eCommerce is one of the most competitive industries at present. It demands you to maintain the uninterrupted flow of services 24×7 and ensure you quickly fulfill customer demands.
If you’re an eCommerce website owner, you know that it’s easier said than done. You need extra resources at disposal who can take over when your current staff ends their shift and heads home, which requires significant investments. So, what to do?
Many eCommerce owners realized the same thing. Hence they approach companies for eCommerce development to automate some of the aspects of their eCommerce website, such as customer support with chatbots. The result: less involvement of manual resources, more customer-centric experiences, and increased sales. Some have even witnessed a significant increase in lead generation. According to an October 2022 US survey, 26% of B2B marketers using chatbots in their marketing programs witnessed 10-20% increase in lead generation volumes.
10 Ways eCommerce Chatbots can Boost Your Sales and Generate More Leads
1. eCommerce Chatbots provide fast, reliable and cost-effective customer support
In the eCommerce landscape, customers expect you to be available 24×7 and quickly respond to their queries. If you can’t do that, they quickly jump ship and you lose sales and revenue to competitors.
eCommerce chatbots solve this problem by offering instant support to customers. They quickly answer their queries and suggest products based on their requirements. If they can’t do that, they transfer your query to a live chat agent. This way, a customer remains satisfied and doesn’t leave your website without buying the product or waiting for the live chat agent to further handle their concerns.
eCommerce chatbots also clear the objects buyers might encounter while making a purchase by offering quick responses to their questions, quickly providing product overviews, and informing them about the offers and benefits of buying the products instantly.
2. eCommerce chatbots personalize product recommendations based on user journey
Everyone loves a personalized shopping experience. So, when you recommend products they like, there are greater chances that they would buy them. For example, I love reading horror novels. Whenever I see one while shopping on Amazon, I at least check it out and even buy it if I find it intriguing.
So, by personalizing your product recommendations, you can save their time and entice them to buy. This way, you can boost your engagement rate and increase your sales.
3. eCommerce chatbots give you access to real-time customer insights
Insights matter a lot in eCommerce, especially the one you gather in real-time. They help you make informed decisions to optimize the user journey, reduce operation costs, and maximize the efficiency of your eCommerce store.
Chatbots help you gather real-time customer insights by recording every customer interaction. This way, you know what products are in demand, what are the common concerns, and what they feel about your website. Then, you can use this data to personalize product recommendations and improve your website journey.
4. eCommerce chatbots help customer support executives focus on complex queries
eCommerce websites receive so many queries that it becomes impossible for customer support agents to handle them all. Sometimes, they’re so busy handling common customer questions that they miss out on actual queries and high-ticket sales.
Chatbots can handle 80% of repetitive customer queries, leaving customer support executives with enough time to handle complex customer queries on priority. This way, you can win more customers while reducing the operation cost significantly.
5. eCommerce chatbots allow customers to purchase across multiple channels
Customers don’t just rely on eCommerce websites for shopping these days. Instead, they are active on many channels like social media, emails, voice assistants, etc. Moreover, they want their journey to be smooth, i.e., they don’t want to switch across platforms. Instead, they want to complete the purchase from the platform they’re active on.
Hence, to successfully convert customers, you have to meet them where they are. It means if they’re on Instagram, you need to showcase the products there so that they purchase from there. Otherwise, they would buy from somewhere else and you would miss out on sales.
By deploying chatbots on social media platforms, WhatsApp, telegram, email, and other touchpoints, you can ensure this doesn’t happen and customers directly buy from you there.
6. eCommerce chatbots act as the perfect knowledgebase
You can also use eCommerce chatbots to educate customers with necessary information about your product. For example, when they search for product queries, the chatbot can act as the single source of touch and offer all the information. It will arrest all the objections customers might have about your product and simplify the buying process.
The result: You would have a significant boost in the engagement rate and your product sales.
7. eCommerce chatbots can significantly reduce cart abandonment rates
Customers do two things when they land on an eCommerce website and spot their favourite products: either they make an instant purchase or they mark them for later. Some may come back in a week or two, there are a few who forget about it. So, the products sit there in the cold state for months and you lose millions in potential sales.
eCommerce chatbots are changing this practice. Whenever a customer marks products but doesn’t come back to buy, eCommerce chatbots send personalized reminders, asking them to revisit their product selection. This way, you don’t lose sales and the customer remains satisfied.
8. eCommerce chatbots drive email marketing and lead generation
Email marketing campaigns can drive traffic on your eCommerce website. But triggering them manually can be taxing. eCommerce chatbots solve this problem by triggering automated email sequences. By automating your email campaigns, you can save a lot of human efforts.
eCommerce chatbots can also drive your lead generation efforts by collecting lead information from multiple ways, such as capturing data directly in the conversation flow or allowing contacts to fill forms natively in the chatbot itself.
9. Chatbots can help you gather valuable customer feedback
Customer feedback is crucial in eCommerce. It helps you optimize your website and grow. But gathering customer feedback is a time-consuming task. Also, it’s not cost effective in a long run. It’s because if customers don’t find your product up to the mark, they leave bad reviews, which hurt business.
eCommerce chatbots can help you gather valuable customer feedback via reviews and web forms. Even if a customer leaves a bad review, they assure the issue has been transferred to the concerned team. This way, you can still assure that the customer doesn’t leave dissatisfied and offended.
10. eCommerce Chatbots can engage customers through interactive content and gamification
There’s so much competition in the eCommerce industry that traditional campaigns would no longer cut off. Instead, you would have to look for innovative ways to engage users.
eCommerce chatbots can help you engage customers through interactive polls, quizzes, and gamified experiences. As a result, users feel more engaged and they spend more time and money on your eCommerce website.
A popular example of an eCommerce website leveraging chatbots for interactive content and quizzes is Amazon. They engage customers through Alexa quizzes, spin the wheel games, polls, and many other ways. Then based on the collected data, they offer personalized product recommendations.
This approach has resulted in Amazon becoming an eCommerce platform doing multi-billion business and becoming a household name.
eCommerce Chatbots can Add Value to Your eCommerce Business
Customers leave an eCommerce website because they don’t get instant answers to their queries. Chatbots solve this problem by offering them instant support, quickly answering their concerns, suggesting products they like, and engaging them through targeted marketing efforts.
While integrating an eCommerce chatbot on an eCommerce website, ensure that you choose the right type of chatbot that solves your business requirements. Also, ensure you measure the success of integrating these bots on your eCommerce website with metrics like number of users, percentage of engaged users, total new users, frequent bot messages, total conversions, and user satisfaction. It would help you see if your efforts paid off or not.
