Chatbots can be a great tool to increase your leads and sales. But the question is “How?”.
With the rise in digital users, the competition in the digital market has grown to a great magnitude. Even surviving in the market has become a challenge for businesses. Many enterprises are trying to increase their sales funneling, but are failing in it.
Sales Funnel: Leads→ Prospects→ Customers → Sales ↑↑↑
What is Sales Funneling?
Sales Funneling is a visual representation of the customer journey representing the process of sales from awareness to action.
A survey showed that 79% of marketing leads don’t turn into paying customers with the traditional concept of sales funneling.
Sales funneling generally consists of four phases as defined below:
Awareness Phase: This process situates at the top of the sales funnel. It’s the stage where the user gets to know about the existence of your company or product. You can relate it with an example: “Suppose, you are selling a product on an e-commerce portal, and a user gets to know about your product while scrolling search results”.
After finding the information, the user gets aware of the existence of your company or product. That user can be considered as “a lead in the Awareness Phase of sales funneling.”
Interest Phase: This process situates at the middle-top of the sales funnel. It’s the stage where a lead starts to show interest in your product and turns into a prospect. You can understand it, with continuing the above example: “After watching your product in the results. The user clicks on the product to check its description, review, pricing, and starts to show interest in the product.”
With the context of the above example, the user who opened the link can be called as “a prospect in the Interest Phase of sales funneling.”
Decision Phase: This process situates at the middle-bottom of the sales funnel. It’s the stage where prospects decide to purchase your product and proceeds to the transactional phase. You can connect it with the above example: “The user finds your product perfect, and decides to buy it. So, the user clicks on the “Buy Now” button to make the purchase”.
You can say that those who have reached this phase are your “potential customers in the Decision Phase of sales funneling.”
Action Phase: This process situates at the bottom of the sales funnel. It’s the stage where prospect purchases your product and turns into a customer. You can relate it with the above example: “The person makes the payment and purchases your product.”
Businesses generally lose customers from Decision to Action Phase because of unreliable payment options, or unresponsive checkout web server.
With the context of the above example, you can say that the user is now your customer.
Sales Funnel with AI Chatbot
Have you ever seen the movie “Iron Man” ?.
If yes, then you must be aware of “Jarvis” (AI-based conversational chatbot, which works on described protocols and commands). Well, there is no more need to fantasize about having a bot like Jarvis. As now, with the advent of powerful chatbot builder platforms, you can build a bot like it for your business.
Defining AI chatbot
Chatbots are AI-Based conversational support, and marketing tool. They can be trained to perform many monotonous and instrumental tasks as per the requirements, such as booking an appointment, providing assistance, advertising products or services, and strengthening relationships with customers.
Experts believe that by the end of 2020, customer management will involve AI about 85 percent of the time. In those interactions, there’s never a need for another human to be present; it’s just customer and chatbot.
Most of the businesses are familiar with the term “Chatbot”, as nowadays it has been in debates a lot. But only a few of them know it’s advantages, functioning, and how it can help them to increase their sales.
Conversational Way to Supercharge Sales Funnel
If you reached this part of the article, then you must have understood the concept of Sales Funneling completely.
Between every phase of the funneling, businesses lose leads, prospects, and potential customers. The key to maximize sales is to minimize the loss in the process of funneling.
By analyzing the process of sales funneling, it can also be easily figured out that businesses suffer the maximum loss of their potential customer between the Awareness and Decision phases. The question is, why does this loss happen and how can it be minimized?.
The problem is in the dull method of interacting with users in the Awareness Phase. And assisting users about detail and benefits of the product in an unanswering and uninteresting manner in the Interest Phase.
A chatbot can be the perfect solution to this problem. It can interact with users more engagingly and convincingly. Unlike dreary written-instruction webpage-forms, chatbots can assist users conversationally in real-time.
Creating a conversational connection between user and website is an efficiently powerful way from losing potential prospects between Awareness Phase and the Decision Phase.
Even if the user communicates with chatbot just for a minute, it can raise the probability of the user to become a customer by a very large number. Practically, for humans, reaching to every lead or prospect is almost an impossible task. But thanks to Chatbot, it can perform this task easily and for 24*7 with the same efficiency.
With the implementation of a chatbot, businesses can gain a boost in the number of potential customers among Awareness and Decision Phases.
Chatbots and AI for increased upsell
The ability of a chatbot isn’t limited to give a boost to sales-funnel results. A chatbot can be designed to increase upsell also. With the subsequent amount of data about the customer’s previous purchases. A chatbot can predict the most probable upcoming purchase of the user and gives product recommendations accordingly.
