Given the increase in online shopping, you need to be prepared to meet demand and ensure a smooth online experience for your customers. Let’s look at how you can optimize your eCommerce chatbot for superior customer experience, engagement, and better conversion.
The rise of chatbots in this fast-paced, mobile-friendly environment is only logical. Consumers want to find the information they need from businesses quickly and conveniently, and chatbots make this possible 24/7/365.
Knowing this information raises several questions, though. What are chatbots? How can they be used? What are the benefits of using them?
And, this time of year: How can using chatbots increase your eCommerce holiday sales?
A chatbot uses artificial intelligence (AI) to engage with consumers and provide assistance by answering questions, offering information, and guiding consumers along their purchasing journey to turn leads or shoppers into customers.
There are many types of chatbots that eCommerce businesses can rely on, but two commonly used types are chatbots that use Facebook Messenger to engage with consumers and chatbots that operate on an eCommerce website.
Messenger Marketing
Messenger marketing refers to the practice of using messaging software to market your brand to consumers and engage with customers or shoppers. The goal of messenger marketing is similar to any other type of marketing: to raise awareness, gain leads, and make sales. This is often done through Facebook Messenger.
One of the biggest difficulties of messenger marketing is that consumers expect instantaneous communication. Most eCommerce businesses can’t have someone monitoring their social networks every hour of the day, every day of the year. This is where chatbots that are designed to work with Facebook Messenger become helpful. With a reported 1.3 billion active users each month, Facebook provides a huge opportunity for business owners to use this technology to grow their customer base and increase sales.
Let’s look at how you can optimize your AI-based eCommerce chatbot for superior customer experience, engagement, and better conversion.
1. Set enticing greetings to start conversations
Whenever a user visits your website, a welcome message called greeting pops right above the chat widget. A persuasive greeting not only welcomes your visitors but also boosts engagement on your website. If the AI assistant for eCommerce grabs a visitor’s attention, there’s a chance that the visitor will interact with the chatbot and learn more about your offers.
Try to keep your welcome message short and creative so that users feel the urge to interact with it. You can even show custom greetings for special offers or offer discounts to visitors coming through a particular referral link. With custom welcome messages, you can boost chat engagement and promote a better customer experience.
2. Recommend products for a personalized shopping experience
Compared to brick and mortar shops, eCommerce sites offer a wide range of product choices, making it difficult for undecided shoppers to make decisions. In such cases, chatbots for eCommerce sites can recommend personalized products to customers to save them from feeling anxious and wasting time. Such recommendations perform better than nonspecific marketing messages and help close the personalization gap prevalent in eCommerce businesses.
Studies show that over 70% of consumers prefer brands that understand their needs and expectations. (Salesforce) With customized product suggestions, businesses can get better at meeting these expectations.
After getting a visitor’s attention, an eCommerce chatbot can ask a series of questions to understand user preferences. In GenieTalk.ai, we build intelligent virtual assistants that can then suggest products & offers accordingly to help customers make their purchase decisions faster.
3. Persuade visitors with attractive discounts
Discounts are a good way to incentivize customers to explore your store and support conversion. 37% of consumers say that having a chance to purchase a product cheaper makes them more likely to buy more items than planned. Conversational chatbots are just another way to promote and distribute your discounts. They can spice up your shopping experience, too.
By applying ChatBot Filters, Zapier, and webhooks, you can distribute promo coupons to customers who engage with your bot. You can segment your audience on new users, returning customers, or redirected from a specific referring page and offer coupons only to a chosen group. This way, the bot can better complement the customer’s buying journey.
ChatBot lets you send collected data to your CRM or email marketing software. You can use this data in your future marketing activities. You can also use discounts in exchange for completing feedback surveys or providing email addresses.
If you want to get a head start with chatbot development, use our ready-to-use Discount Template. It lets you offer product discounts in return for subscribing to your newsletter. 4. Enable package tracking to keep buyers informed
Providing a positive delivery experience is just as important as the quality of your products. Most buyers won’t order again from a store that could not deliver their products intact and on time. However, if you ship your products through third-party logistics companies, you can’t always have control over their quality and speed. Alternatively, you can allow your customers to track their orders and keep them informed about when they will show up at their doorstep.
E-commerce chatbots allow your customers to track their orders by providing their order numbers. Thanks to automated package tracking, your customers will feel more certain about when their order will arrive. Additionally, this will free up your customer service team from answering questions that can be automated easily.
5. Give your chatbot a holiday feeling
You can customize your AI chatbot with vibrant colors and graphics to give it a holiday look and attract your visitors’ attention. To make your whole website look consistent, you can apply the same festive look to your logo, images, and other colors.
Making the eCommerce chatbot part of your holiday sales planning
The unpredictable increase in customers during the holiday season can be demanding to deal with for e-commerce businesses. Fortunately, with proper planning and a GenieTalk.ai-built intelligent chatbot to help, you can tackle the challenge. Discuss ideas with your team to assist and create a memorable brand experience for your customers. With these five practicable measures, you are in for better conversion rates and more sales this holiday season.
