Chatbots 101: Get Started And Convert Visitors Into Customers

We know that the idea of chatbots can be a little intimidating. After all, while some robots warm our hearts (looking at you Iron Giant), others – well, they kind of freak us out. But the truth is, robots aren’t here to take over the world. They are here to make life easier. 

Although your website may have all the information your customers need, today’s busy customers do not want to find information or solutions. Rather than wasting valuable time-consuming searches, they want a magical button. A button that they can press and talk to and that will easily solve all of your questions and problems.

Well, that’s where chatbots come in.

Speaking of which, we wrote down some tricks that will not only help you generate more leads but also improve the quality of leads significantly.

Set Relevant Triggers

It is common for users to browse a website and then close the tab or move on to something else. This gives you only a few seconds to grab the attention of your visitors and turn them into loyal customers. So, what is the best way to use this time to your advantage?

The answer is by positioning your chatbot on different pages (but the right locations). You can engage your visitors with personalized suggestions and offers while they are viewing items on your site. For example, if a user is looking for sneakers on your website, the bot could ask relevant questions to learn more about their preferences while they are browsing.

However, remember that you don’t want to be too nosy or spammy. Several websites repeatedly bombard customers with messages, which is quite irritating when someone is trying to learn more about a product on a site.

You should refrain from aimlessly suggesting products to your visitors. Instead, set intelligent triggers to ask them if they need help at various stages of their customer journey. In case they respond, you can follow up with a link to the product or service they need.

Make Your Chatbot More Human

Agents with personable, empathetic personalities can do a lot to improve customer service – the same could be said about chatbots. 

When you design your chatbot, give it a personality that fits with your brand and make sure it’s intelligent enough to hold its own during conversations. Chatbots that come across as robotic or repeatedly state “I don’t understand” won’t live up to expectations and can dissuade customers from using your chatbot again, defeating the purpose of your implementation. 

Think about how your best human agent would respond, and try to emulate that experience.

You can also take personalization up a notch by giving your chatbot additional humanizing aspects, like a name or even an avatar – just never pretend your bot is human – customers hate that. Make it clear from the start they’re talking to a chatbot.

A piece of advice? Remember to use emojis, gifs, and memes to humanize conversations.

Add Relevant CTAs (to Chatbots)

In the age of reducing attention spans, a clear and concise Call to Action (CTA) is imperative to the effectiveness of your chatbot. 

For example, if you see a customer leaving your website, your bot can be trained to send an automatic message with an actionable button that reads ‘Get Help Now’ or ‘Look At These Alternate Products’. This will urge the customer to interact with your chatbot or look at other options matching their search, increasing the chances of conversion.

There are various types of CTAs you can create, depending on the action you wish to initiate. Offering your customers ‘Free Trial’ or the opportunity to ‘Schedule a Demo’ can significantly boost your conversion rate. 

Of course, to determine which message works best for your company, perform continuous A/B testing on your CTAs to discover the ones that lead to maximum conversion. 

Also, remember to make all your buttons mobile-friendly, which is where most of your customers interact with you.

Employ Chatbots in Local Language for Better Engagement

While English is spoken widely across the globe, not all your visitors are Americans or native English speakers. Fortunately, you have chatbots that can be programmed to connect with clients in their preferred language.

In fact, it is quite straightforward to deploy different chatbots for different countries and encourage personalized connections between your brand and clients. 

Chatbots will typically use advanced Neural Machine Translation engines to provide instant responses, enabling them to adapt to a large number of languages on the fly. AI-powered chatbots on the other hand may need to have responses translated by a human ahead of time.

This way you erase the language barrier and keep your customers happy and engaged.

​​Target Group Distribution

Segmentation plays an important role in keeping your content up to date. It also improves your lead production strategy. 

Chatbots can segment target customers based on the information provided. It depends on several factors such as demographics, interests, age, gender, etc. 

You can use this in various ways. Some people tend to purchase products on a particular occasion. For example, a new year, Christmas, birthday, or weekends for fun and relaxation. A business owner can use occasional trends to boost his business. 

People also like to visit the pub after working hours for recreation. We can call that occasional behavior. Similar to the previous method, a business strategy is developed to make a profit from this behavior. 

This is effective because it targets your audience with the right solution.

Read More: SEO 101: Ensure Your Freelance Website Gets Visits

Define Your Use Cases

If a bot does not have a clearly defined use case, how are you going to measure the success rate? For example, if a bot has so many different goals and options, it will not be the most enjoyable experience for the customer. And it will be difficult to see what exactly the bot is or isn’t helping with. 

Design your bots with specific use cases. Don’t feel that one bot on one web page needs to be able to do everything. On your website, you might want an FAQ bot on one page and maybe another bot with the use case of booking a demo and perhaps a third where the customer can actually buy through the bot. This keeps the process simple and user-friendly.

Wrapping Up

Today, businesses are investing heavily in technology to deal with growing customer expectations and demands. Consequently, customer service has become a key area of concern in addition to the pressure of creating highly personalized experiences for potential, as well as existing customers.

If you want your website to be useful, and not a perch for buzzards stranded out in the internet desert, you need to drive traffic to it, and then convert as many visitors as possible into actionable leads. And, your website needs to be designed specifically to do that. 

AI-enabled Chatbots have proven their usefulness in improving customer service significantly. That is why you should use chatbots innovatively. We really hope some of these tricks will help you in doing that.