E-commerce Chatbots: 13 Ways to Increase Sales, Conversions & Retention

It is now a well-known fact that 68.89% of online shoppers abandoned a virtual shopping cart for a number of reasons. These reasons have to be big enough to make things go out of your site’s control.

The thumb rule of eCommerce conversion optimization clearly defines the final aim as generating conversions and then revenue for the company.

However, many times, with the abundance of choices and unlimited ways to purchase online things, the conversion flow actually becomes fuzzy.

Sometimes, instead of manifold options, you just need one clear route to guide your customers to the conversion funnel. Enter the world of “guided eCommerce” with conversion and engagement boosting.

E-commerce chatbot is a modern way to guide your eCommerce conversions and retain them for getting repeat sales in the end.

By eliminating the distractions and offering instant resolutions, and can guide your prospects to the place where you want them to be at the final stage of the conversion funnel.

1. Facebook chatbot- a brief introduction

The article takes Facebook chatbot as a base to explain the methods. Facebook chatbot or Facebook messenger bot is an AI program integrated by Facebook in its messenger application.

This AI bot uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning to study human behaviors and learns new ways to improvise its response automatically. In simple terms, Facebook messenger bot is equipped with broader techniques to mimic human intelligence.

This is just a glance. This guide aims at uncovering numerous such affairs, where AI bots not only help in generating new sales but also assist in retaining the existing ones.

Apply these insights into your e-commerce touchpoint and chatbot marketing will do unprecedented wonders for your eCommerce business.

2. User Acquisition with chatbot

In the whole conversion funnel, user acquisition is the most crucial part, where your business comes in contact with the end-users.

You need website traffic and new users to processes them into the next stage conversion optimization. The Facebook bot can make things quite easy by automating a number of tasks that escalate website traffic and user acquisition.

3. Website Live chat

A survey conducted by Kayoko revealed that consumers like more real-time support than traditional live chat experience. With AI chatbots, businesses can cut down a whopping cost spent on traditional live chat software and additional workforce required to attend them.

An eCommerce messenger bot like Facebook messenger bot can offer a better live chat experience to your users with rapid answers, less groundwork minimized errors, and precise data handling.

AI-based live-chat integration can prove to be a prominent remedy is not just customer support but also in sales generation.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is an influential phenomenon in itself. Being one of the major sources of organic traffic content marketing can literally help eCommerce websites drive some qualified users to the business website. With AI-powered content marketing, marketers can automate a number of aspects.

By empowering marketers with AI abilities chatbots can present general content in a more personalized way to the users. Hence, one can ensure a definite improvement in content engagement and consumption.

A chatbot can interact with the users who are searching for something particular and present precise content quickly as per requirements.

With smart filtering, the precise information through the chatbots can reinforce a particular content to a qualified lead. Additionally, the data collected by chatbot can boost up your general marketing strategies.

As chatbots learn new stuff, they evolve to understand clients’ desires and preferences and guide to your conversion funnel more accurately.

This is how Call of Duty used AI power content marketing while launching their new game Call of Duty: Infinite War.

5. Social media traffic

The Facebook chatbot is the perfect example of AI chatbots working like charm for e-commerce websites. With Facebook bot working on your live chat, the same AI bot will also help your website generate qualified leads from your Facebook page as well. 64% of Facebook users use Facebook Messenger.

With Facebook live chat integrated on your website, you can directly send communications to the user’s Facebook inbox from your website. Moreover, the Facebook messenger bot can identify a user on your website through their Facebook user account, and present the communications in a micro-personalized manner.

Image source: Socialmediaexaminer

6. Lead generation

With Facebook chatbot, businesses can utilize a new way to drive customer acquisition through their follower base on Facebook and Instagram. They can promote their blog posts on the Facebook page or Instagram profile.

Depending on the quality of the content and exclusive information, the content would soar when bot subscribers are notified for the same. Now, a business can capture a lead from the engagement activities like comments and sharing.

Subsequently, the bot can trigger a related conversation through the messenger. As soon as the person responds, the business meets at least three goals here: Lead, user acquisition, and prospect for sales generation.

7. Sponsored messages-Facebook Ad Bots

Facebook Chatbot Ads, also called as click-to-messenger Ads, work a little different from traditional Facebook Ads. For example, when users click on a Messenger Ad, they do not go to the landing page. Instead, it triggers the Facebook Messenger bot.

The bot gets immediate access to the users’ profile information such as name, gender, age, time zone, and preferred language. Using the information, the bot can initiate a personalized conversation and guide the user to the conversion funnel.

8. Conversion Optimization with chatbots

Help diagnose the problem and offer recommendations

Businesses can use bots to offer a self-help portal to the users. Let users state their problems in the form of questions. The bot can identify the issue and send appropriate content to solve the same.

The recommendations and solutions can go in the form of guides, tutorials, video instructions, and a link to a relevant landing pages, etc. With more of the issues being solved through self-help chatbots, users would love the quick support and engage with the business more confidently.

This is how Best Buy offers a self-help portal to its customers through AI chatbot.

