Imagine your sales copies interacting with your potential customers, understanding their needs, and guiding them with the necessary material to convert them- all without you. That’s exactly what a chatbot does! The ecommerce market will almost double from USD 3.53 trillion in 2019 to USD 6.54 trillion in 2022. That means a lot more sales, customers, and leads. Since Facebook introduced messenger ads, chatbot marketing is becoming a disruptive factor, especially for ecommerce stores. Today, I will share four chatbot marketing hacks that will help skyrocket your ecommerce sales. Let’s get started.
What Is Chatbot Marketing? How It Benefits Ecommerce Stores
A chatbot is a software package that interacts with users and helps fulfill their needs. It can be classified as either AI-based (intelligent) or scripted (rule-based), depending on its interaction capabilities. You can also classify them as support bots, skill bots, transactional bots, and personal assistants. Chatbot marketing is the use of chatbots for driving sales.
Here, we will focus on conversational bots. They use neural networks and can have ‘bot personalities.’ Gone are the days when their application was limited to answering FAQs. Businesses can now use chatbots at every stage of their sales funnel and exploit their traffic better.
For an ecommerce website with a 4% conversion rate, 96% of their traffic is willing to know about their business and exit without any meaningful transaction. That’s a lot of money left on the table. Here’s exactly where chatbot marketing turns the tables for you.
Marcin Stoll, Head of Product at Tidio, finds that chatbot marketing and ecommerce is a match made in heaven. He expects the chatbot market size to grow to $9.4 billion by 2024 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7 percent. So what is propelling this growth?
The short answer is 24×7 availability, handling numerous prospects at a time, and cost-effectiveness. But as a business, chatbot marketing offers a pressure-free and personalized user experience. Also, it gives an indoor shopping experience right from mobile screens. People with disabilities may find it more convenient to interact with non-human assistants, and chatbot marketing can significantly improve their customer journey.
I interacted with Andrew Fox, CEO at Aim Workout, and he shared something very interesting for business. “Those with Alzheimer’s can still be conversational, but making conversation with real people can be difficult because of poor recollection and subject changes as a result of short-term memory loss. They can speak with the chatbot, have conversation depending on what they are currently talking about, but the subject changes are also stored. The chat log can be stored and viewed by others so that they can see the frequency of these changes and could potentially be used to help them better.”
Let us now see how you can leverage them apart from regular user cases.
The Top 4 Underrated Chatbot Marketing Hacks for Ecommerce Websites
In this section, I will share four chatbot marketing hacks that can reinvent your customer journey. We will focus on innovative ways of engaging your traffic:
1. Running Real-Time Broadcasts
If you are willing to run a flash sale, you can now think beyond emails and push notifications. You can broadcast notifications within Facebook and Instagram Messenger using chatbots. This gives greater visibility over open rates, and you can enable them to make purchases right away.
Your customers can inquire regarding the offer on a real-time basis and get a seamless, personalized user experience. You need to define the audience segments, tags and offer details while creating the bot.
You can run real-time broadcasts for items that need to clear off for inventory management reasons. You can also use it if you find that a particular buzzword related to your products starts trending. I find that they can help supplement your scheduled broadcasts if they don’t perform up to your expectations.
2. Replace Cookies as Your Prime Tool for Personalization
We all know that third-party cookies are no longer useful, but you shouldn’t completely rely on alternatives like Privacy Sandbox, social media marketing, and email marketing. You can use chatbots to help your users navigate through your website, execute tasks like providing order delivery status, and confirm products’ availability.
During those interactions, you can build their customer profiles and learn about their preferences more reliably. You can also always take the opportunity to sell, upsell, and cross-sell your products during these interactions. Thus, chatbot marketing can become your combined avenue for generating customer behavior insights and selling your products.
With first-party cookies, you can only track user behavior, while chatbots allow you to ask specific questions and learn reactions to different stimuli.
3. Sending Recurring Purchase Lifecycle Offers In DMs
Customers periodically buy many items like home supplies, groceries, and stationary. Emails are a great way to remind your customers to replenish their supplies, but chatbot marketing can take it to a new level.
People spend more time on social media as compared to their mailboxes. You can DM them a list of the items they regularly purchase and cross-sell/upsell items related to nearby events/festivities.
Because users find social media a place for connecting with their friends, family, and colleagues, they are more likely to consider your recommendations. Despite extensive effort, people value their friends’ recommendations above all other efforts.
Approaching your customers on a social media app significantly increases your chances of conversion. In the case of an email, they can surf to find other suppliers, but the FOMO-obsessed social media platforms will pave the way for instant purchases.
4. Generating Social Proof Using Chatbots
Did you know that 88% of customers consider user reviews at par with personal recommendations and see around ten reviews without buying? This is another great reason for using chatbot marketing because you can ask for customer reviews after purchase.
Here too, the same logic applies. When the chatbot asks for a review, the user will consider it similar to a person asking them for their opinions and you will get more customer reviews as compared to self-initiated ones or through emails. Also, you can expect more detailed answers and use contextual questions for getting deeper insights.
Wrapping Up
As far as chatbot marketing is concerned, we are only witnessing the beginning phase. Ecommerce will be its biggest beneficiary, and we can also expect AR/VR Chatbots to take over the market in the future. No matter if it is increasing average order value, customer lifetime value, or simplifying the checkout process, chatbots are exceptionally user-friendly and generate the best opportunities for ecommerce stores. I hope you find this post insightful for your ecommerce website.
