In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, one thing is guaranteed - chatbots are not only here to stay, but with increasing speed they are taking over many tasks. With all the possible implementations and advantages that chatbots bring to your website, it is not a matter of deciding whether or not to them, but rather HOW to use chatbots. In this post, we will describe exactly that

Why Are Chatbots Popular?

It’s not a surprise.Around 69% of customers prefer chatbots due to their reaction speed.

The development of virtual assistants has also played an important role in their popularity. Several years ago that was a product for some of the top companies. Nowadays, chatbots are provided as SaaS (Software as a Service) for the price of one lunch and implementation faster than having lunch.

How to Use Chatbots to Bring Value to Your Business

1. Welcome and Exit Intent

Chatbots can be used on a site for more specific, limited tasks. You can set up a welcome chatbot or an exit-intent bot on your website. Welcome chatbots work well to nurture your brand’s relationship with a visitor. They initiate an interaction with them from the get-go. It lets visitors know that support is available if they need it or lets them know what special offers are available to them.

You can use it to put a particular content upfront or help the visitor navigate in your (possibly difficult) website structure.

Exit-intent chatbots are used when the visitor is preparing to leave your website. This is your final chance to present the visitor with a special discount and convince them to buy.

Just this simple proposition may tilt the visitors from undecided to a customer. Or, at least help you find out why they decided to leave. It could be that they didn’t find what they were looking for or they didn’t like something. It’s your chance to find out what and improve your offer or selection.

2. Recommend Products

When your brand offers many products or services, visitors are more likely to convert when they are walked through all of the options available to them. Too many choices can be overwhelming. So, limiting them based on a visitor’s preferences is a good idea.

Based on their inclinations, a chatbot can help visitors decide between several products. Or, advise them what other products would work well with a purchase they already made.

It’s a very efficient way to nurture your relationship with a lead and secure a sale.

3. Register Visitors For Events

While we will discuss overall lead generation a bit later, chatbots are a great option to register your visitors for various events. First of all, you have an opportunity to let them know that you doing an event. Let’s presume that you decided to take charge of the raise in business moving to digital, chose the best webinar software, and now are looking to launch a webinar to generate leads and convert them to clients.

And just like that...you have a lead. You can make the chatbot react to a particular trigger or just be there when the visitor lands. You would also of course spice up the chat with some highlights of the webinar like a unique guest or an interesting topic.

4. Qualify Leads and Get Sales

It is obvious that you can generate leads with a chatbot, but what may come as new information is that you can qualify them too.

Leads can take up a lot of time and energy and there are always a lot of variables in a customer’s journey. Using chatbots on your site can help you better manage the way you nurture and convert leads. They have the capacity to run through and pull out information about a lead that can sway them in the direction you want.

Imagine the difference between letting a lead wander aimlessly around your site and a lead being nurtured and led through their options by someone (or something) that has all the right information. That’s exactly what chatbots do. They read the signals given by a lead and quickly adapt the information they serve to close the deal.

This simple structure will allow you to filter out visitors who:

• Are not from regions that you are interested in.
• Do not have a buyer's intent.
• Have a budget that is under your benchmark.

Few simple questions, and a link to a scheduler, and you have a qualified lead. Just imagine all the possibilities.

5. Leverage Contests and Giveaways

Lately, a new strategy to rapidly attract new audiences had appeared on the scene - referral contest and giveaways. The idea is simple, you chose a prize and let your target audience do various tasks to take part in the contest.

The most basic structure is to have your audience subscribe to various accounts and then from the new followers you will be choosing a winner. But of course, as with other things, you can take it a step further.

Using the same viral marketing principles, you can create a quiz like this one:

If the visitor answers correctly, they can be put on the list from which you will draw the winner. If they will give a wrong answer maybe you will give them a second chance or lead them to a different funnel. It can be questions about your brand, or product (so they have to google them…).

No matter what you do, their email and name are already with you. Who would give you the wrong contact details when competing for a free prize?

6. Get Customer Feedback

You can not correct mistakes that you do not know about and rest assured that due to operational-blindness you can not figure them out on your own. That's why the next way on the list of how to use chatbots is collecting feedback.

Chatbots will allow you to easily figure out what's the issue with your website user experience and so make the necessary adjustments in your landing page builder. Finding out if it's not converting because of the wrong CTAs or just that your products are not easily accessible won't be a problem.

7. Receive Cross-Platform Opt-ins

Chatbots are very versatile in their use, so you can cross-promote various communication channels. Here is a simple example of WhatsApp lead submission.

You can add a freebie to it, saying that you will send a 10% discount code on visitors’ telephone number. The same strategy applies if you would for instance like to build up your email list with one of the email marketing services or apply the same approach to Viber, Telegram, WeChat, etc.

8. Decrease Cart Abandonment

You drive traffic, design a great converting landing page, have a solid product (or a service) and everything seems to be working well...except that visitors leave their cart at the last possible second.

Sometimes the visitor needs just a bit of help to make their final decision and since you already got them so far, it is just logical to help them at the end. You may offer a discount, call with a sales team rep, or even use this opportunity for a last-minute cross-sell.

5 Chatbot Tips To Keep In Mind

Below you will find a couple of overall tips that will assist you in more efficient use of chatbots. Using some of the examples that we described above, let’s discuss a more complex use of the chatbot in the overall user experience and their journey through your website.

Find the Right Balance between AI and Human

You may feel that chatbots can never replace the power of human interaction. And that letting artificial intelligence do the work people that have been doing for ages cannot have the same effect. While that may be true in some way, and there are some things humans do better, nothing is quite so black and white.

