How To Boost Your Holiday Sales With Chatbots

To boost holiday sales, companies are using chatbots to manage the high customer support volume which occurs during periods such as Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, and Black Friday. To make sure you never lose merchandising opportunities, below are some tips for using chatbots to increase your revenue.

Make Product Recommendations

The most advanced chatbots are capable of communicating with web visitors directly and asking them questions to ascertain what items they’re searching for, and the answers they receive from potential customers can enable them to make recommendations and narrow down the choices.

Increase Advertising or Email Conversions

While driving lots of traffic to your website or online store is extremely important, this alone isn’t sufficient, as you also want high conversion rates. When a visitor arrives at your website after clicking on an advertisement or email link, it isn’t enough to show them a page that highlights your product or service. Instead, you’ll want to use your chatbot to send a message which is targeted based on how they reached your site. The chatbot can provide additional info regarding the product, offer them discounts or additional assistance.

Lower Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is a phenomenon where a customer will visit a website, select items to add to their cart, and then suddenly abandon it before proceeding to the checkout page. Research shows that as many as 74 percent of American digital shopping carts are abandoned within a single holiday season.

To reduce these incidents, you can use chatbots to send a specific message offering their support or perhaps a discount to customers who are on specific pages, such as the checkout area. Depending on the module you’re using live chat with the support team can be offered to help finalize the purchase.

Implementing the Correct Chatbot

Chatbots come in different types, and just as you want to use different tools for specific construction projects, you’ll want to use certain chatbots for specific marketing purposes:

• Keyword based chatbots: These chatbots will assess the keywords which are typed in during customer queries and will attempt to match them with content that it finds inside the knowledge base.
• Button or menu based chatbots: These are the oldest bots and though basic are still effective when used properly. They function through branch hierarchies which are presented to users as buttons. The user will be provided a choice after which they must choose from the options which are presented. Once a choice is made, the chatbot will continue narrowing the options down through the introduction of new choices which are associated with previous decisions which were made by users until the correct answer is found.
• Machine learning chatbots: These bots utilize brute force style algorithmic learning which is determined by past questions and interactions. They require lots of data sets for their training.

Symbolic AI conversational chatbots are the newest and most advanced. They utilize contextual, semantic, and linguistic knowledge to provide answers to questions even in situations where they weren’t previously asked. They understand natural human language and the true meaning of queries. Due to their high cost, which can range from $300,000 to $1 million for a custom build; many companies are using platforms with knowledge that is built in such as Enterprise Bot.