level of control that goes far beyond Gorgias's pre-set AI features.

Get predictable pricing and testing for your campaign strategy

One of the biggest differences is eesel AI's simulation mode. Before you ever let the AI talk to a real customer, you can run it on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of its performance and your potential automation rate, so you can go live feeling confident. Gorgias just doesn't offer this kind of risk-free testing.

Best of all, you can move away from unpredictable billing. eesel AI's pricing plans are based on a set monthly capacity, with no per-resolution fees. Your bill is the same every month, no matter how many tickets you successfully automate. This lets you scale your support without worrying about costs spiraling out of control.

The final word on Gorgias chat campaigns

Gorgias chat campaigns are an excellent tool for any ecommerce brand looking to get started with proactive support. They can help you engage customers, answer simple questions, and drive real sales.

However, their reliance on basic triggers, a siloed knowledge base, and a costly per-resolution pricing model create a clear ceiling for what you can achieve with automation. For businesses that are serious about scaling their support and delivering truly intelligent conversations, integrating a dedicated AI platform isn't just a nice-to-have, it's the necessary next step.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your proactive support? eesel AI plugs directly into Gorgias to unify your knowledge and automate more conversations with predictable pricing. Start your free trial today.