How often is it that you get website visitors, but none of them wants to buy your products or services? Or maybe you notice that your web traffic is growing, you are getting more click-through rates, but you can't seem to be making those sales.
Get our drift? We're talking conversion here.
And if you don't pay attention to that, your whole business could sink like a ship.
There's more to conversion rate optimisation - it's the bread and butter of digital marketers. To understand how conversions work and what you can do to address the issues, let's dive into them below.
What is Conversion?
A conversion happens when a visitor on your website decides to take an affirmative action (such as filling up a survey or feedback form, signing up for newsletters, etc.) which ends up resulting in the purchase of your product. The process begins even before your visitor is on your website, starting from the ads you post online and your website pages that show up on search engine result pages when visitors look up a product or specific services.
And once they land on your website through those channels, the whole workflow starts from navigating from your landing page to arriving at the final checkout window through a series of sequential events. Or in short, a conversion is when your site visitor does what you want or performs the intended action (or set of actions) you expected.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Let's say you've got web traffic of up to 20,000 visitors a month and a 100 of them end up buying your products. Your conversion rate would be 20,000 divided by 1,000 for the month, which gives you 2% (that is a small number for a marketer). conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a series of tweaks you make to your website and its various elements to make that 2% conversion rate to higher numbers.
This could mean changing the style of your web-forms, revamping the visual designs of your landing pages, or even fostering more customer engagement through the addition of chatbots into your sales funnel.
The Different Stages of Conversions (or the Sales Funnel)
You may be asking how exactly chatbots make a difference. To understand that, let's map out the different stages of the sales funnel.
Awareness
This is when your visitor lands up on your website or social media page. They have no info about the product and are just looking around. In short, it's the top of your sales funnel, which we dub as the first interaction. This is the moment where you get a chance to grab their attention, inform, and leave them feeling good enough about the visit to come back again. A chatbot here can ask questions and attend customer queries. And if the process goes smoothly, you might even get your customer's email.
Interest
Moving to the second stage, where you ideally want to nurture your subscribers and not push your products onto them. This is where your chatbots feed them more and more content, educating them about the benefits (not features) and how it can make their lives easier. You have to focus on their problems, how to solve them and be very subtle about how your product does that (and yes, chatbots excel at this). The goal is to gather more information and data about your customers at this stage and profile them (not necessarily make a sale).
Evaluation
At this stage, your customer keeps tabs on regular updates and uses the info you send via newsletters. They follow your blog, read what you post, and they keep returning for more content. This is where chatbots can perform an educational role by sharing with them links to relevant content, offers, and free educational resources to inform and educate your customers. But this stage only happens after your "lead nurturing" is well underway.
Commitment
Now your customer finally decides to click and sign up for a free trial of your product. Maybe they've already tried out your ebooks, resources, and now want to test the real thing. Adding a chatbot here can help collect feedback from your customers and learn what made them decide the first step towards the purchase. A chatbot can ask specific questions and give you insights into your inbound marketing, such as what's working and what's not. As you collect more data through these interactions, you'll learn what your customers want and gather insights that help you improve your services.
Sales
Congratulations! Your customer finally decides to make the actual purchase. And this is when you truly appreciate the advantage your chatbots bring. Once your customer likes the trial and buys the product, you've built a solid relationship. There's a higher chance that your customer will return for future purchases, and you'll get to know that through user and experience feedback (data from your customer which chatbots consistently collect and analyse).
10 Ways Chatbots Impact Your Conversion Rates
Now that you understand how chatbots fit into your sales funnel, the big question is - do they work? Do they deliver on their promised conversational capabilities, and can they change the game completely?
The answer is - Yes! They help you increase conversion, and they're changing the world. There are a ton of users using messaging and social media apps these days. Regular apps are becoming a thing of the past since chatbots are taking over customer interactions and engagement.
Of course, building a great chatbot is not enough. Knowing how and where to use them effectively is what helps a chatbot unleash its true potential.
If you're serious about making more sales, here are ten ways to use them to optimise your conversion rates.
1. Customise conversations with your audience
Every visitor is unique and arrives at your website through different marketing channels. Some may come from your online ads while the rest may arrive at your site from your Facebook page or social media outlets. Depending on where you get your users from, you can load up custom chatbots which interact with them. Custom chatbots can say the right lines depending on where your user comes from thus delivering a more personalised experience.
2. Embed them In blogs
Your customers are bound to land on your blog, medium articles, or website content eventually. You can embed chatbots in these places and automatically trigger them whenever a user reads or hovers over certain sections of your content. This is an ideal way to collect personalised opinions and find out what's going through the mind of the user and how/what made them view that post or piece of content.
