Over the past few years, chatbots are used by companies because of their ability to attend to customers at a fast rate. A chatbot is a software application that is used to manage conversations via text.
Chatbots are flexible, customizable software that can help you in your business with a few modifications. It also acts as a substitute for a live human agent. They assist clients by simplifying discussions through messaging programs. Chatbots also make communication simple between companies and clients.
Currently, chatbots are invented to execute automated tasks and imitate how a human would perform in a conversation. These chatbots are designed not only for communication but also for gathering and processing information. They are operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and automated rules to answer various requests.
Two Strategies That Drive Traffic in E-commerce
Chatbot marketing and Link building are the latest effective strategies that will drive traffic to your e-commerce store.
In this article, we are going to look into chatbots extensively. Before looking into the features of e-commerce chatbots, let us see what Link building is and how it benefits online business.
Link building in E-Commerce: Is That All You Need?
Sure, businesses in e-commerce need to build links in order to make it to the top. With tons of competition in this industry, having a lot of backlinks will help with brand visibility and ranking. Backlinks in e-commerce are extremely important to the point where most businesses opt for e-commerce Link building services from experts to get their best results.
However, Link building alone will not yield the expected results if the potential customers you gained through e-commerce Link building have queries left unanswered. This is where chatbots play a pivotal role as it enables two-way communication with clients.
Link building Strategies in the E-commerce
Link building strategies in the e-commerce store will captivate many visitors to the website. The backlinks in e-commerce will help you increase traffic exponentially. Here are the five Link building strategies for your e-commerce business,
- You can build backlinks with the people who have used your primary target keyword in their articles.
- Guest blogging is a conventional way to build links for your website. Conventionally, you will write blogs on a website and link your website there. This strategy has improved many online businesses.
- Building the highest quality links to your e-commerce website is one of the credible ways to invite potential buyers.
Do You Need E-Commerce Chatbots?
Chatbots guide, hear questions, and build relationships with your customer. At the very least, the conversational bot connects around 2 to 5 times faster to customers than a human customer service representative.
Chatbots are authorized to convey promotional messages to your customers to construct a great strategy. They also strategize the needs of the market and customers through data analytics, information gathering, and collecting reviews.
In addition, chatbots can also boost sales through ad pop-ups that captivate prospective customers. Customer attraction plays an important role for small to medium businesses in the e-commerce industry. E-commerce chatbots help a company acquire insights into what is the market trend and what the audiences would like in the future.
How Effective E-Commerce Chatbots Affect Business Growth
E-commerce chatbots are governed by artificial intelligence and virtual assistants. This is because they handle a wide range of conversations and requests for customers. These e-commerce chatbots increase the efficiency of an operation and save the cost of the business.
They offer convenience to all employees and clients, customer questions and issues are easily solved and it minimizes the need for an agent. In short, chatbots reduce the dependability on the availability of a human agent 24/7.
A study by State of Global Service Support 2018 indicates that around 66 percent of the USA population uses customer support chatbots and 61 percent of those aged 18-34 would rather engage a chatbot than an agent. This report shows how much of an impact chatbots bring to a business.
To keep up with an ever-expanding e-commerce market, AI is important to keep the steady outflow of services undisturbed.
Helpful Tips That Can Benefit Your Business
- Laying out 24/7 Real-Time Customer Support
Almost 50 percent of clients expect that businesses are open 24/7. Chatbots are able to remember a client’s previous interactions and inquiries. E-commerce companies that fail to provide instant support services are more likely to shut down because of the competitor’s 24/7 operating support system.
- Customizing the Services
E-commerce Artificial Intelligence chatbots recall interaction history with the clients and utilize the data collected to further improve future conversations by customizing it. In addition, chatbots focus on clients leading them to sales and making product recommendations.
Customized services also increase the consultation rate and lessen the time clients need to spend by promoting related products. For easier recommendations use of Big Data e-commerce is a big help for its ability to personalize the shopping experience of a client.
- Fast and Reliable But a Low-Cost Support Service
The artificial intelligence chatbots allow e-commerce companies to handle a lot of clients at once. The availability to always answer clients gives a huge advantage to the business.
Using instant support with two-way communication, chatbots can build connections with clients. Chatbots that are powered by AI are able to answer up to 80 percent of frequent client questions. If there is a circumstance that a chatbot can’t answer a question, it will instantly direct it to a live agent.
