.png)
Everyone has a mobile phone, and everyone is buying stuff online. But still, the competition is fierce among e-commerce players. Even if you’re a small or medium-sized business, you have to compete directly with the top e-commerce brands in the mobile-first market.
The only way you can sustain is by impressing customers with competitive differentiation. Satisfy your customers and you will see their retention rate going up. That is when WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce enters the picture to raise the quality of how you engage, serve, and support your customers online.
Issue of Low Conversion
The e-commerce industry receives 2.93% of the conversion rate on an average from mobile and desktop. And that is a result of multiple challenges faced at the customer support front. From unending repetitive FAQs to long-wait times in the support calls. Traditional customer support channels such as call centers, emails, and forms are not as efficient as customers demand them to be.
High Conversion with WhatsApp Chatbot
A WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce presents a perfect solution with the ability to:
Capture, qualify, and nurture leads towards conversion
Automate query resolution at a high scale
Boost the productivity of human agents
Engage customers on their preferred channels such as WhatsApp
While traditional support requires a huge team to even scratch the surface of the above-mentioned activities, an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce can do it all alone single-handedly.
What Made WhatsApp Chatbots Most Popular for E-Commerce?
The reason why WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce is widely popular is mainly due to the familiarity and ease of use of WhatsApp. As people use this messaging platform on a daily basis, it doesn’t become hard for your customers to start interacting with your chatbot there.
Here are more reasons why e-commerce businesses popularly use WhatsApp chatbot:
1. Everyone knows how to use
There are no complicated steps when a person starts using WhatsApp. The interface is easy to understand. And with a chatbot integrated, a customer can simply ask what he or she wants, select desired categories, and get the query resolved. So, instead of wasting time browsing everything on a website, customers can just get what they want.
2. Multi-layered engagement
With your WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce, customers feel engaged at multiple levels. They can make a purchase, reach multiple touchpoints, raise tickets, and more within a consistent conversational flow. This way e-commerce businesses gain and retain more numbers of customers through multi-layered engagement, marketing, support.
3. Security assurance
WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption to its users, so they can feel safe while sharing their details with a WhatsApp chatbot.
4. Automation of messaging
You can save your customers from long waiting periods with a WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce. Every user can receive an instant response and on-time messages day and night. Hence, customer queries get addressed without wasting any of their valuable time.
In return, it provides efficiency and cost-effectiveness to your business and customers feel more valued.
5. Instant communication
E-commerce can use WhatsApp chatbot to enable instant communication across all channels. For instance, Facebook ads can have a Click-to-WhatsApp button leading customers straight to your chatbot for instant conversation. Similarly, real-time conversations become possible by integrating WhatsApp to other channels like your website, social media profiles, and Google ads as well.
Use Cases of WhatsApp Chatbot for E-Commerce
With all advantages making sense, now let’s go through the use cases of WhatsApp chatbot for your e-commerce business:
1. Automated Lead Generation
Everything in sales of e-commerce come down to quality lead generation. Using a WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce brings automation to the entire stage of capturing, and qualifying leads. Every channel can have a clickable WhatsApp button to start conversations with potential leads. In the chat platform, the chatbot can automatically learn the contact number and name of a lead and qualify those details.
Beyond that, an AI chatbot can even ask for other information in a friendly conversational flow to qualify a lead. Plus, it can nurture those leads and encourage them till they convert into a customer.
You can:
Add WhatsApp buttons on your product pages or category pages.
Send chat invitations to people who visit your site and leave.
Set up ad campaigns with a clickable WhatsApp button on Facebook, Instagram, and Google.
2. Drip Marketing
With emails and SMS messages giving low drip marketing ROI, WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce seems a better choice for drip marketing. You can set up a series of automated yet personalized messages based on a customer’s interest and previous inquiries. Send every message after a fixed time interval to encourage prospects and keep existing customers engaged with new discount offers, product choices, and more.
3. Order Placement
Using an e-commerce WhatsApp chatbot allows you to offer a well-connected, omnichannel experience personalized for every customer. They can initiate orders and repeat them in the future through the same flow of conversation.
Customers can use the WhatsApp chatbot to explore different products and place their orders with payment submission. This single-channel purchase experience increases the chances of sales every time.