6. Add a festive touch to your content 
If it matches your brand voice, use holiday GIFs, emoji, images, and puns on social media, on your website, and in your chatbot. Reflect the spirit of the season and connect with what people are feeling, and you’ll draw them in more easily. For example, Click to view holiday-related content about chatbots is far less engaging at this time of year than Jingle bots, jingle bots, jingle all the way! 
It’s a great time of year to focus on visual imagery, too. You can set up your chatbot to send personalized images to users. A coupon or sale notification with snowflakes or candy canes and your name on it is likely to catch your eye more than a plain block of text.
7 Share the love—and get your customers to as well
It’s the season of giving! Encourage your customers to share your brand with their friends, and reward them in return. A few ways to do this include:
Give customers a discount or coupon for sharing your email newsletter with friends using a custom link.
Run a creative, engaging giveaway on Facebook or Instagram to motivate users to comment and tag friends to enter.
Reward users with freebies for sharing your bot with their friends, as this music festival did.
You can also set up a rewards program to give customers discounts or cash for referring friends. Referral leads convert 30% better than leads from other marketing channels, and they have a 16% higher lifetime value. So if you’re not already taking advantage of referral marketing, now’s the time to start. Customers get rewards, and you earn new business—it’s a win-win.
Top-5 Advantages of Using Chatbots
1- Chatbots Can Handle Multiple Customers At Once with Speed & Efficiency
There’s no doubt that sales during the holiday season peak. But with more-than-usual customers already shopping online owing to the pandemic, your customer support teams may end up being overburdened with additional queries. This is where an automated chatbot can lend a helping hand, especially for basic and routine queries that don’t need the expertise of a live agent.
The bot can track packages, provide shipment information, and throw light on the customer’s order every step of the way. This ensures that the queries are addressed with speed and accuracy.
2- Chatbots Can Lower Cart Abandonment & Boost Conversion Rates
Not everyone who lands up on your website completes the purchase. Research by CXL suggests that eCommerce websites have an average bounce rate between 20 and 45%.
Customers often abandon the cart because of last-minute shipping costs and taxes or a complex checkout process. Plus, they may have questions about the delivery timeframes, return policy, etc. To address these kinds of customer issues, especially at the checkout page, you can place a 24×7 chatbot. This intelligent tool can nudge the customers in the right direction to complete the purchase seamlessly and without hiccups. Take a look at Sephora’s bot, which takes the shopping experience to the next level and allows customers to ‘Try on’ looks or book a makeover and provide unparalleled convenience in the process:
As you can imagine, this small effort significantly reduces the number of support emails and calls. It frees up your support agent’s valuable time, which they can use to address more complex issues that require a ‘human touch.’
3- Chatbots Can Personalize The Buying Experience & Boost User Engagement
Around 70% of customers today expect brands to know – and anticipate – their needs and offer relevant product suggestions all the way through. Well-trained bots can help eCommerce brands achieve this. Here’s how it works.
The bot asks the customer a few questions to understand what they’re looking for. Alternatively, it can also encourage the user to take a quick quiz and understand their needs (as shown below):
Once the customer inputs the answers, the bot can segment the target audience depending on various factors such as new users, returning customers, customers incoming from social media pages, etc. This data-driven categorization enables the bot to roll out contextual deals, offers, and product suggestions and better complement the customer’s buying journey:
This way, both the customer and the business end up saving time and effort during the buying process – a win-win for all!
4- Chatbots Can Up-Sell & Cross-Sell Effectively
The power of gathering useful and real-time customer data shines through again. Chatbots can track the customer’s past shopping behavior and make a note of items placed in the shopping cart. This valuable information can then be stored in your CRM or email marketing software and be used for driving hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. Plus, bots can also send discounts to customers in exchange for finishing feedback surveys, providing their email addresses, or referring the brand to their friends and family:
That’s not all. These data points can also be used to recommend further products that complement the products your visitors were looking for. One fantastic example of cross-selling or up-selling is sending ‘replenishment messages,’ which encourages repeat purchase:
In other words, the bot can up-sell and cross-sell effortlessly and boost sales. The bots can also be triggered to proactively reach out to new customers and offer discounts once they land on the checkout page:
5- Chatbots Can Optimize Your Email/Paid Ad Campaign Conversions
If you’re using a personalized email marketing campaign or a paid advertising campaign to drive traffic to your website, you need to integrate a chatbot on your home page. Once the customer lands on your home page (after clicking the email or advert), you can thank/greet the customer with the help of the chatbot and make them feel welcome:
When drafting your greeting/thank you for a message, make sure to keep it creative, short, and engaging (as shown above). No one likes to read endless paragraphs of irrelevant content:
You can also send customized offers, deals, and additional product information for the user’s benefit. Starting off the customer’s journey on the right note can make all the difference between an abandoned cart and a purchase, thereby boosting your conversion rates.
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