- Record of Client Data
Chatbots are outstanding tools that can keep tabs on the purchase patterns and behavior of clients. Record data of clients can help businesses how to strategize the market of products differently and how they can widen their reach.
- Collecting Feedback
E-commerce companies have two ways of getting feedback from clients. The first is through HTML form and the second is via reviews. Companies should not focus on collecting manual reviews for it is too time-consuming and wasteful.
In case there was a defective product delivered, surely, a bad review will be posted. Bad reviews may hurt the business but it’s alright, that’s why we are here to improve customers’ experience.
E-commerce companies prompt their feedback collecting process gradually, then a chatbot can collect the feedback of the client while interacting with them and guaranteeing them that the issue is already directed to a live agent.
With this, the impact of bad AI marketing is reduced and there is a chance that other people might promote the business to their trusted ones.
- Email marketing
AI chatbots are able to get hold of clients with the help of automated email and immediate responses. E-commerce chatbots collect lead pieces of information in various ways. It can be from the conversation flow or through fill-up forms.
- The Help Of Shopify Chatbots
Shopify’s chatbot plug-ins not only answer clients, but also tempt them to make a purchase. When a possible client lands on a product page and looks into it for a while, Shopify can send a message with a code for a discount or promotional offers. This can entice them thus converting a prospect into a client.
- Introduction of New Products Or Services
Every company should try to provide clients with product recommendations at every possible opportunity to maximize sales. Many companies adapt this strategy to make more product recommendations to have more sales in the company.
For the prospective customer, it reduces conflict on what to buy next. There are many tools and strategies a company can work on to create a recommendation of products and one of these tools is Chatbots.
- Chatbots are the Best Assistant
Chatbots are focused on helping customers, and reducing the workload of business. They are not only for external use but for internal use too.
It isn’t just clients who have trouble solving complex problems. Even company employees, customer service agents, salespersons, etc also need a hand in how to figure out the answers to problems and questions.
Chatbots are valuable to the company because they are used to answering repeated questions, search for a database, and many more. The reason for this is because chatbots are connected to the company’s database and with the help of AI, pieces of information needed are easily found. This allows the live agent to answer back fast.
Challenges in E-Commerce
There are a lot of techniques that can help a business grow but with it comes the challenges in e-commerce. As the e-commerce business grows, new technologies have created more challenges for the e-commerce industry.
The top 5 challenges the e-commerce industry faces right now are:
- Cybersecurity Attacks
All e-commerce companies should know the proper cybersecurity practices and tools. It is to prevent cyberattacks that can happen anytime, especially for small businesses that can’t afford to have downtime for its sale and operations as every transaction is a financial accomplishment.
- Competition Everywhere
Competition comes in various forms. The primary competitors you have are the direct competitions where you both target the same audience and or offer the same products and services in the market.
The secondary competitors may sell the same products and services but not to the same audience. And finally, the tertiary competitions, are the business related to yours that sells its product to the same audience.
- Providing Poor Customer Experience
It is hard to provide a customer with the same experience it will get from a top-heavy store. The failure to see the issues in pricing and customer segmentation is a problem. For initiative e-commerce, customer experience is really important when launching because possible customers and already customers expect better treatment.
- Insignificant Online Visibility
You won’t be able to turn a looker into customer if no one can find your site. It is crucial for an e-commerce business that the primary digital property gains visibility in searches. If the company is searched using the keywords and doesn’t show up it is to be expected that soon-to-be customers won’t see it.
- Low Website Quality and Visitor Conversion
Building and running an e-commerce website is complicated, but creating quality conversion is even more complex. Planning the business website is just the start, what’s hard is how you will maximize the content on the website.
With proper guidance on how to face challenges like these, it will be easy to solve them.
Conclusion
E-commerce chatbots flourish to make customers happy and make them purchase more products that add to the sale of the company thereby making them grow into a bigger company. Effective e-commerce chatbots not only make the customers happy it helps the employees of a company solve complex problems faster.
Empowered with techniques chatbots sure can do the job perfectly, and it’s low cost. Minimizing workload and reducing work time for the customers and employees is a strategy many companies would definitely want to own to help their businesses flourish.
