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How Chatbots Can Help Your Business Increase Sales

With research in machine learning being especially fruitful this year, more and more businesses are finding ways to leverage the emerging technology to complement their operations. Chatbots are just one machine learning powered tool that’s evidently growing in popularity and hype. In the past, Chatbots were one-dimensional and could only respond to very specific messages sent from users. Whenever a customer had a question or concern that the chatbot wasn’t familiar with, it was useless.

Recent advancements now allow chatbots to be more responsive, gather data, and have seamless conversations. These advancements in complexity simultaneously have turned chatbots into a more diverse tool with many potential applications. One exciting application for chatbot technology is also one of the most grueling and difficult aspects of running a business; sales. How do chatbots help with sales? Read on.

Use Chatbots to Maintain Social Media Presence

Use Chatbots to Maintain Social Media Presence

This one might seem a bit obvious, but social media is a huge opportunity to leverage Chatbots for sales. With social media evidently being at its peak (Facebook passed 2 billion users this year), you’re likely to find your ideal customers on social media. In the case that you’re able to catch the attention of your potential customers on a given platform, they’re likely to look for a way to contact you by visiting your website/social media account.

Obviously, responding to dozens of customer messages each day on every social media account isn’t efficient. This is where Chatbots come in. Rather than having to respond to each and every customer, Chatbots automate that process. In a sense, Chatbots can do social media lead nurturing for you! In fact, you could use Chatbots for lead nurturing all across your funnel…

Use Chatbots to Nurture Users Through Sales Funnels

If you leverage Chatbots correctly, you could gradually gather customer information you need to create personalized messages that help guide users through their entire buying journey. When doing lead-nurturing campaigns, aggregate all of your customers’ information and conduct some split testing on your personalized messages.

The more information you can accumulate, the more personalized your customers’ journey can be. This system works even with relatively new visitors; especially if you’re gathering their information on a social media platform. Facebook, in particular, is a very data-rich platform that’s perfect for lead-nurturing and personalized messaging.

Use Chatbots for Data Gathering

Use Chatbots for Data Gathering

In the case that you’re not fortunate enough to have plenty of data at your disposal, you could also leverage Chatbots to gather data on potential customers. Usually, people are a little reluctant to giving their valuable information to people without a good incentive to do so. People also don’t like spending their time doing one-dimensional surveys. However, people do like talking about themselves.

Using chatbots is a “best of both worlds” solutions that comes off as a softer approach to gathering feedback from customers by naturally introducing questions in conversation. With the right tools, you can equip your chatbots with the tools they need to analyze feedback, locate trends, and ultimately translate that into decisions that can help optimize your sales methods, user experience, and just about anything else. From there, you could even build an entire inbound marketing strategy based on live, real-time information.

Use Chatbots for Message Notifications

Another way to use chatbots to boost sales is to occasionally send your customers messages (of all kinds). One way this could look in practice is to send website visitors greeting messages if it’s their first time visiting the website.

Use Chatbots for Message Notifications

For example, you could let them know that they could ask questions if they have any, right on the spot. You could even configure a chatbot to analyze user behavior and make decisions based on that. In the case that a website visitor seems to struggle with finding a particular page, your chatbot could send them a message asking them if they’re having trouble finding a page on your website.

Another use case would be if your chatbot notices that the same user has returned to your website or Facebook page a certain number of times without making a purchase. There are dozens of ways you could set up the chatbot to eventually lead to a sale. The possibilities here are endless.

Just as with any technology, if you’re creative enough, you can find practical uses for it. Although chatbots didn’t start out as sales tools, the technology is advancing enough to be used in many other ways. See if you can come up with other ways to make chatbots useful in your sales process!