Using chatbots on your site can be beneficial not only to you but to your customers. They are a good way to avoid bad customer experiences and leaving clients unattended or dissatisfied.

Nowadays, people expect fast service and prompt responses to their queries. No matter where they go. And, if new technology can offer them what they need, they don’t have a problem embracing it. That’s why chatbot popularity has grown so much in recent years.

To find and maintain a good balance between old and new, what you can do is train your chatbots to be more human. This doesn’t mean tricking your visitors into believing they are dealing with an actual human being. No one will buy that. It only means that chatbots don’t need to be boring, cold, and uninteresting.

Chatbots can be fun and engaging or anything you set them up to be. All depending on your needs.

Providing information and support can be non-boring if you dare to be a little creative. Bots can pull up information about a website visitor and address them by name. They can make recommendations based on previous purchases or based on similar items that others have bought. They can give answers to queries with a dose of humor or imagination instead of robotic one-liners.

Adding that little touch of creativity can transform the experience potential customers get from visiting your website. So, don’t be afraid to experiment and keep in mind that chatbots can of course be combined with some of the best live chat software solutions. So you can have the advantages of both worlds.

Streamline Customer Experience and Improve Customer Support

Chatbots can take over the interaction with a lead from the moment they enter your website. They can welcome the visitor and move them on to the next step of their journey by asking what they need help with. After that, the chatbot can assist the visitor in making a choice and simplify the check-out process for them. This way, the visitor is carefully guided and nurtured through each step of your sales funnel. Using various types of chatbots on your site can be a great way to tend to your customers’ needs.

Chatbots are always available. Your customers won’t ever have to wait for hours or even days to get an answer to their query. Chatbots offer support and information round the clock and with great precision. Armed with valuable inventory and information, a product recommendation chatbot solves queries and complaints in a fraction of the time it takes humans to do so.It is a surefire way to:

• Cut down response times.
• Reduce cart abandonment rates.
• Secure more sales.

Once a visitor enters your website, you can set up your chatbots to welcome them. People appreciate brands that are thoughtful and pay attention to how they interact with their customers. You can use chatbots to inform visitors about any special sales or discount campaigns you are currently running. You can use chatbots to introduce and promote a new service or product.

Chatbots will also serve your leads’ or customers’ need for additional information. Be it about pricing, shipping, or payment methods. Chatbots are a very efficient way to nurture leads and retain customers because they provide instant real-time responses and convenient information.

Last but not least, personalizing a customer’s journey is also very important. Using chatbots on your site is a very effective way to tend to your customers and make them feel special by providing customized offers and personalized recommendations.

Get Valuable Information

On top of being a great and efficient way to give out information, chatbots are also good at gathering information. And information, as we all know, is priceless to any business.

A chatbot can not only answer questions and provide quick answers but also naturally include the necessary questions into their conversations with your website visitors.

During their interaction, your chatbots can collect information from your website visitors about anything from their age, to their likes and preferences. They can sense how a visitor prefers to communicate and adapt to their inclinations. This way, you can more efficiently guide the visitor through the sales funnel by delivering information in a way that suits them best.

Chatbots can also be used to build your customer database by offering visitors an easy way to subscribe to your email list or become a member. You can set up your website chatbot to welcome visitors and offer them a personalized welcome offer if they fill in their email and name.

And while we are on the subject of the information, using chatbots on your site means that you can get data gold from all their interactions.

Chatbot interaction data can be analyzed and interpreted to improve your chatbots’ abilities to convert a lead, promote a campaign, or secure a sale. Chatbot data can also help you improve customer experience by adapting to feedback. It can help you better understand what your audience wants and it can help you tailor a marketing strategy that delivers results.

Promote Your Content

Want to attract more visitors to your blog? Have your chatbots include recommendations of relevant blog posts in the course of their interaction with your website visitors.

For instance, if a lead is looking for more information about a particular product before they make their decision to purchase, chatbots can deliver personalized suggestions of relevant content and guide that visitor through their options. This way, the visitor immediately gets the information they need and you improve your chances of making a new sale.

Save Money

We can’t pretend money is no object because of course your budget is a big deal.In recent years, chatbot options have become more and more intuitive and efficient. You can choose to use a simple chatbot on your website or go big. Smart chatbots use machine learning to hold human-like conversations with your website visitors. They can make interactions flow naturally and seamlessly.

All the examples that You've seen in this post are pre-made templates that you can configure literally in a matter of minutes and already start levering the chatbot power to your advantage.

Chatbots are a great money-saving tool. Doing the job of quite a few support and sales agents, they are a very efficient way to safeguard your marketing budget while still getting all the hard work done.

This doesn’t mean that you will be replacing your entire staff with bots. It simply means that chatbots are a great way to relieve your marketing team of the burden of doing repetitive, mundane tasks. Instead, they can be free to focus on the more complex tasks that require their attention and can generate more results for your business.

Conclusion

Due to unprecedented events in modern history, the inflow of business and new users into digital space is enormous. Nothing did so much for digitalization as the year 2020. This is great news for all online businesses.

The other side of this coin is that due to an increase in competition - customer experience becomes the name of the game. While going from one store to another physically might be tiring and you purchase something even if you are not completely happy with it - the other extreme applies for all things digital.

There is only one click between a visitor becoming your customer or a customer of someone else. So you must make sure that you get each and every sale.

As we illustrated in our examples of how to use chatbots, virtual assistants can do a lot to make those small tweaks and improvements to maximize your conversion rate. Considering the low price and simple setup - a must-try for your business.