Here below are my handpicked strategies to employ chatbots in boosting your company sales.
As per the statistics, 40% of the people from all age groups are using a chatbot for their online shopping. In contrast, only 0.5% of B2B companies trusted it in the past.
See, here is the opportunity for you to leverage the AI-powered functionalities of chatbot within your marketing strategies. Here below are my handpicked strategies to employ chatbots in boosting your company sales.
1. Provide Personalized Experience
The main purpose of a chatbot is to serve users 24*7 without any interruptions. Businesses also use it to deliver customized experiences by taking advantage of machine learning applications.
Based on the user’s previous inputs like search queries and behavioral patterns, the chatbot will directly ask questions related to what the user wants and this cuts the clutter of unnecessary communication. Also, this leads to reduced query resolution time and a higher probability of purchase.
Apart from that, you can set up the custom workflow in the chatbot based on your product features. This helps them to get dedicated answers depending on their requirements.
Universal Orlando Resort Bot is the perfect example of delivering a personalized experience and they consider it an integral part of their marketing plan. Nowadays, all the chatbots can do basic stuff like booking tickets, confirming reservations, delivering information about product features, etc. What differentiates the Universal bot is that it can inform the guests in real-time about waiting times of rides and the next available ride to help them plan better.
The GIF below depicts how it is done:
If you employ certain chatbot based growth hacking strategies with a focus on “personalized experience”, then it can create wonders as far as sales are concerned. There are multiple chatbot case studies out there from that you can take inspiration about scaling your business and marketing efforts.
2. Boosting Lead Generation
The primary function of a chatbot is to generate the lead and pass it on the most relevant ones to the sales team for further follow-up.
However, the methodology always remains the same and that won’t help you in boosting your leads. In terms of workflow and process, you need to cut the path taken by users to make them reach the status of “prospect” or “customer”.
For Example, Hipmunk is the platform for finding travel deals and booking flight tickets. They launched a chatbot to be built on slack, FB messenger and Skype.
1. Revenue models for bots and chatbots
2. Series of stories on AI, chatbots and how can they help businesses
3. Why Messenger is the Ideal Bot Platform for Now
4. What I learned in making three chatbots for small businesses
The interesting part is that they are not following the traditional way of asking questions about basic demographic traits. Instead, you just need to share your location and BOOM!
You get diverse travel deals to choose from before booking tickets. It is a cherry on top when you get an omnichannel experience. How? Well, it simultaneously lets you chat with a friend on FB and also plan your next trip.
3. Leverage Other Channels
Apart from doing internal changes to a chatbot, you can integrate it on different platforms for full coverage and maximizing the effectiveness of the same. Here are some of the channels/platforms you can leverage it.
When you have the subscribers list and active email marketing campaign, you just need to place chatbot Call To Action (CTA) at the end of an email to increase the website traffic.
Here also, you can prepare the separate campaign with the customized message to maintain the sync with CTA. If you have multiple running campaigns, then you can even use Mailchimp to automate it.
Another great platform to leverage it for marketing efforts. Below is a great example from Larry Kim (of Mobile Monkey) regarding the integration of organic posts with the messenger.
To describe it’s working, you just have to set up Facebook Post Auto Responder for your page using MobileMonkey. After this, whenever the user types a comment on the post, he will get an automated message in return. You can customize this message by sharing time-limited deals that will ultimately boost your sales.
Traditionally, we had email and text messages to send important information about the business. Getting tonnes of the same types of messages every day and minimum attention-seeking window, it’s not advisable to depend on these channels anymore.
You can set up a chatbot on the website for resolving user’s queries. With daily data collection and analysis, you can find out user’s requirements at a particular time of the day. Later, you can utilize this information to send push notifications to the user.
Here is one example of such push notification received by me from the Online Food Delivery Platform called Swiggy.
4. Martech Applications Integration
This strategy is most useful for marketing people who are working on various 3rd party applications. They can use the chatbot and integrate it with systems like Customer Relationship Management System (CRM), Content Management System (CMS), Business Intelligence (BI) software to enable smooth navigation.
With easy access to all the systems and overall view of user data, the team can better prepare marketing strategies and service users.
5. Showcase Your New Products And Services
Whenever you launch a new product or service, you need to share that information with users. For this also, you can leverage chatbot.
You don’t need to send the information to every user who lands on the website, as first-time visitors have no idea about your products.
For this, you can create one list of relevant users based on historical traffic data and send the necessary updates to them only.
As a result, instead of annoying your new users, delaying in notifying the existing users, and the possibility of your users getting to know from other sources can create your analytics complex could be managed well with the help of a chatbot and relevant CTA.
Doing this will speed up the lead generation process and shorten the sales cycle.
For example, GoPro — the renowned company that develops cutting edge next-generation camera, leveraged a chatbot that first showcases some cameras to users. Then it asks certain closed-ended questions to users and helps them decide the relevant camera based on needs and requirements.
Conclusion
It’s not possible to increase sales with the usage of just one strategy. You need to combine multiple above-mentioned strategies based on your business’s needs that ultimately fuel up your marketing efforts.
