How to Use Chatbots for Ecommerce Marketing | Use a Chatbot to Grow Your Sales

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Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.

In this section we’re going to talk about example chatbot use cases.

You might think it makes more sense to go dive in right away and build a bot.

You could, of course, skip some of these lectures and go do that but I think it makes a lot of sense to first walk through a bunch of typical use cases for typical types of businesses that will a give you some ideas on what you want to accomplish and what the goals of your own chatbots are going to be.

It’ll also help you conceptualize chatbots. It will help you start understanding the opportunities and what’s possible by building Facebook Messenger chat bots.

So first I want to talk about a big, big niche I would say probably the majority of you, or even 50 percent are running ecommerce businesses.

So let’s just run through a few straightforward examples of what’s possible with a chat bot for an e-commerce business.

Now this is by no means an exhaustive list of ideas or opportunities.

These are just some basic templates, some basic notions. These are just some basic, straightforward ideas that will work very well out of the box.

So ecommerce again refers to if you’re selling anything online that can be a digital product it could be a physical product. It could be a subscription. Those are all those are all things that sort of refer to ecommerce offering.

Special coupons limited time promotions — it’s a really great way to promote a sale. Limited-time promotions that are being run on your site.

And when you do it through Facebook Messenger you could actually generate more leads in your pipeline to be used at a later date through chatbots and drip campaigns as well.

We’re gonna talk about coupons and discounts when we when we talk about psychological principles in bot design.

This is the principle of scarcity but it’s a great way to get started using a bot. And these are really easy bots to build.

You could use chat bots to find out what your prospects and leads are in the market for and use that information in future campaigns.

So for example for an e-commerce company that sells furniture online, we might ask the user through a chat bot say, “Hey how you doing? Just wondering what are you in the market for furniture?”

And you could offer them some different options and the user would self select them either in the market for a sofa, a sectional, recliner, a loveseat.

Greatm we’re gonna save that as a variable and we’re gonna go through all of this step by step in future lectures.

These are just a very high level ideas just just so you could see what’s possible. And now I know I could have a contact list built in Customers.ai of a hundred thousand leads and I know what each one is in the market for based on their own self identification.

That’s very powerful information. Now I could do a chat blast for loveseats. I can do a chat blast for recliners to specific audiences who are in the market for those specific products so it’s really, really powerful you could use chatbots to answer questions about returns and refund policies.

Those are very, very common uses for live chats and people calling into customer service.

imagine the workload that you could take off a live team or the additional value that you could offer website visitors or your Facebook leads by being able to answer all those types of questions automatically.

You just have to set it up once. You should use chat bots to promote your selling promises like free shipping, quality craftsmanship.

You could get more complex again and use Facebook chat bots to figure out and ask people what is the most important of these selling promises to them and then have separate chatbots that promote that specific aspect of your brand or company or product.

It’s very important to think about how you could put news into your chat bot design.

News has a special weird unique thing about it that it just creates higher engagement levels if it’s a new product, a new service or even if it’s a new way to use an old product when your headline and when the chatbots talk in a way that’s promoting something new you see you typically see much higher engagement rates

So use your chat bots to promote news so again if you have a new product or you have a new way of using an old one of your products use chat bots with chat blasts and drip campaigns and even Facebook Messenger ads to generate leads by promoting those news and you’ll have two very powerful things combined.

You’ll have the efficiency of a Facebook Messenger bot and you’ll have the fact that you’re promoting news on social media which is its native place for news to be, so those are two very very very powerful things combined to create an unbelievably profitable and cheap lead generation and even revenue generating chat bot education, even if you’re in e-commerce.

You might typically think that educational resources are more for you know software-as-a-service brands and more service-oriented brands but it’s not true.

Successful e-commerce companies know how to educate their consumers their customers. Ecommerce businesses invest a lot of money in doing so.

So for example, a client of ours that we will use in a bunch of different examples offers IV hydration therapy to people in different cities around the country. And typically people who are hungover but also athletes etc.

It’s a new sort of thing it’s sort of catching on in the country now it’s a really exciting market actually but there’s a lot of unknowns about it.

People are nervous like I don’t know, some nurse who I don’t know is gonna put an IV in my in my arm and what’s in the bag and whatever. So we decided to create a campaign “what’s in the bag”.

So we just we did we teach people what is vitamin b12 and what it’s used for how much of vitamin b12 is in the bag. What is saline? What’s vitamin C? What are all these different types of vitamins?

And now we could use chatbots to send out and and sort of supplement, no pun intended, our what’s in the bag campaign where people who are now interacting with our Facebook ads and our Facebook posts using Facebook comment guards, are now getting messages on a regular basis giving them information about each one of these individual vitamins, why it’s safe, how it helps the person feel revitalized and rejuvenated.

It’s been extraordinarily effective way to help our customers and our leads become more comfortable with this service and we’ve seen those results and it’s quite impactful.

So if there’s two takeaways from this lecture I would say it’s to think about how you could implement news into your campaigns through chatbots.

Also education because of course the limited time promotion in the sales, those are all the easy things we all know how to do that but the expert marketers are going to figure out amongst you are gonna figure out how to implement education and news in your campaigns.

Just quickly two more things with e-commerce you could also use Facebook chatbots to run polls and surveys.

So if you’re trying to figure out what your customer preferences are it used to be very expensive and really tricky to send out a mass survey or a mass poll to get actual real-time feedback from your customers.

Now with chatbots with Facebook Messenger bots it’s really easy and you get really good data and you could use that data to personalize your campaigns moving forward.

So again if you’re a company that sells furniture online, we’re using this as an example in this lecture, and you’re designing a new sofa, you could put you could throw out a poll offering three different options of three different designs or three different upholsteries.

And this could be applied to any e-commerce business in the world.

And you could literally ask tens of thousands of people instantaneously to choose their favorite one and then to act and then to say why they like that one the best.

And people will engage its Facebook Messenger this is what people like to do.

It’s totally mobile optimized you could offer them a 5% discount for engaging with the poll and survey.

And you can get enormously powerful information when you’re coming when it comes to planning your campaigns and planning your products and services that used to cost tons of money and take tons of time to do if you go back a few years.

Brand marketers would have given their left leg to be able to have this capacity to have this capability to run polls and surveys.

And lastly competitive comparisons this is one of my favorites it’s using Facebook Messenger in a sort of cheeky way to like highlight why you’re better than than the competition.

In this case in particular we had a whole campaign running us against Bob’s discount furniture and we would send a picture of the Bob sofa and with the similar price point to the sofa of our client and we would say you know which one do you like better?

And we had a whole — I’ll show you guys the back end of that interesting chatbot — but the whole idea was basically say look these are the same prices ours are such a nicer sofa it has so much better reviews it looks so much more comfortable.

“Its upholstered and much more its in much higher quality fabrics” — and it was just like a very funny like us against Bob’s competitive comparison campaign.

And you could do that at scale quickly and it’s very effective because you engage people in conversation you ask people to make choices so competitive comparisons along with polls and surveys is another really powerful way to use chatbots in e-commerce.

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