Higher Engagement And Conversions with Chatbots

You have no problem getting people to come to your site. You’ve worked hard to make that happen. You’ve optimized your content as Google says you should. You’re active on social media, and your ad campaigns are right on track. The only problem is that all of this traffic isn’t garnering much in the way engagement or conversions.

It turns out that your solution may be within a fairly new piece of technology. Many brands are using chatbots to boost engagement and generate more conversions. One example of this is Taco Bell’s TacoBot. Still in the testing phase, TacoBot runs on the slack messaging platform and allows customers to place and customize orders by interacting with an artificial intelligence driven chatbot. When it’s released, Taco Bell hopes it will be a fun and engaging way to get customers to place orders and seek out future engagement.

Chatbots Offer an Unobtrusive Browsing Experience

Headlines, background videos, trust badges, social share buttons, content, popups and more; Landing pages can get very busy. Worse, every tweak you make needs to be tested. By using a chatbot, you can create engagement opportunities without adding another element to your landing page.

Rather than cluttering things up and making the browsing experience even busier than it already is, your chatbot can simply wait in the corner of the page with a simple message that it’s there to help whenever it’s needed. Even better, the chatbot may be able to replace some of the content that could be cluttering up your landing pages.

Chatbots Can be Used as an Alternate To The FAQ Page

FAQ pages are great by no means. They’re a one stop shop where customers can find answers to a large number of the questions they might have about your products, services, and policies. If a customer surfs into your home page and is simply browsing your site and they find your FAQ page, that’s great. It increases time on site, and educates your customer.

The problem is that you may not want visitors veering away from landing pages, order forms, or subscription forms to find answers to their questions. This is where a chatbot can help. Bots can be fed information from your knowledge base. They can then use that information to answer questions, provide instructions, even advise customers. The key here is to test your page speed after you implement the bot, along with engagement rates and time on website to gain additional ranking benefits.  

You Can Infuse a Chatbot With Your Brand’s Personality

One of the reasons that the impending release of TacoBot is creating such buzz is that it isn’t simply a bot that takes orders and answers questions. It has a personality. It interacts with customers using natural language, and the words and phrases it chooses reflect what you would see on the company website. In other words, it speaks the branding language very well.

Using a chatbot can be an engaging way to enhance your branding and add on to the storytelling that you are already using to build relationships with your customers and create conversions. For example, you can train your bot to have the personality you want by tweaking its language, voice, and vocabulary.

Chatbots Can Inform Visitors About Special Offers

When bots are used effectively, they can engage with customers naturally. This makes the chatbot an ideal tool for letting customers know about special offers, upgrades, even upcoming events. The reason this works is that customers are interacting with the chatbot by choice. This means that suggestions and information about sales and other offers don’t seem as intrusive.

It should also be noted that offloading these tasks to a chatbot can improve page load times. Popups take up a lot of bandwidth, and finding more economical ways to get the most performance possible and measure performance is key.

Instead, these efforts simply feel natural and conversational. Imagine visiting a website and being immediately hit with a popup touting some ‘Limited Time Offer!’. If you’re like most people, chances are you couldn’t exit out of that quickly enough. Now, imagine an interaction with a chatbot that looks like this.

• Chatbot: I see you’re looking at suitcases. How can I help?
• Customer: I need a bag for a flight from St. Louis to Sacramento
• Chatbot: Sacramento is beautiful this time of year. Is this for carry on or will you be checking your luggage? Also is it okay if I ask which airline you are using?
• Customer: Carry on. Southwest.
• Chatbot: Great! It looks like Airliner 6000 tote meets all of Southwest’s dimension requirements.
• Customer: I want to order that.
• Chatbot: I will place your order for you. Is your account information still up to date?
• Customer: Yes
• Chatbot: Would you be interested in buying another, larger bag for a future trip? You can get 20% off of this order if you add the Airliner 9000.

Some of the biggest brands in the world are implementing chatbots to improve customer experience.  It is clear that chatbots can be used to create engagement and push conversions where other approaches may feel less effective, even intrusive. They can also be used to build relationships.