Chatbots For Improving Sales

Chatbots For Improving Sales

We know that chatbots are great. We know that customers love chatbots. And we know that chatbots can do a lot of things- but can they improve the sales significantly? The answer is a plain yes and the proof lies in all those organizations that have shown a marked rise in their sales simply with the integration of a chatbot in their business. The way several small businesses benefit through Facebook Messenger bots needs no introduction.

Engage your customers better by personalizing their experience

When we talk about chatbots improving the sales, we are only talking about the artificial intelligence powered bots. These can smartly learn from each conversation with the customer as they have self-learning algorithms at the core. These can capture relevant customer data to train themselves better and to keep giving more relevant responses. These are said to be smart because what is deemed relevant for one customer might not be the same for another customer. Few common observations about customer behavior:

• Customers prefer getting instant responses than having to wait to get a reply to their email or wait for the call to get connected. So chat windows are often the most used customer service channels
• Customers are more likely to move away from a business if the customer service team is not able to provide a relevant response to their query.
• The response of the customer care team is one of the major factors that customers rely on to frame an opinion about the particular business. This is something that gives them the confidence to actually buy a product or service.

For this, a flawless customer care model would be ideally required. And chatbots take you one step closer to this.

Chatbots for analytics can evolve to chatbots that make a sale happen

Data analytics is the magic that sets apart a normal marketing strategy from a successful one. Chatbots are efficient because they are excellent analytics tools. In fact, for those who wish to attain improvement in their sales with the help of chatbots, the focus should on using these first as data analytics instruments. These would not just function when the conversation actually starts with the customer. Chatbots start doing their job soon after the customer starts browsing through the products and services. This would help gather customer interests. Based on the past orders, purchase patterns would be understood. These metrics are essential in framing marketing campaigns which can be more relevant to different customer segments. They also give a better idea about the appropriate channels that actually offer good conversion rates with these campaigns. The code for the bots should be written so as to help them focus on gathering data that actually matter for the business. These would be the most relevant datasets to train the chatbots for future revisions. Once this is achieved with perfection the code could then be tweaked to improve and shorten the sales funnel. These would be the ultimate bots that would be able to push the customer down the sales funnel. This would initially be a trial and error method which would consist of attempts to try with different responses to understand which response causes the customer to advance towards an actual sale.

Strongly establish brand identity

Marketing teams often concentrate on establishing brand identity because brand awareness is the first step towards a stable customer acquisition and reliable customer retention pattern. By integrating with your social media pages chatbots would be able to talk to customers not just through the chat window but also through their social media profiles by displaying catchy campaigns with personalized thoughtfully curated content. Some marketing campaigns fail simply because they are not dynamic and they display the same promotions to all customers. What use would it be to display promotions and offers running on baby products to a youngster for example! For this analyzing the customer’s profile information, the products viewed would help. Occasionally the chatbot could also attempt to put in front of the customer simple questions to complete the basic profile details to help enrich the shopping experience.

Knock knock! Your cart is waiting

Cart abandonment when addressed on time, sales can be improved significantly. Chatbots would keep monitoring the customer’s activity. When there is a cart abandonment or if the order process is not completed at any point, it would get back with a quick question to the customer. This would help in two ways- businesses can understand what is stopping a customer from making a purchase. Removing barriers in sales funnels can have long-term effects in avoiding similar cases in the future as well. This would also have a positive impact when the customer gets to know that the customer responses are all registered and addressed on time. Another scenario is when the customer doesn’t get back to make a purchase for a long time after an order. Sometimes this simply happens because of a weak internet presence or a weak brand awareness. Out of sight is out of mind! So the chatbot would not allow losing a customer because of weak presence. It would help place promotions appropriately or send occasional reminder emails or even customer crafted promotions based on the actual code written. By boosting the visibility of the business chatbots can help customer acquisition and retention.
When you seamlessly integrate chatbots in your existing sales and marketing streams you would be able to positively influence buyer decisions and thus achieve measurable returns on the investment made for promotion.