A chatbot is a program that can automatically interact with your website visitors based on a given script. Chatbots are most often used to automate customer support, but they are also a great marketing tool that can guide a customer through the sales funnel.
As you might know, the sales funnel is generally divided into four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Chatbots can accompany your potential customers through each of them. They can help you build brand awareness, stimulate consumer interest, push consumers toward a decision, and help them complete a purchase.
Thanks to their versatility and autonomy, chatbots offer excellent potential for increasing website conversions and sales. Let’s take a closer look at the ways chatbots can help you grow revenue.
Imagine a user who first visits your website. This user is only at the stage of researching your product and hardly wants to be the first to start a conversation.
Chatbots help you proactively connect with potential customers: they can welcome new visitors, offer them help, and inform them about special offers and promotions. Thus, you will increase the level of visitor engagement on your website, increase the duration of their visits, and avoid losing potential clients when they visit your site.
Plus, proactive communication is important for customer retention. Chatbots help you increase customer loyalty and keep your existing customers interested in your product, which in the end results in more sales.
To reach your visitors at the most opportune moment, you can use special triggers that make a chatbot pop up. For example, in Chaport, you can set up a chatbot to send messages to your visitors based on the page URL, referrer URL, time spent on the page or site, the visitor’s language, and other parameters.
Customer satisfaction is one of the key factors that determine a company’s sales success. When customers are happy, they are more likely to buy from you again and tell their friends about you.
Multiple studies have found that chatbots positively influence customer satisfaction. In fact, 87.2% of consumers report having neutral or positive experiences with chatbots.
What people like the most about chatbots is the ease of use, speed, and convenience. Modern customers want to get everything, especially information, right away, and chatbots are ready to help them whenever they have a question. They are a great way to answer customer FAQs about your company, products, and sales-related issues.
If you have an online business, it is most likely that a good portion of your target audience is among the younger generation who grew up in the digital era. However, targeting Millennials or Zoomers is not the same as targeting older generations. The young generation differs in several ways:
Let’s put these points together: mobiles + messaging + self-service. Guess what tool combines it all? Chatbots! They are an excellent way to attract younger audiences and increase sales opportunities.
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers, which typically involves collecting their contact information. Using chatbots, you can automate lead generation and increase the conversion rate on your website. During conversations with users, a chatbot will collect all the necessary information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact details.
Another important stage is lead qualification: you need to determine whether a prospect is ready to become your customer. The more qualified your leads are, the more of those leads will result in sales. This process can also be automated with the help of chatbots, which can ask prospects clarifying questions and identify their needs.
Chatbot data collection is an excellent replacement for traditional web forms, which are gradually losing their effectiveness. Unlike forms, bots provide immediate responses, make the customer experience interactive, and engage customers more effectively. In some cases, chatbots can generate up to a 90% response rate.
One of the greatest things about sales chatbots is their ability to personalize the customer experience, which can increase the chances of making sales.
We’re sure you know the importance of personalization in sales, but here’s another confirmation: according to a report from Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations. If you want to make more sales, you should tailor the customer experience to their needs and preferences.
The first thing you can do to personalize the customer experience with chatbots is set up the right triggers. They will help you make conversations meaningful based on information about your customers and their behavior. For example, you can:
Another way to add personalization to your customer experience is to use chatbots for product recommendations. For example, they can ask customers a few clarifying questions, find out their preferences, and guide them to a personalized offering.
One more important benefit of chatbots for sales is that they work 24/7.
Imagine the following situation: a potential customer lands on your website, writes to you via chat or email, but doesn’t receive a response because no one from your team is online. What will the visitor do? Most likely, this person will continue researching available solutions on the market and slip away to your more responsive competitor. As a result, you get a lost sale.
However, chatbots can help you stay connected with your customers around the clock. They will be able to answer your prospects’ questions, clear their doubts about your product, and prevent them from getting away. This will enable you to generate sales opportunities non-stop, even when you sleep.
Cart abandonment is one of the most challenging issues for most e-commerce companies, with an average of 72.07% of consumers leaving their carts without making a purchase. The reasons can be different:
Chatbots can’t solve all the issues, but they can definitely help with some of them. For example, bots can send proactive messages offering help, answer customer questions, and provide discount coupons, giving them a little nudge to complete a purchase.
Also, it’s a good idea to combine chatbots with live chat. Many consumers tend to trust real people rather than bots. Let your chatbot offer them an option to contact a human agent so that your sales team can gently push them towards a purchase decision.
We’re sure you already see what the key benefit of chatbots is: automation. Bots can take on a large number of tasks that were previously performed by humans: answering FAQs, asking sales qualifying questions, providing recommendations, and more.
By transferring part of the tasks to chatbots, you will be able to reduce the load on your sales team and let them shift the focus to more important tasks.
What’s more, many chatbots can be integrated with other sales and marketing tools. For example, you can transfer the information collected by chatbots to your CRM, email marketing system, or directly to your sales agents.
Chatbots are a great way to get feedback from your customers. Mostly, people don’t like wasting their time filling out surveys or having long phone calls about the quality of service. Chatbots take a softer approach to collecting feedback and customer information, asking questions naturally during the conversation.
Unlike traditional surveys, chatbots allow you to tailor the conversation to the user and create a scenario where each subsequent question depends on the previous answer. Plus, it won’t take much time to respond, since some questions can include ready-made reply options.
Moreover, some chatbot tools provide valuable insights into customer behavior, including information about the pages customers visit on your website, the number of visitors who engage with your chatbot, conversion rates, and more.
Using all this information, you will be able to analyze your customers’ preferences, segment your audience, improve your chatbot scenarios, and strengthen your sales and marketing strategies.
If you’re not using chatbots yet, now is the best time to start! Today, the market is full of low-code and no-code solutions which make creating chatbots easier than ever. If you want to add a sales chatbot to your website, we invite you to try our chatbot builder. Start engaging with your prospects, automate your workflow, and see your sales grow!