How to Use Chatbot Marketing to Grow Your Business
Over the past two decades, digital technology has revolutionized marketing. From social media to the use of machine learning and AI, digital marketing has changed how businesses operate and promote their products.
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Chatbots are just one of the latest eCommerce trends that are starting to see wider acceptance across the industry. Unlike yesterday’s chatbots that could never come up with the correct answers to users’ questions, modern chatbots are more sophisticated and smarter – sometimes, they respond just like human agents!
And the payoff? Higher customer engagements and more conversions!
So, in this article, we will discuss different ways online stores can use chatbot marketing to scale their eCommerce brands. This includes using chatbot marketing to:
- Increase Lead Generation
- Improve Customer Engagement
- Support Remarketing
- Streamline Customer Journey
But before we discuss how you can utilize chatbot marketing, let’s take a quick look at its basic concepts and why your online store should look into using them.
What is Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot marketing involves using chatbots to promote products or services. The bots are designed with advanced artificial intelligence that allows them to answer different questions, recommend products, take orders, pitch cross-sells and up-sells, and so on.
Moreover, certain chatbots are programmed to recognize specific keywords and use them to serve relevant results.
For example, let’s say a prospect lands on your online store and mentions “men’s shoes” while messaging the chatbot. An advanced bot can analyze that keyword contextually to produce relevant results. It can answer with a link to the product page with men’s shoes, for example. In doing so, the chatbot enhances the customer experience and speeds up the conversion process.
Bonus Content: 9 Merchant Chatbots on Facebook Messenger to Inspire You
That perfectly explains why chatbot marketing is becoming so popular in the digital world. The bots help businesses generate leads and save on customer service costs. Not only that, but consumers also seem to enjoy this new customer experience involving chatbots.
About 65% of customers want to use AI chatbots for self-service when dealing with small matters. Also, if your customer base is primarily millennials, you will love the fact that over 60% of them already use chatbots. The best part? 70% of those millennials report a positive experience.
Chatbot Marketing Benefits
Perhaps the biggest benefit of chatbot marketing is that it can save your online store time and money.
A report by Chatbot Magazine suggests that chatbots could save businesses up to 30% in customer service resources. That’s because these bots can function 24/7, and they are cheaper than human customer reps.
Chatbots will also help you deliver quicker responses to your customers’ queries. That’s critical, since modern consumers value responsive businesses.
[Source: Toistersolutions]
It’s evident that consumers want instant responses. Chatbots are your best bet at meeting customers’ expectations. Businesses understand that all too well, and that’s why all top eCommerce platforms, including Shopify and WooCommerce, make chatbot installation a straightforward process.
Moreover, chatbots can help you segment the traffic landing on your online store.
As you know, not every website visitor is ready to purchase. Some people are there to explore their options. Others want to compare your prices with the competitors’. Chatbots can help you segment this traffic, making it easier for you to meet website visitors where they are in the customer journey.
The segmentation can work hand in hand with lead scoring.
Example: A chatbot can ask a series of questions and use the visitor’s responses to place them in the right stage of the sales funnel. For instance, if the visitor is interested in prices and offers, they may be placed toward the bottom of the sales funnel. On the other hand, if the visitor is interested in general information, they will be grouped somewhere at the top of the funnel.
Either way, both the bots and your sales team will have an easier time dealing with every visitor.
For example, the chatbot can push for conversion by presenting a discount if the visitor appears to be at the bottom of the funnel. The bot could also connect a real sales rep to take over the process and help the visitor pick the right product.
Let’s now get practical and see how you can use chatbot marketing to boost your online store’s revenue.
How to Use Chatbot Marketing to Grow Your Business
1. Increase Lead Generation
By integrating popular messaging apps like Telegram, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger, chatbots can reach a broader audience of potential shoppers. Statistics already show that more than 100,000 chatbots are being used in Facebook Messenger. Brands use these chatbots to recommend products, collect customer information, take orders, etc.
Therefore, you cannot ignore chatbot marketing on social media.
That’s especially true when you consider Facebook Messenger has over 140 million users in the US alone. These chatbots can generate leads from social media and move them along the digital marketing funnel before turning them into paying customers. You can also set up rules that allow your sales rep to intervene and close the deals as needed.
Did you know that chatbots can also help reduce cart abandonment? Chatbots can track visitors’ activities from the moment they land on your website.
So, let’s assume a visitor adds several products to the cart but does not checkout. Your chatbots can intervene and send a cart abandonment message a few hours later. Again, you can use incentives like discounts to sweeten and close the deal.
4. Streamline Customer Journey
Finally, chatbot marketing can help you streamline the customer journey.
One way chatbots will do that is by helping prospects quickly find the products they want.
Website visitors can ask chatbots questions regarding specific products instead of browsing through your entire catalog. The bots can produce a link to that product and may even recommend other alternative items. That can be instrumental in speeding up conversions.
Online stores like Zalando also use Chatbots to facilitate order tracking. Not only does this improve customer experience, but it relieves the human customer reps from simpler tasks. That allows the reps to focus on more meaningful tasks, like closing more deals.
Chatbots also improve the customer journey by providing instant responses. That’s one of the biggest benefits of chatbots, and it’s also why you cannot rely on human customer reps alone. Chatbots address visitors’ queries instantly to facilitate a smooth experience.
Compare that to emails where potential buyers might have to wait for hours to get a response. Even human customer reps can hardly match the efficiency of bots. Relying on human customer representatives alone means you’re likely to expose prospects to longer wait times, which modern consumers despise.
That said, there is also space for human customer reps. Don’t just deploy a chatbot and shut down your customer support team. Integrate the two.
For example, the chatbot from Zalando Lounge allows users to switch to a human customer rep by just typing “transfer.”
Read the rest of How to Use Chatbot Marketing to Grow Your Business.