How to increase sales using chatbots?

The global chatbot market is projected to hit the 10.5 bn USD mark by 2026 and demonstrate a CAGR of 23.5%. 

Apart from being the fastest-growing brand communication channel, chatbots have interacted with 67% of global consumers over the last 12 months. 

The latest technology advancements and innovations in conversational AI have transformed the way businesses can use chatbots for sales. Chatbots can now offer a highly personalized product recommendation experience right inside the chat window. They can engage customers with intelligent and context-relevant communication and also offer basic query resolution, keeping the chat history in mind. Also, they can collect leads, offer valid responses, and accomplish the front desk tasks effortlessly. 

So, how do chatbots increase sales, and what are some of the best ways to use them for boosting your sales?

Below, we explore the answers to these questions and discuss chatbots at length. 

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What Are Chatbots?

Chatbots are software applications powered by conversational AI and are used by IT company or others to communicate with customers without human supervision. Another type of AI-powered chatbot — a voicebot —is also a type of chatbot usually used in contact centers for navigating interactive voice responses. They derive their intelligence from machine learning programs and can be trained with initial data to understand human behaviour and different forms of speech. The more they train with diverse data sets, the more effective and natural their communication capabilities become.

As technological advancements are now integrating Big Data analytics, AI, ML, etc., chatbots are becoming increasingly advanced and skilled. 

This is why businesses across the globe are using them to deliver fast and reliable customer services 24X7X365. As the chatbots are always online, they can reduce the query resolution time by 60% and improve the customer service standards. 

But how do chatbots increase sales? Let us find out!

Key Features of Chatbots That Help in Increasing Sales

Chatbots increase sales by targeting three core sales drivers - lead capturing, guiding the prospects, and human-like conversations. 

Chatbots can proactively send welcome messages and lead capturing communication to the visitors as soon as they land on your webpage. Once they have visitors' attention, they can start communicating in a human-like manner and offer a guided visitor experience. 

This becomes extremely crucial in case the visitors are looking for a product that interests them, as the bot can also display relevant information and sources of information in the chat window itself. 

Given below, is a screenshot of a chatbot used by Sephora, offering a highly engaging experience to a customer:

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Let us take a closer look at the key functionalities of a chatbot to learn more about their benefits in the sales sector. 

1. 24*7 Customer Support

Chatbots never fall sick or take leaves. They never have to go on vacation or celebrate the Holidays with their families. They are constantly online, 24X7 and throughout the year. Hence, they can always serve your customers, no matter what time of the day it is and what day of the year it is!

Constant availability is the prerequisite for delivering excellent customer service in this post-pandemic era, where customer interests are getting more volatile and businesses are leaps and bounds to retain them.

Chatbots allow you to deliver a valid and smart response to your customers, and can also direct them to the self-service resources you have. 

Take a look at the following screenshot that shows how beautifully chatbots can overtake the customer support responsibilities and offer a hand of help during the busy seasons, such as holidays:

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2. Fully Automated

Every sales process has the following mandatory steps:

• Capturing leads
• Accepting orders 
• Processing prospect and customer data
• Processing and tracking payments
• Post-sales customer engagement
• Customer support

Now, if you invest in the right chatbot, you can automate the majority of these steps, depending on the bot's capabilities. 

And, this automation can fuel your sales numbers, improve your sales team productivity and steer your business towards sustainable growth. 

Chatbots are excellent when it comes to learning from new data and enhancing their skills based on the new learnings. Hence, they bring the advantage of consistent improvement and automation to their sales operations.

3. Break the Language Barrier

You can configure the chatbots to deliver customer support in different languages and even the vernacular language. They don’t need months to master a language as their capabilities stem from code.

An example is shown below:

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The multilingual chatbots can help you scale your customer experiences globally and troubleshoot customer problems in a language they are most comfortable with. What makes the entire experience so powerful is the seamless switching between languages a chatbot can accomplish to personalize the communication experience. 

