- 75.8% of retail shoppers abandon purchases after adding items to their cart (source)
- The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. (source)
Long checkout processes and not communicating about shipping costs until the end are the major reasons for abandoned carts. Contacting the lead now than later or nurturing the lead now gives a higher conversion rate.
What if the business can create a conversation on the checkout pages?
What if a lead gets a call or SMS instantly asking for an appointment or giving further information?
We want everything instantly. The more the wait the higher are the chances of losing customer’s interest.
As a society, we turned towards real-time communication for both personal and work-related activities. We use WhatsApp for most of our day to day communication and messaging powered team collaboration tools like Slack for work.
Automation! This word is not new to the world. This concept was there from the 1800s when the industrial revolution began.
By definition, it means setting up processes and systems with minimal human interaction. These processes and systems keep evolving with new technologies, inventions, and evolution.
But, what if we could automate the conversations?
What if we could give them everything they need immediately instead of making them wait?
What if we give them the real-time communication experience they wanted?
Chatbots can do that!
When I say Chatbots, today I am focusing more on Facebook Messenger Chatbots.
Facebook first announced bots for its Messenger platform beta version in the mid of 2016.
By mid- 2018 there were 300,000 bots built on messenger. And businesses and customers exchanged 8 billion messages a day on Messenger in 2018.(which were 2 billion conversations in 2017).
This is proof that customers want to speak to businesses before making a decision and when given an opportunity they want immediate conversations.
Where does this messenger chatbot fit in your marketing and sales funnel?
It fits in every stage of your funnel
It depends on your goal and you can have your bot designed at any stage of your choice or every stage of your funnel.
Also, you can build your complete funnel cycle on messenger. We call them Messenger Funnels.
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Let me compare and explain the regular funnel to the Messenger funnel:-
A Regular Funnel
- Usually, in our regular funnels, we direct traffic to landing pages where we get information about the lead only when they fill-up the form offering a lead magnet.
- We will redirect them to a thank you page where we will have an upsell.
- We might add them to email automation as well to upsell if they didn’t convert on the thank you page.
- Since we don’t have information about the visitors who didn’t fill-up the form, we shall try re-targeting them with paid ads and increase the touch points to bring them back to the landing page and fill up the forms.
- We try repeating the process until they purchase.
- To increase conversions we try to increase the number of visitors coming to the landing page through various sources.
- To increase conversions we try to re-target them with paid ads and email automation.
The Problem Here
- The existing websites and landing pages do mass personalization . They were designed considering a set of target audience behaviors.
- Maybe email automation to some extent can be more personalized but we have to deal with declining open rates and click-through rates.
- Visitors have to take 2 or 3 steps more to reach you and have a conversation if they want to talk to you.
Let us look into how a messenger chat-bot can be different from a regular funnel:–
Messenger Funnel
- With Messenger funnel, we are first creating a conversation. We are directing people to the conversation and then based on their interaction we can define the flows to take them to a landing page, or directly give the information what they need.
- We can have conversations to collect forms like details and subscribe them to email automation.
- The cherry on top, everyone who starts an interaction with the Messenger bot gets subscribed to the bot. To whom we can send broadcasts similar to email blasts.
- With chatbots, you can trigger conversations based on the user behavior and engage with them at that moment. So, you can be more personalized and shorten your funnel cycles.
- Creating a conversational buying experience can increase trust, and gives authentic and personalized experiences.
- Customers feel they have more control over the decisions they make.
- Messenger bot conversations have greater open rate and click-through rate and emails.
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What else can a Messenger Chatbot do?
- Ask questions and gather feedback.
- Give them a shopping experience and enable them to buy right away.
- Communicate tracking order status.
- Enable Live chat and provide 24/7 customer service.
- Schedule appointments and make reservations.
- Offer downloadable resources like e-books.
- Send them any media like videos and images.
- Segment users based on their interactions and conversations with the bot.
- Connect the bot with your CRM tools to sync all your data together.
- Have inbuilt email and SMS systems.
- You can train the bot based on certain keywords to answer.
- You can connect your FB ad to your bot.
- Trigger messages when they comment on your Facebook posts.
- Send free message broadcasts – abiding by the Facebook policies.
A few thumb rules I have for you (I believe this applies to any marketing automation just not for messenger chatbots)
- The more the data you have about the user the better you can personalize the automation.
- ‘When you are telling what,’ is important! – connect this statement with ToF, MoF, BoF.
- How is the content your end-user is interacting with – it should make them converse with you.
- The real deal is in being able to personalize the conversation with your content.
Last but not least
ENGAGE – ANALYSE – RECOMMEND/SELL
Akathma Devi is a Marketing coach, Analytics-driven marketer, Chatbot Marketing Enthusiast, and Founder of Rubhu Social