As a consumer, you’ve likely engaged with chatbots in some capacity while shopping online. As a business owner or marketing manager, you may have even managed the development and deployment of a chatbot to your website. But are you getting as much value from it as your business can achieve from it?

With the way ecommerce is developing and how consumers’ needs and preferences are evolving, chatbots are fast becoming the future of marketing. Chatbots enable brands to warmly greet new visitors to their websites in an automated format while maintaining humanlike dialogue to open the door for interactive conversations.

Chatbot technology has come a very long way. Today, many chatbots are powered by AI to further enhance the shopping experience for consumers. They have become essential to digital marketing, and they help businesses achieve new levels of success. To that end, don’t wait until you need to have a chatbot on your site to get one installed. Lead your industry and start benefiting from chatbots.

How to use chatbots for marketing

Marketing is how relationships between brands and consumers develop. Marketing collateral, be it in the form of websites, social media posts, email notifications, and thought provoking content is often how consumers first learn about a new brand.

Chatbots help move people through the shopping journey by representing the brand in an automated function. Chatbots can warmly greet new entrants to the site and offer personalized shopping experiences with product recommendations tailored to unique shopper interests.

They also have the potential to massively increase onsite engagement, and they gather customer pain points in real-time conversations. This data can then be analyzed and leveraged by the customer service team to optimize their services to provide even greater shopping experiences for future consumers.

The top 10 marketing benefits of chatbots

So what exactly are the most significant marketing benefits derived from chatbots? Here’s a quick overview of why chatbots are important for the future of marketing.

#1 Chatbots are available 24/7

Customers expect instant answers and with an increasingly global online marketplace, they’ll engage with brands that can quickly provide those answers. Business hours are not a thing anymore, and great customer service means being there for your customer, on their terms and at their convenience. Chatbots enable 24/7 customer service for shoppers who can engage with your website from all corners of the world.

#2 Chatbots help your e-commerce business scale

Every business wants to grow but, remember, the more you grow, the more human resources you need. More growth is a direct result of more shoppers, and that means more questions for your customer support staff. If you get more questions, you need more people to answer these questions. This means you end up in an infinite loop of increasing the number of customer support agents. Your chatbot helps you avoid this dilemma by using technology to handle the front-line customer service requirements.

#3 Chatbots free up your human resources

Having chatbots available to field frequently asked questions enables customer service, marketing, and sales to scale faster and more sustainably. You can automate the repetitiveness of many of these enquiries through the chatbot and allow your human resources to focus on more strategic growth for the business.

#4 Chatbots future-proof your business

The reason businesses thrive is due to their willingness to adapt and experiment with new technologies. This is how you find out what works for you, what you can do to have a better offering than your competitors, and how to ultimately give your customers the journey they deserve. Chatbots are the future of marketing and soon most consumers will come to expect this technology on the sites they choose to shop. Stay ahead of the curve by getting a chatbot for your site today

#5 Chatbots are proactive

Chatbots have moved past the point of being rule-based FAQ knowledge bases. Today the technology leverages NLP and AI to get your customer to their goal as fast as possible. Chatbots can be programmed to respond to specific triggers and thus can say the right things at the right time. Because they are chatbots, consumers also don’t feel pressured to reciprocate as they would with a person on the other end; consumers then feel more comfortable interacting with a chatbot

#6 Chatbots give you helpful customer insights

Chatbots are the future of market research. They’re great for resolving customer issues, and they help you gain insights into how you can improve your products and services to further improve the customer experience with your brand. This is done through not only feedback from customers, but also being able to ask a customer why they removed a certain product from their cart, to getting them to leave a review of a product.

Chatbots are able to gather data from an unlimited number of interactions and present it to you in a way that gives you customer insights, which you can use to optimize your website and guide your business development.

#7 Chatbots capture more qualified leads

A chatbot is a great way for a curious customer to find out more. Talking to a chatbot has a low barrier to entry for learning more about your services and products, allowing you to deal with objections the customer may have. This will lead to more leads coming in, where you can set up the chatbot to funnel the customer to a meeting to learn more. Additionally, a chatbot can be used to qualify your leads, meaning that it can ask a set of questions that gives you insights into whether this is an interesting lead or not, what their pain points are and what timeline the customer is working with.

#8 Chatbots make it easy to expand to global markets

Going international brings a lot of challenges to companies in regards to presence in said market, meaning that you have to establish a channel for potential and existing customers to reach out. Chatbots can be programmed to cater to many different markets, allowing you to avoid hiring people to cover each target market. This allows you to easily test the waters in new markets, without having to make substantial investments in staff. Customers will also feel you are catering to their needs to a larger extent, and are more likely to return to your website again and again.

#9 Chatbots help you spend less and earn more

With a chatbot, you can employ one assistant (a digital one) that can cover up to 60% of your traffic. This means that you can save a huge chunk of your budget on having one employee who is never sick, never takes a holiday and works constantly. Since you can archive conversations within the chatbot’s database, you can increase your revenue by making better decisions with audience data to drive more qualified leads.

#10 Chatbots help you delivery customer satisfaction

The best use of chatbots is making your customers happy and improving overall satisfaction with your brand. No matter how small or big an e-commerce business you want, having satisfied and loyal customers is how you keep your business thriving for years to come.

Conclusion:

Chatbots are a great resource to help build brand awareness, nurture customer loyalty, and generate a more sustainable business. They can complement the work your employees carry out, improve your customers’ experience, cut your costs, increase your revenue, help you scale, make you more approachable, understand your customers better, and they’re very easy to implement.

Chatbots are the future of market research and customer engagement. The cost benefit analysis of a chatbot skews heavily in favour of the benefits, and you should implement a chatbot of your own across your website to further enhance the customer experience.