How to Use Chatbots to Drive Conversions

Okay, I know what you might be thinking…”I have heard this chatbot buzzword being thrown around, do they really work?”

The short answer is yes, however, where most businesses fall short is not in the execution, but in the planning and next steps. Think of a restaurant that has no menu but guesses what people will like and after serving a random meal, they don’t ask the customer to pay.

A bit of a strange analogy, sure, however, what I am eluding to is that these businesses (not you, because you’re reading this) that implement random chatbots for the sake of it, don’t research how they can provide the greatest value to their customers and prospects and miss out on the best way to monetise it (the follow-up and nurturing process).

Also just to set the record straight, people really don’t mind if a chatbot is present on a website.

The main reasons why we all get irritated at them (myself included) is when they become invasive, irrelevant or don’t provide genuine value.

But how can you use chatbots to drive conversions on your website?

There are two main ways to do this. Either through customer service or marketing and sales. Through customer service, you are providing highly personalised service at scale to existing customers, with the objective of increasing lifetime value. With marketing and sales, you are providing highly relevant offers to prospects with the objective of gaining an opt-in or sale.

Your audience is happy to engage with a chatbot, as long as the experience is positive and relevant to them.‍

The two main functionalities of chatbots

Chatbots are primarily used for customer service or marketing & sales. Essentially, any time a representative of your company would typically interact with a customer online, you would be able to implement a chatbot.

A big misconception is that you need to sacrifice quality for quantity when it comes to interacting with customers in this setting. That is simply not true.

According to a 2020 study by Drift, Chatbots were the fastest growing communication channel used by brands in 2020. Customers and prospects don’t want to wait for an answer. They want answers now and in a setting that is minimally invasive where they can still multitask.

Furthermore, a study by Statista2 found that 33% of consumers found chatbots ‘very effective’ at resolving their issues. This coupled with the fact that chatbots have an almost 90% satisfaction rate (according to a study by Comm100) tells us that a majority of consumers believe chatbots add value to their experience.

At the end of the day, that’s what good marketing does. It adds value to your customer’s experience and in doing so, progresses your prospect along the buyer’s journey.

How you achieve this outcome does not matter, as long as it is sustainable and can be scaled.

So how do you get started with your own chatbot I hear you say? Well, I am glad you asked!

Half of the battle when creating a chatbot is finding the right tool that works for you from both usability and purpose standpoints.

Chatbot examples you can use for inspiration

Let’s look at a few examples of some of the best ways I have seen chatbots used which can hopefully spark a few ideas you can apply to your own business…

1) Business To Consumer Example – Marketing & Sales

Say you sell clothes online and have a website with product pages and a portal to purchase items. You could create a chatbot that simply answers questions regarding pricing or whether you have specific stock of an item. Aside from answering each of these questions, the chatbot could also suggest an additional item, thus upselling the customer & even adding products to their cart. This would all be done on one page in a conversation that takes less than a few minutes.

2) Business To Consumer Example – Customer Service

Staying with the same example, your customer is now waiting for their products to be delivered, however, they want to know the status of their order. Instead of your customer having to phone or email you, they can simply jump onto your website & start a conversation with your bot regarding their order. They simply put in their order details and boom! It can link to a tracking page or if it’s really crafty, can give a text update in the chat of the order details.

Customer service chatbots can save your team hundreds of hours a month.

3) Business To Business Example – Customer Service

Let’s use a software company as an example for this. If they are selling solutions to other businesses at scale, it can become a problem when trying to provide quick, reliable and valuable customer service at scale to all of their customers. Specifically, customers who have questions about how to use the software, want to find out ASAP how to get the most out of the platform. By utilising a chatbot that is connected to a Knowledge Hub (a collection of video and article tutorials), a customer can ask a question and the chatbot will sort through all of the resources to provide them with the most relevant documentation. All done within less than a couple of seconds.

4) Business To Consumer Example – Marketing & Sales

This is perhaps one of the best ways to grow your email list (if done right) through your website. Let’s take a financial services company that provides recommendations to individuals regarding ways they can invest their hard-earned money. There would be a wide range of topics that would be covered across their websites blogs & videos. An easy way to grow their email database would be to provide a high-value content offer that is contextually relevant to the topic the visitor is learning about. Whether it’s an eBook, webinar invite or guide, the chatbot can begin a conversation with the visitor, obtain their contact details and feed the data back into the CRM all within minutes.

Conclusion

While this isn’t the whole process covered end to end regarding how to set up a chatbot and automate all follow-up processes, this was perhaps the most important phase which is planning and discovering a compelling use case for your organisation.

Through determining whether you want to focus on customer service, converting warm prospects at the point of sale or lead generation, you can begin to write down any key scenarios and use cases in which you would be willing to invest in setting a chatbot up.

Remember though, you need to find a happy medium in which your customers/prospects and your business (in the form of saving time, money & resources) would all find value in the initiative.