How to Use Chatbots to Drive Sales and Engagement

Chatbots have made the lives of humans easier in so many ways and marketers are interested to know how they can increase the sales and engagement of their business with the help of these chatbots.

As the world is now massively depending on the usage of the internet for all of their tasks, it is becoming a challenge for humans to cater to all of the increased demand.

Chatbots and Emerging Trends:

Chatbots, also known as talkbot, chatterbot, Bot, or IM bot, are computerized robots that can make a conversation with a person using normal human language and a friendly tone.

These bots are making the lives of humans easy as you do not need to hire a team of representatives to answer to queries of people.

As people are becoming more familiar with online communications, they prefer to get a quicker response when they ask a query with any business. Digital marketing agencies are incorporating chatbot services to their customers as well.

Hence, chatbots are helping bridge the communication gap and giving answers as quickly as possible.

You can now set FAQs with a chatbot which can respond to the people and resolve their query without any human intervention.

Some of the key points to take into consideration regarding chatbots are:

• Analyze and understand the context of queries for better response
• Personalize the conversation to make the customer feel connected
• Engage with the human in real-time using chatbots

Examples of Chatbots Used By Popular Brands

Let’s have a look at a few famous brands using chatbots:

1. Lyft

Lyft, Inc. operates a mobile app, offering vehicles for hire and food delivery. With the help of Lyft’s chatbot on Facebook, you can request a ride from Lyft via chat or even voice. You can also ask for your rider’s information and location etc.

2.  Spotify

Spotify is an audio streaming and media services provider app. With the help of Spotify’s Facebook Messenger, you can search for, listen to, and share music. You can also filter music based on your mood and what you feel like listening to.

3.  Whole Foods

Whole Foods is an American multinational supermarket chain. The Whole Food chatbot helps you assist in cooking with different recipes. You can also send emojis for different responses and filter your search as well.

4. Sephora

Sephora is a retailer of personal care and beauty products present globally. Sephora uses a chatbot on Kik using which you can ask for desired makeup tutorials and relevant information.

5. MasterCard

MasterCard uses the Facebook Messenger bot which helps in checking on the transactions for the customers. You can check how much did you spend in June and also directly shop with authorized brands.

How to Use Chatbots to Drive Sales and Engagement

There are multiple ways chatbots are helping businesses improve. May it be a clothing brand, a vet, or an airline, every kind of business is benefitted from the chatbots. Let’s have a look at 6 ways through which chatbots are helping in during sales and engagement for businesses:

1. Gain Customer Insights

Identifying customers is essential to all businesses. The more you know about your customers, the better you can cater to them.

There are various ways that you can facilitate your customers if you know more about them. Through using chatbots you can collect relevant information that can be used to improve your marketing and sales strategies.

You can set up questions to know more about the customer’s interest. There are multiple ways to engage the audience and polls or surveys can be set up to gain useful information.

You can also set up user preferences and show customers the products they are interested in based on their answers. These customer insights will help you improve your strategies and marketing approaches.

2. Targeted and Personalized Experience

Chatbots are an excellent way to help you provide a personalized experience to your customers.

You are likely to engage more with a text that is especially for you as compared to the one that is sent to a whole list of people. Getting an email with your name mentioned feels better than an email with no name in it.

This is how you can use chatbots to target users in a personalized way and give them dedicated advice.

This way it won’t feel like the humans are talking to a robot. Everyone likes to have an organic conversation and now the chatbots have advanced to a level where it is hard for one to distinguish between a bot and a human.

3. Keep Customers Engaged For Long Periods of Time

Customer engagement is essential for every business and marketers to keep on improving strategies to increase customer engagement.

With the help of chatbots, you can increase customer engagement on your respective page or website.

The chatbots usually welcome the customer with a greeting message and ask them how they want to proceed.

This is a great way to make conversation and keep the customer on your website for a longer time.

You can also use a chatbot to schedule a meeting, arrange a call, add notes or reminders, etc. the possibilities are endless it depends on each business how they program it for their usage. The purpose of increasing engagement can easily be fulfilled using chatbots.

4.  Proactive Advertisement

With the help of technology, now the customers do not have to wait and find the contact us page to connect with a brand, rather, once they are on the page or website a chatbot is there to welcome them and is ready to assist.

This also helps your brand stand out amongst the rest as it is readily replying to conversations and resolving customer queries.

You can also advertise your other products or services through chatbot assistance. You can also use these bots to guide customers about the process to book your services.

For example, if you are providing carpet cleaning services, your customers should be able to book a service with the help of a chatbot within seconds. This is how operations are becoming efficient with the help of chatbots.

5. Provide 24×7 Supports

Another way that chatbot is helping businesses is by enabling them with 24/7 support. No matter what time of the day it is, your chatbot is there to help people with their queries. Not only is it responding to them but also helping them solve the issues.

This is an excellent way to go human-free from the customer service while giving 24-hour support to the customers.

Now people are comfortable asking questions from an official website at 3 am and are expecting an immediate reply as well.

Chatbots readily help the customer queries, provide them the required information and also redirect them to useful articles to help resolve issues.

This elaborate and direct communication with customers helps increase engagement as well as drive new customers.

6. Send High Quality Leads To Sales Instantly 

Through bots, you can not only target new potential leads but also redirect them into purchasing.

Whether your business is about selling a product(s) or giving services, through using chatbots you can easily fetch and collect useful information from customers and use it to increase your sales.

The user behaviors, patterns, and needs will help you understand better the customer which helps in achieving the goal of increasing sales.

Moreover, once a chatbot has identified a potential lead, it can then schedule a meeting or redirect to the sales team immediately which speeds up the process of turning a potential prospect into a client.

To Sum It Up

By using a chatbot, businesses are now accelerating their sales and reach. Not only chatbots help reduce the human resource burden but also help in collecting useful data that can help in data-driven decisions.

Technology is advancing every day and with the help of automated software businesses of all scales are now getting progressed.

With the usage of chatbots, you can engage and segment your visitors, drive sales and retarget the lost visitors.

Chatbots help in setting up meetings, assist the customers as well as help the customer representatives.

The work that was being done manually by humans is now automated with ease. There is a lot of scope for chatbots in the coming years.

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