4. Multi-Channel Communication

90% of customers expect seamless and effortless interactions with brands across multiple channels and 49% of them buy every week from their favourite omnichannel brands (Source). 

These stats speak volumes about the power of multichannel communication.

You can configure your chatbots to gather customer communication from multiple channels and send bulk notifications and messages with just one click. You can also train the customer bots to offer personalized customer support and improved lead nurturing campaigns, based on chat history, which ultimately boost sales. 

How to Increase Sales Using Chatbots?

Now that we have learned the various benefits of using chatbots, let us move on and find the answer to the question - How do chatbots increase sales?

1. Converting Visitors Into Leads

Chatbots can automatically get your customers on board with welcome greetings and proactive communication within the first few seconds. As soon as a visitor lands on your website, a chatbot can offer a menu-based chat, from where the customers can pick the relevant options.

This amplifies your leads and also helps in offering guided customer experiences to the visitors. 

Take a look at how convincing and engaging the proactive bot messages can be:

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2. Chatbots for Selling

Nothing and no human can beat chatbots when it comes to offering a wholesome selling experience. The bots are always ready with the latest inventory information, product upgrades, stock details, and all the product-related data that comes in handy in selling.

They don't have to put the customers on hold or check the information in the database to offer a valid and rich response. If you want to integrate chatbots into your business, you can use a chat SDK (Software Development Kit) to make the process easier and faster.

An excellent example is shared below:

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3. Increasing Customer Engagement

Chatbots can always serve information-rich responses with much alacrity and confidence and that too in multiple languages. They can facilitate instant transactions and present highly personalized product recommendations by focusing on the crucial words in customer chat. 

Further, they can accomplish all this in a time frame that is way shorter than the one offered by a human agent. Based on every interaction, they can learn, enhance their understanding of the customers and get feedback like no other CTAs can match. 

4. Send Reminders to Complete Purchase

Chatbots can also be configured to send automated alerts reminders to the customers that leave their populated carts without making payments. To make the entire process more engaging, you can configure the chatbots to send personalized discounts and offers as well.

Apart from cart abandonment, you can also use chatbots for customer retargeting, as shown below:

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5. Chatbots for FAQs

You can connect the chatbots with your organizational resources, such as knowledge base, and train them for using canned responses for answering FAQs.

This will also reduce the burden on your support staff as they don't have to answer repetitive queries. Using chatbots for FAQs will definitely help you improve your workplace productivity. 

This feature makes chatbots a relevant and well-defined fit for SMEs that don't wish to invest in a full-fledged support team.

Next, we share three amazing chatbot tools that you can easily get started with.

3 Chatbot Tools for Increasing Sales

1. ProProfs Chatbot

ProProfs ChatBot allows you to create and configure chatbots with ease. You can either build a bot from scratch or use the in-built templates for delivering the desired customer service capabilities. 

You can create chatbots to:

• Book appointments
• Increase your sales
• Automate support, lead generation, and qualification
  

2. Intercom Chatbot

Intercom is a smart tool for live chat for Shopify stores. It encourages repeat customers to continue shopping with targeted emails and boosts your sales.

It comes with awesome business management capabilities, such as:

• Live chat
• Apps
• Bots
• Product tours, messages, email, etc. 
  

3. Livechat Bot

Livechat bot allows you to create chatbots with templates and absolutely no coding skills required. You can create chatbots for lead generation, FAQ, appointments, and after-hours. You can track goals, organize and close chats, and create help tickets as well. 

Energize Your Sales and Elevate Your Customer Experience: Get Started With Chatbots

Chatbots take over the basic support responsibilities as well as the sales agent functionalities. Be it lead gathering, prospecting, lead nurturing, or delivering guided sales experiences, chatbots can deliver all these functionalities, right inside the chatbot window!

Chatbots not only enhance the overall customer experience but also add more value to your interactions. 

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Written by Irov Vaul

Irov is a content marketing specialist, demand generation enthusiast, and team player who is currently working with Linkoholics. He helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. When he is not working he likes playing video games on his PS4.