As the world continues to embrace conversational commerce in a bid to excite, engage, and interact with customers, chatbots are at the fore of driving this revolution. These business tech solutions rely on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide customers with a better experience at various stages of the sales funnel. According to Statista, the chatbot market is projected to reach USD 106.6 in 2022, thanks to the widespread adoption of this technology by enterprises.
That said, we all know that the overall objective of any business is to optimize sales. For boosting sales, chatbots proved to be quite useful. In this article, we are going to highlight the various ways chatbots have already helped and continue to help marketers with increasing sales within their companies.
Bots Initiate Conversations with Site Visitors
Chatbots are excellent tools for greeting your customers when they visit the company’s website. For instance, if a return shopper comes to the site, the bot can salute him or her by name, stirring a sense of belonging in the visitor.
Moreover, based on the customer’s interests, chatbots can recommend suitable products. By doing these things, bots can help to improve the interaction with the customers, thus, making visitors more inclined to make purchases.
They Personalize Automated Content
AI-powered chatbots can compile data, analyze it, and then make appropriate decisions. Therefore, after interacting with shoppers, AI-based bots can generate product suggestions based on the user’s search history, purchase trends, and previous buys. In turn, it results in more personalized solutions for buyers.
They Help to Understand and Segment Leads
A chatbot goes a long way in helping marketers understand their target demographic. It allows finding out such things as customer interests, dislikes, and even personal preferences. Moreover, a chatbot can be used to conduct surveys or quizzes when interacting with a visitor. This way, it can help marketers in identifying the most and least favorite aspects of their services and products.
When it comes to segmenting leads, chatbots can play an essential role, too. They can help you to segment your visitors, based on the information users provide. Consequently, you can create customer segments based on variables such as age, gender, interests, among other criteria.
Chatbots Encourage and Guide Customers to Convert
Chatbots shine when it comes to giving your site’s visitors that final push to buy. Every day, shoppers across the planet abandon their carts. It is especially the case for e-commerce stores because almost 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts on various platforms.
So, to get them back to a path that ends with a sale, an online enterprise can opt for measures such as sending email reminders. However, bots can be more effective at this since they have a friendlier brand voice and encourage conversations. They can respond to the issue a customer faced that forced him or her to abandon the cart. This way, a chatbot can get a buyer back to complete a purchase they started.
They Motivate Leads to Share Their Information
Website forms that have been around for a while are one of the most commonly used methods of collecting customer information, including full names, email addresses, preferences, etc. However, this approach can be boring and tiresome for site visitors. Many people will leave a website without sharing their information because a form is too long or has too many fields.
Agile marketers are now phasing out these forms and replacing them with chatbots. Now, instead of filling out an unexciting survey, a visitor can provide personal information by engaging in a conversation with a bot. The bot asks questions, and the leads provide personal details by simply answering in the chat.
The process becomes much easier for prospective customers. Some questions can have auto-replies so that leads don’t have to type everything down.
Bots Can Be Used to Do Research
Research is an important aspect of any business. You need insights into the industry and customers to survive and make a profit. Chatbots are also useful as research tools. Instead of spending a lot of time on research, you can assess data collected from conversations that your bot had with visitors and existing customers.
You can also set the chatbot to seek new information about your customers. By using a bot, you can simplify the tedious tasks of collecting, sorting, and assessing data.
Chatbots Help to Educate Leads and Customers
In lead generation and nurturing, education is vital. If potential customers are to convert and become loyal to your brand, they must first understand what your company offers and stands for.
You can simplify this process by using a chatbot to teach your target customers and turn them into subscribers. For example, if you operate in a real estate area, you can build a real estate chatbot to answer questions about finding properties, payment plans, or choosing a house.
If you have a blog that covers various aspects of your product or brand, your bot can help to lead potential customers to the required information. Thus, you can redirect them from your landing pages, social media, or messaging apps to their topics of interest. Thus, the readers only need to message a term to the chatbot and receive the content they were looking for in response.
They Help to Build Relationships and Trust with Customers
Before you can break even and make a profit, you need to build trust with your potential buyers. And the best way to create such a relationship is by engaging with customers regularly.
If they have questions, you should be able to provide instant answers. That way, your customers will perceive your brand as a reliable one. However, hiring enough human agents to work around the clock would be expensive and complicated. Instead, you can make use of a chatbot that can engage your customers at any time.
Final Words
All that said, chatbots have penetrated almost every aspect of businesses. And with the introduction of AI and ML, bots have evolved to do exceedingly more now than they did a few years ago. Even simple chat interfaces have many benefits for marketers. So, if you want to engage your customers, get more sales, and gain more from your marketing efforts, implement chatbots in your strategy.
Anzhela Sychyk
I`m a market researcher and technical writer at TheAppSolutions. I like to learn new things about modern technologies and share knowledge through value-added content, helping entrepreneurs build businesses in a more effective way.
Comments (1)
Thank you fro providing us with a topic as important as this, i have learnt a lot that will help my sales