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79% of digital marketers in retail are investing in personalization tools, more than any other industry.
Studies also indicate that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
Many companies have claimed that personalization has doubled their conversion rates. However, it happens only if they do it right.
In this blog, we are going to discuss the importance of personalization in eCommerce and B2C online companies and how to do it precisely and cost-effectively using conversational chatbots.
Let’s jump in.
Why Should Marketers Think Beyond Doing Assumption Based Personalization
Generally, most marketers implement personalization based on assumptions since they do not have accurate or curated data on their target customers.
Whether it is email or paid channels, they run campaigns using general data – thinking it would resonate with their audience’s needs/pains and make them purchase/convert. However, many times it fails.
An email body copy with just a recipient’s name next to ‘Hi/Hello’ will not do any magic with the receiver as they know it is sent to many people that way. It is a false personalization.
The right personalization should go deeper by understanding your target audience’s needs, situations, browsing habits, and past purchases.
You need to understand their intent and send messages or recommend products that motivate them to purchase.
Why Conversational Chatbot is a Great Personalization Tool
Believe it or not, the chatbot market is growing at an exponential pace.
1.3 billion USD is the expected growth of the chatbot market size by 2025 with a compound annual growth rate of 29.7%.
The phenomenal growth of chatbots is attributed to its ability to communicate with website visitors 24/7. More and more companies have realized it today.
Conversational chatbot or AI chatbot is programmed with NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning) technologies to understand your customer’s inputs better (even if there are typos and complex questions) and carry out human-like conversations with your customers. They ask the right questions, learn their needs, and help personalize the shopping experience in real-time.
Only with conversational AI chatbots, you can deliver hyper-personalized experiences for your customers. Simply because it has a mind to learn and serve.
All marketing efforts go in vain if you don’t engage visitors better on your website and make them convert. Since many e-commerce sites are designed in a conventional way with a lot of texts, images, products, categories, and links, getting the right information is quite a task for the customers and they soon disengage.
However, if you have a conversational chatbot on your website, you can create a customized experience for your customers and influence them to take your desired action.
The below diagram shows a high-level overview of how conversational chatbots work to personalize your customer experience.
Having a conversational chatbot on websites is like having a virtual sales rep. They welcome the customers, ask the right questions, and show the right product that helps your customers make faster purchase decisions.
Perhaps, conversational chatbots do a few things more than your salesperson.
How to do Personalization with Conversational Chatbots
Let us look at how to do personalization with conversational chatbots according to your customer journey.
Top-of-the-funnel Customers:
96% of customers visiting your site are not ready to buy. They can be categorized as the Top of the Funnel (TOFU) customers.
Customers at this stage usually research your site to understand whether you offer the right products or tools that solve their problems. So in this stage, all the chatbot needs to do is
Increasing brand awareness and engaging customers should be the main focus of the chatbot in this stage.
Here are some of the tasks chatbot can do here:
1. Recommend personalized products
2. Share a link to a blog post that explains more about the product
3. Share how-to-videos
4. Show available offers and discounts on the product
The goal of this stage is to gather customer email, phone number, or make them subscribe to your newsletters to nurture more.
Middle-of-the-funnel Customers:
Personalization plays a huge role in this phase. Customers in this stage know who you are, what you are offering, and evaluating your product. This is a very crucial phase as the potential buyer needs to be nurtured well to move down the funnel.
If the chatbot already collected the email id or phone number of your customers, you can feed the data into your CRM and start marketing automation. You can send relevant content and offers via email or text messages and persuade them to purchase. If the customer revisits your site, the chatbot can send personalized messages and nurture them more. Here are some of the tasks chatbot can do here:
1. Show testimonials and customer reviews
2. Share the ongoing offers and deals
3. Send the most useful links such as how-to-guides or case studies and gain customer trust
Educating your customers with the right information and building trust are the key things to do in this stage.
Bottom-of-the-funnel Customers:
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) customers are one step closer to sale. They have almost decided to go ahead with your product and the goal is to accelerate the checkout process by positioning your brand/product as superior to others and helping them overcome the hurdles that stand in their way. Also, you need to answer order-related questions such as stock availability, shipping details, payment options, return and refund policies, etc.
Here are some of the tasks chatbot can do here:
1. Answer checkout questions
2. Create more upsell and cross-selling opportunities
3. Persuade with a stunning deal
4. Reduce cart abandonment rate with alerts and offers
Conclusion
We live in a world where personalization becomes common practice- thanks to companies like Amazon, Netflix, etc.,
Customers are expecting personalized experiences from almost every company and studies show that 49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience.
Conversational Chatbots are an easy and cost-effective way to put eCommerce personalization into action.
If you like to learn about RoundView conversational chatbot and how it delivers amazing personalized experiences for your customers, schedule a demo meeting with us.
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