How do Chatbots Optimize my eCommerce Marketing Funnel?

Conversational shopping is the next big thing in eCommerce. In fact, eCommerce is growing year by year, but the COVID-19 pandemic drove eCommerce usage up by 9.5%, or more than $790 billion. With increased consumer acceptance of online shopping, marketing experts predict eCommerce will continue to grow 10% each year.

With this influx of new digital customers, how can forward-thinking enterprises ramp up their use of personalized digital marketing and commerce? Conversational shopping. Integrating conventional customer service with text messaging and online commerce is the key to happy, repeat customers who turn to your brand again and again.

Venture capitalist Henry Shi attests to the positive impact such technology can have on business. His company, SnapTravel, is an early adaptor of conversational shopping. Shi and his team have experienced $100 million in sales revenue over three years since implementing the technology.

What is conversational shopping or conversational commerce?

The answer depends a bit on who you are asking. Conversational commerce or conversational shopping gives your company the ability to connect with and have communications with customers, answer questions and have asynchronous dialogues, and offer and process commercial transactions. The conversational experience can be delivered to a potential customer via a chat app, a chatbot, a voice assistant, or through a messaging platform.

Conversational commerce or shopping is simply the convergence of integrating AI-powered chatbots into messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. It personalizes the shopping experience and makes it easy for customers to engage with a business despite the time or day of the week. It also allows the business to message customers with updates, promotions, satisfaction surveys, and more.

What is an eCommerce chatbot?

A chatbot is an automated computer program that simulates human interactions. eCommerce chatbots allow your company to engage with new and existing customers, as well as prospects, anytime. This is becoming increasingly important as 80% of customers now consider the experience a company provides to be as important as its products and services. And 66% expect a company to understand their needs and expectations.

Chatbots are a game-changer for retail, banking, airlines, telecom, media, and utilities, offering consumers on-demand and real-time engagement with a business via their smart device of choice. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that chatbots would completely replace customer service agents within a decade.

How do chatbots optimize my eCommerce marketing funnel?

Chatbots can impact all aspects marketing/sales funnel: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Here are just a few examples:

  • Chatbots engage a visitor with conversation, information, and recommendations. Chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand text or vocal communication. The result is a positive customer experience, which leads to brand loyalty.

  • A potential customer’s interest is piqued when they have a personal experience without waiting 15 minutes on the phone to speak to a live agent. Chatbots don’t take lunch hours, breaks, weekends, or holidays. They allow a more flexible, convenient experience for the end-user.

  • Because chatbots gather data on a visitor’s behavior, they increase sales efficiency. They then analyze data and refine the algorithms.

  • Efficient chatbots can gently remind customers to take action on making a repeat purchase, recovering an abandoned shopping cart, or renewing a subscription.

 

Can chatbots gather data to personalize eCommerce on social media?

Chatbots are all about the data. The bot's AI quickly analyzes a person’s questions and, if needed, can transfer them to a live agent. Chatbots aggregate data, recording everything about each transaction and conversation. Chatbots use machine learning to understand historical data and learn from new data. Facebook for Business claims that 69% of U.S. consumers say C2B messaging helps build trust and customer retention. Used on messaging apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, or Slack, chatbots are disrupting the typical commerce flow for both large and small enterprises.

Are chatbots a good enterprise eCommerce solution?

Absolutely. There are many ways to pull in chatbots for your enterprise. Chatbots, integrated strategically in the customer journey, help brands increase customer engagement, brand loyalty, provide support and service through an ultra-convenient channel, and grow revenue through a wide variety of methods.

Chatbots allow retailers to offer customers what they want 24/7, enhancing the user experience and deepening brand loyalty. Developers on the back-end can analyze this data to refine the bot's performance, and the marketing and sales teams can understand customer preferences better because of the data. All of this leads to enhanced personalization on both social media and eCommerce pages.

What is conversational AI?

Conversational AI works behind the scenes with automated messaging and voice apps with a host of other technologies—natural language processing, machine learning and intelligent analysis—to understand and converse with you in a way that mimics human interaction.

A chatbot can, but doesn’t have to, work with AI. Chatbots that do offer customers a smoother, more nuanced experience. Conversational AI drives enhanced customer experiences across many types of business as consumers use the chat apps they love.

Activate with Clickatell.

Clickatell delivers what you need to open conversational commerce as a sales and service channel. Our solutions let you use popular chat apps to take orders, upsell, and promote products. And for service? We help you create a self-service option that customers will like because it saves them time. Contact us to discover how easy it is to use chat to build revenue and delight customers.

 

 

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