An AI chatbot can push data from WhatsApp to an integrated database or CRM in real-time, making order management simpler for e-commerce businesses.
4. Payment Assistance
Payment related issues are the biggest problems in retaining customers. No customer would accept a wrong deduction. If the payment experience is bad, no good product can hold a customer.
A WhatsApp chatbot can provide assistance throughout the payment process. Plus, it can hear and resolve payment associated queries of customers. Any complicated issue can be transferred to a human right away on WhatsApp only. This is called a 3-way communication with WhatsApp chatbot.
5. Answering Repetitive Questions
From a customer's 1st visit to your e-commerce site to the final purchase, the entire journey can become seamless when you answer their questions. Generally, FAQs involve company information, product information, size or color requirements, refund policy, and more.
Most customers ask these questions at different stages of their buying process. If not answered instantly, they might drop off without making a purchase.
On the other hand, answering these repetitive questions consumes a lot of time of human agents. But a WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce can take this task up with no hassle at all. It can answer all questions instantly at any scale, leaving more time for human agents to focus on more complex queries where human intervention is required.
This helps to decrease the number of support tickets and increase the conversion ratio.
6. Handling Replacement or Refund Requests
It can be tricky for human agents to accurately manage replacement requests, but not for an AI-enabled WhatsApp chatbot. A bot can improve the replacement/refund experience for e-commerce customers by making it hassle-free and quick.
The bot can easily assess the information and decide the reasons for replacement or refund, and quickly schedule a date and time accordingly. This helps to keep customers loyal to your e-commerce brand.
7. Recommending Products
Product recommendation comes into play when you want to sell more to an older customer. It’s a popular fact in the e-commerce industry that finding a new customer is 7 times costlier than repeating a sale.
After you have found yourself a customer, relevant product recommendations and keep the sales on from time to time. After purchase, a WhatsApp chatbot can help you send personalized recommendations based on customer behavior after fixed time intervals.
Customers are more likely to buy as the bot sends products that they actually need.
The bot can also recommend the same products for repurchase with new variations, discounts, and offers.
8. Order Tracking
Order tracking has become a very common and expected service from e-commerce businesses. After shipping a product, you need to allow your customers to know where their orders are.
Such messages are sent via SMS or email, where customers have the lowest activity. So, they don’t see your message and start calling support people to inquire about their orders.
You can reduce the number of such calls by allows WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce to enable order tracking. On the same platform, customers can request a change of delivery address or re-schedule delivery time.
9. Retargeting Abandoned Carts
You make all efforts to bring customers to add products to their carts on your website. But then, they abandon those carts leaving your sales-funnel to fail at the final step.
However, these customers have shown interest and have the capacity to buy. So, you need to retarget them in a more personalized way to encourage a purchase.
That’s when you can trust a WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce re-engagement of such customers. Very little effort can give great returns with more people completing their transactions.
10. Updating Customer Information
When you plan to retain a customer for long, there are times when they change their lifestyle, location, cards, and other information. If not updated on time, these discrepancies can limit your sales.
With ORAI’s AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce, you can help customers update their information faster with a lesser number of steps.
11. Getting Referrals
There’s nothing better than your existing customers referring your products and services to other people. Referred leads convert faster with lesser cost per lead and conversion.
A WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce can impress customers with a smooth buying experience. And then, it can collect their feedback and ask for reviews in a friendly way.
Plus, a bot can ask people to share referral codes with their family and friends for reward points. WhatsApp is the easiest platform when it comes to sharing such links/codes. All the family and friends’ groups are there on the same platform. Hence, you can expect a large number of customers coming through referrals.
12. Quick Feedback Collection
Similar to business feedback, you can utilize WhatsApp chatbot to collect feedback for your products as well. People can use the in-built camera feature on WhatsApp to record videos or click pictures. Or, the bot can talk to them and collect feedback in an interactive manner also.
Final Words
With WhatsApp chatbot coming in the front, we are helping e-commerce provide AI-enabled support to customers for efficiency, sales growth, and result-driven marketing.
So, if you are looking for an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot for e-commerce, come and see what ORAI can do for you.
Click here so we can start talking about AI automation in your business. Or, straight sign up for our FREE DEMO. We’d be delighted to show you the effectiveness of our solutions.