Chatbots are revolutionizing the way people shop online. According to a Hubspot research report, 71% of people are willing to use chatbots to solve their problems online fast, 56% would rather message than call customer service, and 53% of people would rather shop from a business they can message directly via chatbot.
More importantly, there are several other benefits chatbots offer that can make them extremely useful for ecommerce businesses. Chabots can be used to accomplish the following business tasks:
– Providing 24 hour customer service for basic queries. You can provide instant responses to customers, through pre-populated messages.
– Resolving a customer complaint or problem. For queries that aren’t automatically answered by the chatbot, customer service staff can provide a more personalized service.
– Making a reservation for a ticket or making a purchase. Chatbots are essentially doing the work of a customer service or sales rep though standardizing and automating the sales and customer service process.
– Subscribing to a newsletter by leaving your email address through the chatbot. You can use chatbots to enable visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or leave their contact details by designing an automated conversation that collects their personal information.
In this article, we will examine how you can use chatbots to boost your eCommerce sales.
#1: Incentivize Customers To Make Purchases Via Discounts or Coupons
People love discounts and special deals. These tactics are especially useful if you’re a new eCommerce business launching a new product or if you’re providing products at a premium price and want to make them more affordable.
By using chatbots, you can incentivize customers to make purchases by offering discounts when they interact with the bot. By using a bot like BotBlocks, you can integrate your messenger app with a loyalty card chatbot API, which creates discount codes in a sequence, unique to each user. On the backend, the chatbot will track if the discount coupon has been used.
Although discounts can incentivize first-time buyers, they can also prove useful for creating loyalty programs. You can integrate your chatbot with your loyalty program and reward customers with ‘points’ if they’re regularly purchasing your products.
For example, if an existing loyal customer is online with the bot, they’ll instantly receive a personalized greeting through the bot, and be facilitated into making purchases as per their buying habits. This can be a great way to retain customers, and boost sales.
#2: Provide Product Recommendations Through Interactive Quizzes
The wonderful thing about chatbots is that you can use them to engage customers online. Using expressive, emotionally appealing language, you can make things fun and interesting by spicing up the conversation with customers.
One method to use in order to accomplish this task is to design interactive quizzes for chatbot conversations. The bot begins by asking a simple quiz question, building on consecutive answers to serve up the next appropriate questions. Once the customer has provided the relevant information, the bot can even provide product recommendations most apt for the user.
For example, if you go to the Food Network Facebook page, and initiate a conversation with their chatbot via their messenger, it can provide recipe suggestions as you can see below.
You’ll be asked some questions, and depending on your responses, the Food Network will search for recipes that are most appropriate to your preferences.
In order to more effectively sell a product or empower customers with information, you should create a chatbot that engages in interesting, exploratory conversations. By interacting in this way, you’ll significantly cut out product search times, and make it super simple for people to shop efficiently.
#3: Lower Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
With attention spans becoming shorter, and the number of choices for customers becoming larger every single day, it’s no surprise that customers change their mind about making a purchase at the final stage of the eCommerce buying process by abandoning the shopping cart.
Usually, eCommerce businesses will send these users a ‘cart abandonment email’ to recover their lost sale by reminding them to complete their transaction. Studies show that emails usually recover 10-15% of lost cart abandoned sales, while messenger reminders via chatbots recover between 13-20% and generate four to ten times more revenue. Check out ShopMessage or MindHeroes apps for lowering cart abandonment rates effectively.
#4: Empower Prospects With eBooks, Product Guides & Whitepapers
Making sales isn’t just about marketing your product effectively. You need to build relationships with your customers in order to gain their trust. That’s why content marketing is one of the best ways to both educate, and engage your users.
In addition to instant interactions, chatbots can also provide downloadable content in the form of eBooks, white papers, PDF docs, and infographics. Users can simply click on the ‘download’ option within the chatbot and get the documents.
You can also include dynamic and visually appealing content like GIFs and images within your chatbot conversation. Marvel used a range of images to stimulate people to buy movie tickets for the ‘Avengers’ series, as you can see below:
So, if you’re a smart eCommerce shop owner, use content dynamically to empower your customers. You’ll start seeing your sales shine in no time.
Wrapping it up
In order for your chatbot to function most effectively, it’s important to get people to initiate conversations through your messenger. For this reason, we recommend you advertise your Facebook page and include the ‘message’ call to action in the ad in order to initiate conversations via your chatbot.
Once you have users regularly interacting with you via your messenger or chatbot, you can provide them with 24/7 customer support, help them find what they need, empower them with knowledge through insightful content, and even entertain them. That’s what makes chatbots a great catalyst for boosting eCommerce sales!