Wanna Increase Conversions? Try 'Chatting' up a Computer. Some 1.4 billion people a year interact with chatbots. Why aren't your customers among them?
By AJ Agrawal Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There are many ways to boost your conversion rates, and many brand managers turn to growth marketers to provide them with guidance. While it's always a good idea to seek the counsel of experts, you do yourself and your brand no favors by blindly allocating strategies without taking the time to understand the problem, and the best possible solutions.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
Familiarizing yourself with proven conversion-boosting strategies will not only help you make better immediate decisions and green-light new projects, but enable you to more effectively strategize long-term growth solutions to ensure that your company is on the cutting edge of conversion tactics your competitors may already be implementing.
Often, increases in conversion are the result of small tweaks and consistent A/B testing. Some brands are even able to generate more sales and subscriptions simply by testing out new color schemes, landing-page messaging and navigational layout. But if you've already exhausted site and advertising testing options to no avail, it may be time to consider leveraging the power of chatbots.
Even if you don't have any experience building chatbots for business, there are steps you can take to implement this technology soon. Before you do so, take a look at what chatbots can do for your business and how you can use them to increase conversions:
1. Improve your customer service.
When was the last time you interacted with an automated customer service system? There's a good chance that you've done this over the past few days or weeks (or maybe even today). After all, 80 percent of companies are already using chatbots or plan to do so over the next few years.
Today's customers expect some kind of automated step in the customer service process because so many organizations across industries have found that adding in an automated layer increases their ability to react to more user questions and point customers in the right directions.
Related: 10 Tips for Creating a Great Chatbot
Oftentimes, customers would rather turn to a chatbot solution instead of picking up the phone, dialing an 800 number and, potentially, remaining on hold for up to an hour. Chatbots offer something that even the most efficient employees can't: immediacy. If you don't have the manpower to provide personal customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can use chatbots to pick up the slack.
The most innovative businesses are now using chatbots, often to provide a better customer service experience. By adding a chatbot feature to your own site, you set your company up to respond faster to customer inquiries and, ultimately, drive more conversions because customers are not relegated to waiting hours, and possibly days, for human intervention.
2. Create custom scripts.
There is more to chatbots than meets the eye. Even if you don't like the idea of conversing with a chatbot, you should respect the way this technology works.
Just like a live customer service professional, chatbots are most successful when they offer customized answer. Simply serving website visitors a generic script, leading them to visit the FAQ page or to fill out a more in-depth contact form doesn't do the trick. Customers want to know that they are being heard, even when they are interacting with an automated system. So, use chatbots to provide customers with detailed information based on their questions and personal wants and needs.
The more information your chatbots collect, the easier it becomes to create custom scripts designed to increase conversions.
3. Alter your approach.
It doesn't matter how much time and money you put into increasing conversions; if you don't have something your audience wants you'll never reach your goals. Chatbots can help you better understand your target audience. For instance, you can program this technology to monitor data and track purchase patterns.
This type of information tells you what your audience members are like and what they dislike, and how to alter your approach in the future. It also allows you to adjust your chatbot scripts to provide better service.
Did you know that approximately 1.4 billion people per year interact with chatbots? That's a huge number that will only continue to grow in the years to come. If you want to increase conversions, you need to implement this technology on your website.
Related: Enterprise Chatbots Platforms and the Future of Work
Chatbots aren't a magic pill, but they can be one of the many things you do to increase conversions. Consider checking out this strategy today.