3. Interview and help your leads
When a lead is browsing through various channels, you can deploy chatbots at the appropriate locations and collect more data. For example, if a person is browsing your blog, a chatbot can pop up and invite them to sign up for your mailing list. Another instance where you can optimise your CRO rate is letting your chatbot interview leads who stay on your pages for quite some time. These bots can ask a few questions and redirect them to sales pages or promotional offers depending on how they answer. You can even interview your leads further and identify at what stage of the sales funnel they're in. Using that info, you can redesign or optimise your site elements and see how you can convert your leads into deals better.
4. Connect with your sales team
Sometimes you lose leads when your sales team gets intrusive. You can set up a chatbot at different stages of the sales funnel and optimise them so that they appear or get triggered when certain visitor criteria are met. Users will have the option to close them if they don't need help and when they want answers to more in-depth questions besides the ones your bots are designed to answer, they can be connected directly to your sales team. Based on the type of visitors and answers to questions, you can also profile your users and redesign your marketing strategy based on the data and insights received.
You'll discover things which never crossed your mind about your customers this way. You can even segment your target audience into different groups and run A/B split testing on them by designing the elements of your website differently. For every use-case, chatbots will give you precise results and dig deeper into the consumer landscape. This method lets you know how well you're doing when you're "testing the waters" with new approaches.
5. Engage more website visitors
The following is a behaviour commonly seen among website visitors. .They browse a website and then close the tab or move onto something else. There is a small window of opportunity to grab their attention. By positioning your chatbots at the right locations, you can invite and engage your visitors. You can host mini polls on your website, make the bot give suggestions whenever users are viewing items or products on your website. For example, if you're selling T-shirts online and the visitor is browsing, the bot could ask questions like what colours do they prefer and what designs/artwork do they like. In this way, you discover and learn more about your users' preferences and tastes while they're browsing. It's all about setting the right triggers.
6. Interact in the language they speak
Not all your visitors are from the U.S. or speak English. You can use chatbots to connect with clients in their local languages and get translated conversations of the chat transcripts. Different chatbots can be deployed for different countries and optimised further to make interactions more personal.
According to Itai Leibowitz, Product Manager of Facebook's Messenger Platform, "Businesses that take people's messaging behaviours and preferences into account are the ones that tend to see the most success."
7. Integrate with other tools
The chatbot alone can only create conversations and give you the data. You need to define a framework and decide how to use the conversational data that is coming towards you. For this, you have to integrate your chatbot inside your sales funnel so that you can see the information in a stretch in your analytics tool. Seamless integrations act a path for data to be accumulated over time, giving you a clearer picture of what's happening with your online business. Chatting has become native to customers around the world. That is one activity people spend a lot of time in. So adding conversations to your sales funnel is the next best thing you can do.
8. Improve your webpages and offerings
Using chatbots, clubbed with the power of data analytics, you can collect raw data, clean it up, and discover how to improve your existing products and services. From reducing bounce rates to optimising your site better, you can redesign your products, landing pages, and anything else related to your marketing strategy based on your customers' wants (urgency, not needs), thus leading to more sales.
9. Experiment with different conversation styles
If you're optimising your conversion rates, it's a good idea to optimise your chatbot experiences too. You can change your conversation style and make your chatbots friendlier, interactive, and engaging by customising or redefining their scripts. Just as there are various ways to pitch a product, there are multiple ways to talk to your audience. You never know what will work better. This will help you redefine your brand's tone, voice, and customer outlook by redefining your chatbot experience.
10. Automate, Automate
In today's modern world, customers want chatbots. You can use chatbots to automate your drip campaigns and help them book services, requests, and read the latest content. You can book meetings and schedule appointments via the bot. You now possess the arsenal to optimise every conversion through meaningful conversations and automate micro/macro tasks at every step of the sales funnel using them.
These are just a few tricks that you can pull from your sleeve to push your conversion rate from 2% to 15% and beyond! Don't believe us? Here's what Nick Sudhas from Elite LASIK Marketing had to say about acquiring leads and converting them using these bots.
The entire process of getting a lead, educating them, sending them in the right direction and then closing the winning deal is a time-consuming task. Automated conversations can help you keep the thought process of your customers in check as they move through this cycle. These days, chatbots are changing the game for B2B businesses. They are heavily used to bump up their CRO.
Start taking advantage of chatbots today and make your business goals a reality.
