Chatbots have gotten really popular nowadays, as human resources are not up to the task of sitting in front of a PC for 24 hours straight and answering every query that comes along nicely. With Artificial Intelligence making strides forward and computers getting better and better in their interactions with humans, chatbots seem to have taken over. Websites of all major brands, companies, and services use chatbots now; you visit one, and a pop-up lets you know that Alexa is here to talk to you about whatever it is that you are searching for. Newsflash: there’s no Alexa really, but a chatbot. So, to make a bank from this hype, let's look at the five tips to boost your conversion rate with a chatbot.
Many people might argue otherwise; that chatbots aren’t really all that useful, as customers or potential business opportunities are better off interacting with people instead of a chatbot. But the reality is that as long as chatbots outperform humans regularly and are more efficient at converting business leads into actual revenue for the company, chatbots are the way forward. There’s really no downside to chatbots, maybe other than the responses from a really bad one, but that’s not the case anymore. Sophisticated chatbots that converse on par with humans are widespread now and can be really pivotal in boosting your conversion rates.
So before we get into the five tips to boost your conversion rate with a chatbot, lets first delve deeper into what actually is a chatbot, why is it so useful, and how you can use it to your advantage and take your business to the next level.
A chatbot, in the simplest terms, is a conversational piece of software guided by artificial intelligence that specializes in providing human-Esque responses to queries by other users. For instance, if you go to any website and start looking around, chances are, sooner or later, a window is going to pop up with the option for you to chat to a ‘representative’. That representative is actually a chatbot, and it is there 24/7, regardless of whatever the time is, or the weather is.
So, the chatbot is essentially a piece of AI software that specializes in conversing and helps the potential customer in navigating toward their point of business or reference, in order to convert it from a business lead to an actual sale. Now, why don’t companies use real people for that? For one, why pay two people to monitor a station for 12 hours each when you can have a chatbot do it for you for free? And secondly, chatbots are the better option out of the two; despite the fact that human-to-human interaction might be more organic and better, statistics point towards the chatbots being more efficient in this regard.
As explained beforehand, chatbots are really everywhere. Every website uses them, from the big hitters to local businesses with a bit of business and tech-savvy. It is simply more convenient than having a person man a PC and wait for people to ask questions and then respond to them in an objective manner that brings in the business lead and converts it into business. It is far easier and more convenient to have a smart algorithm-based AI talk to the person at all times so that it is far more efficient in converting business leads into an actual business that generates revenue.
As for why chatbots are so useful, the primary factor is just cost savings and the efficiency they have. For starters, you cannot afford a team of dedicated professionals in customer service all the time. People cannot deal objectively with a large number of queries at any given time simultaneously, and even then, objectivity kind of goes out of the window. You want the tone to be professional, respectable, and a little bit welcoming at the same time, which becomes difficult to maintain with a human present.
But with a chatbot, will follow a certain language style and tone that it has been allowed to use, and it will never deviate from it. Regardless of how many queries or users it has to deal with at the same time, the chatbot will stick to whatever tone and script it has been given, whether it's 10 in the evening or 4 in the morning. It will deal with all these queries as objectively.
The second is the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of chatbots. These are bots that convert business leads into an actual business and do not require any pay or benefits. You pay once for their development, and that’s it. As long as you have a product to sell and you keep them on the website, they will answer questions. That’s it; it's just good business practice.
Now let’s get into the five tips to boost your conversion rate with a chatbot.
Here are the five tips that you can use to boost your conversion rate with a chatbot at the helm of outreach to customers and answering and addressing their basic questions and queries.
The PPC model is already something of commonality within the digital marketing realm. Using this in conjunction with your chatbot, with what is called the PPC bot, will extensively help your conversion rates. Many estimates clock this PPC bot up to two or even three times the amount of conversions that you can get with just a chatbot. This is because whenever your ad appears somewhere on the internet, and a user clicks on it, they are referred to your chatbot rather than your website, which means that they will be able to chat directly with your chatbot rather than going to your site and navigating or waiting for the chatbot to appear. With a PPC bot, your conversions will double as more and more people will be able to interact with the PPC bot.
Many times, as we’ve stated beforehand, the chatbot does feel forced. What we mean is, that they do sound or read like a bot, and people who have had experience interacting with bots might be able to catch it. Hell, there are some chatbots out there who are even worse than that, and people can immediately guess that they are conversing with a bot rather than a person. So, ideally, what you might want to do in the development phase would be to have a dialogue wheel or dialogue tree that sounds and reads natural and puts the potential customer at ease in dealing with the chatbot. Because many times, people will guess right away that the conversation is being fielded by a bot, and users tend to end the session there and then. Therefore it is imperative that you use dialogue that is natural.
Lead magnets do exactly as their name suggests; they attract leads and make it so that the leads are all piled in a central location. These are free resources that do everything from capturing the user’s email to sending a user an e-newsletter or an email or a blog. These resources are obviously automated and capture leads and data by themselves; meaning all that you have to do is to check them periodically to see and monitor the users and the data. Lead magnets can be used in conjunction with chatbots; these can then be used to send emails automatically and basically do the hard work for you. Really good and makes an otherwise banal and mind-numbing job much easier.
Your chatbot will be something that is essentially the face of the company for the first-time user, and as such, the face of the company needs to be friendly and creative, not robotic. This means that your chatbot will have to work with media to make sure that the user gets hooked on it. A good example of this would be chatbots at shopping sites, where these conversational bots routinely use new ads and listings within the chat to further entice the customer and attract them towards making a purchase. Similarly, throwing little emojis here and there, when the situation calls for it, will only help better the user experience while chatting with the bot. So, look into these options if you want to boost your conversion rates with a chatbot.
Repeat customers are the bread and butter of any e-commerce website, and so, attracting them with offers is key to your business strategy. You would want to integrate your chatbot in it, as it can use these offers to attract the repeating customer or a person just window-shopping online to make them do a purchase. Imagine the conversions with this strategy; must be through the roof.