9. Decision/Purchase Stage-guided selling

A large number of choices sometimes disturb the regular flow in the conversion funnel. Often time, customers get distracted and leave the site without purchasing anything. An AI power chatbot can prove to be a useful asset here by offering a guided eCommerce shopping experience to the users.

The shopping chatbots can identify the customer requirement through questions and quizzes and offer an immediate recommendation. Saving a lot of time, this approach also eliminates an array of disturbances caused with independent shopping.

Image source: Neil Patel’s blog

10. Purchasing via Bot

In addition to offering an assistive product recommendation, the sales chatbot can also successfully place an order right from the messenger.

Using web-views for a product page, the sales chatbot can display a personalized view of the product in the messenger with detail such as reviews, product description, and product pictures, etc. In short, the customer need not browse the product page to view these details.

They can directly go to the checkout page and finalize the purchase from the messenger interface only. Moreover, they can also feed the order purchase information and other related notifications such as order status and expected delivery time.

Check out this awesome shopping bot of H&M in Kik’s Bot Shop

11. Abandoned Carts

AI chatbots can lower the cart abandonment rate by reaching out the customers directly. Moreover, unlike your cart recovery emails, messenger communications do not end up in the spam folders.

A well-integrated e-commerce chatbot can send automatic cart reminders and allow the customers to make a direct purchase within the messenger without moving the user to the website. It is a better option than emails where customers move to the website to complete their checkout.

An e-commerce chatbot ensures a negligible friction and facilitates a dedicated and personalized route for a particular conversion. One can also program chatbots to attach discount coupons to entice the abandoned cart customers.

Doing so can reduce the total abandonment rate and more efficiently, it can also utilize the information to boost further sales while building trust and loyalty through incentives.

This is how Cole Haan combats Cart Abandonment with AI-powered Facebook bot. The messenger bot identifies the situation here and triggers a discount-based offer to attract the user.

Image source: retailtouchpoints

There is one more, an excellent example-

12. Upselling

With lead collection and data analysis, chatbots can boost up the conversion rate by upselling and cross-selling related products. You might have seen many AI-based product recommendations on eCommerce websites and mobile apps.

The chatbots are in fact, capable of providing a much better resolution as they can process the whole database in a lighting fast speed and process that data to offer an extremely micro-personalized product recommendation.

For any reason, even if they do not have enough customer data, they can conduct quick questionnaires to offer a better proposal.

Moreover, eCommerce chatbot can also analyze the purchase histories to recommend similar or complementary products. It is believed at one out of every three customers will buy the upsold item.

Customer engagement & retention with chatbots

13. Customer Support Chatbot

Generating a single new sale is not enough to survive the heat of competition in eCommerce. If you want to take your business to the heights of success, you need to attract repeat sales.

Do you know that a new customer is only 20% likely to make a purchase, while your previous customers possess a 60% chance of making a repeat purchase of the same or other product?

Getting a repeat sale is though not that easy. You need to offer excellent after-sales to do that. This actively involves addressing to after-sales queries, replying as quickly as possible.

While traditional live chat or email support takes a lot of time in receiving, processing, and then replying to the queries, AI chatbots take no time to reply even to the data-intensive queries.

Having a robotic executive looking at your chat support in a 24×7 environment is indeed a working way to boost customer loyalty and repeat sales.

14. Messenger Scan Codes

Facebook recently introduced Messenger codes in its messenger app. This feature lets users connect with a particular brand in a relatively quick fashion. Users can scan Messenger scan codes from the app to open a chat directly with the particular brand.

Furthermore, the chats can be handled by the human executives or by an integrated AI chatbot. Snapchat also gives a similar feature. Business can share their direct scan code on their touchpoints, and their customers can directly connect without any hassle.

Image Source: scanova

15. Loyalty Programs

Be it any product, any service, or any business, customers generate an opinion strictly according to the value offered against the price they pay. Brands conduct customer loyalty programs only to ensure higher brand loyalty and enhanced value for the products.

Unfortunately, for 70% of consumers, loyalty programs by brands are nothing but a source of frustration. It is because brands do not understand the relevance of a particular offer for a particular user.

For example, even if you are offering 80% OFF on kids’ wear, a 50 years old user will hardly have an interest in it. The prime issue is customer targeting.

You cannot expect anything less than an extremely targeted approach from AI chatbots. With all those lead generations, data analysis, Facebook profile synchronization, no one can better understand a customer’s need that an AI chatbot.

Based on all these analyses, chatbots can point-out the users easily who would be interested in a particular offer, and trigger a relevant coupon to an appropriate customer.

16. Over to you

Chatbots are futuristic technology. With the advancement in NLP and Machine learning technologies, chatbots are going to automate almost everything in the eCommerce shopping environment.

With multiple applications and higher value propositions, chatbots for businesses are developing into sales teams in themselves. If we consider Facebook Messenger bot, with its roots from the biggest lead generation platform (Facebook), no one knows your customers better than this excellent robot.

You can always trust this bot for adding that extra spice to your customer acquisition, sale generation, and customer retention programs. There are various Facebook Messenger plugins in the market, test them out; if any of them is offering the above-mentioned aspects, you might want to integrate it on your site and mobile application.

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