How to Improve Conversion Rates on Using Chatbots

Improving conversion rates remains the number one goal for all online businesses. Taking care of the customer throughout the entire funnel is one of the commonly adopted tactics by these businesses. By now, you are probably aware that there are very specific methods you can use, depending on which stage the customer is at currently.

Today we are not here to discuss these methods. In fact, we are here to shine the light on just one method that can help you nurture leads and increase conversion rates – using chatbots. If we have your attention, here is how to improve conversion rates on using chatbots.

Automated Problem Solving

 To solve the problems, customers have to drop whatever they were doing, try to make contact with your customer support department, wait on hold, tell you their problem, and wait for the solution.

This process already consists of way too many time-consuming tasks. If you integrate a chatbot, you will delight your customers with an instant service. In fact, this is how chatbots are commonly advertised. But this way of solving problems only increases customer satisfaction and has very little to do with improving conversion rates.

Chatbots can be used to solve real-life problems for your customers. Make them interested in using your service, increase conversion rates and turn them into your loyal fans. The perfect example is the chatbot on the Hotels.com website. They decided to introduce a chatbot able to automatically solve problems for travel shoppers by making them easy to book hotels on the go.

The way they use a chatbot is quite brilliant. After the prospective customer engages the chatbot with a simple “Hi”, the conversation starts. During the conversation, a travel shopper will be asked about the city, date of arrival, number of guests, and length of stay.

The chatbot then lists possible arrangements for the travel shopper to choose from. This is a perfect example of how automated problem-solving leads to better conversion rates.

Lower Abandonment Rates

Did you know that almost 70% of online shopping carts get abandoned? Yeah, in fact, ecommerce businesses lose more than 75% of their sales due to the phenomena of cart abandonment. This definitely calls for some improvements, because the “Order Now” button should be the last action that customers have to take in the conversion funnel. All the actions that lead to this point are useless unless a conversion takes place.

Chatbots can be used for this purpose because they operate inside numerous messaging channels. Facebook Messenger, for instance, is used by 1.3 billion people and it offers 600% more engagement than emails. They provide businesses with a unique opportunity to be there for their customers throughout the entire shopping process, starting with product suggestion, and all the way to final purchase.

Recognizing that the complex needs of modern shoppers and the risk of cart abandonment, eBay was among the first to help the customers make the right purchasing decision. By being there for their customers during the entire shopping process, eBay has significantly decreased shopping cart abandonment rates and made shopping a personalized experience for their customers around the globe.

Upselling and Cross-selling

Increasing conversion rates throughout your upselling and cross-selling efforts is a daunting task. You need to know as much as you can about your customers’ online purchasing behavior, past purchases, current trends, which items are usually bought together, and so on.

The algorithms used for these purposes work perfectly fine, but they are not able to deliver custom-tailored options to a chat-like environment.

AI and machine learning are exactly the things that make chatbot technology particularly useful in this scenario. They are practically built to make upselling and cross-selling a personalized experience for each person in your customer base.

One of the early chatbot adopters is H&M, a global fashion company. They stepped up their upselling and cross-selling game by leveraging the chatbot’s ability to navigate customers through numerous outfit possibilities.

By adhering to customers’ purchasing desires and showing them how they can pair items to appear more stylish, H&M nailed chatbot usage. After the chatbot implementation, H&M launched ecommerce stores in South Korea and Canada. It’s safe to assume that they’ve had great results with their chatbot implementation.

Improved Customer Experience

The current era – the customer-centric era – puts customers in the central place. Everything you do has to make things better and easier for the customer. Devoting your time and resources to improving customer experience can help you increase conversions in many different ways.

Thanks to the technologies powering the chatbots, you’ll be able to provide a custom-tailored experience for each of your customers. By analyzing previous purchasing patterns and incorporating new data recovered through conversation, chatbots are able to read the customers’ minds.

Let’s see how this practice has affected 1-800-Flowers, a floral and gourmet foods gift retailer. By using NLP and machine learning, their chatbot provides not only a great conversational experience, but it also turns into a personal shopping assistant.

After asking questions regarding the occasion, intended audience, and event sentiment, 1-800-Flowers chatbot is able to suggest the best possible gifts for the customer in question. The slight increase in conversion rates resulted in $165.8 extra revenue in the first quarter of 2017.

Full Sales Through Bots

To put your business in a better position, you have to find a way to streamline your conversion efforts via multiple channels. The best case scenario – the channels preferred by your potential customers. After researching numerous chatbot platforms, I’ve discovered that apart from being a free chatbot platform, SnatchBot supports many different communication channels and has enabled in-bot payments.

Diversifying your efforts will result in better conversion rates. Supported by chatbots enabled to process online payments, your efforts will deliver even better results. The previous example can also be used here – 1-800-Flowers.

After implementing a chatbot, their report showed a 6.3% increase in total revenue. In addition, 70% of the customers started exclusively ordering through the chatbot.

Chatbot Provide Metrics

Every strategy with a goal to improve conversion rates has to be clearly established with easy-to-check KPIs. Since people try to find the solution to improving conversion rates by using several different methods, tracking KPIs can become a real nightmare. For instance, you will have to look at your email campaign, social media, PPC, and SEO KPIs to determine the best course of action.

With chatbots, tracking KPIs and making adjustments according to what you see is a streamlined activity. You can set your custom goals and track them in real-time.

For instance, you can see how many times chatbot showed a particular message, or how many times it was unable to process the customers’ input. Simply put, you have the opportunity to see exactly what’s going on and make the adjustments accordingly.

Adidas uses a chatbot to assess the engagement rate of their chatbot users by tracking the open rate of reminders and messages sent out to them.

Chatbots are set to become a vital part of any strategy with the goal to improve conversion rates. As you can see, there are already many companies in different industries that use them daily to achieve exactly this. The fact that we now have access to free resources for bot creation makes things even easier – you can find templates for various niches and start from there. Adding things you need, removing those you don’t and creating a perfect little bot for your situation.