How To Increase Conversions by Personalizing Your Chatbot
How do you feel when you receive an email from a business with your name in the subject line?
That’s one of the most common ways businesses will try to personalize their marketing.
But that’s not the type of personalization I want to talk about here.
Automatically adding someone’s name to an email only creates a false sense of personalization. It offers no real value to the person receiving the email.
And if you’re like me, you probably find it a little inauthentic.
What I want to talk about is personalization that improves the user experience. This is the type of personalization that can actually increase conversions.
To improve the user experience, personalizaion should make the user’s life easier and make them feel understood.
Chatbots offer a way to personalize the user experience in a valuable way like no other digital medium.
HOW PERSONALIZATION CAN IMPROVE USER EXPERIENCE
By personalizing the user experience — whether in a chatbot conversation, on a website or in email, you can make your user feel more valued and understood.
You have to consider people’s desire to feel understood. This is one of the strongest desires that people have.
As Stephen Covey says in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People…
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Every person has their own individual needs and desires. Without asking questions and taking time to get to know a person, it’s impossible to truly understand them.
In his book on negotiation Never Split The Difference, former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss talks about how important it is to make your counterpart in a negotiation feel understood.
The more someone feels understood, the more agreeable they will be to a solution, Voss says.
He also says you should never go into a negotiation making assumptions about the other person.
But that’s what most marketers are forced to do. They have to make assumptions about their audience when they design their website, send emails or advertise on social media.
They can use general data to support these assumptions. For example they might know that their target audience is males, aged between 35–50 who live in the US.
So they can use that data to make assumptions about what colors they should use on their website or what type of content they should post on Facebook. Doing this may help to make their audience feel understood.
But not every male in the US aged between 35–50 is going to have the same needs and desires.
The only way to truly make your audience feel understood is by asking them questions individually. Then using that information to tailor their experience. Rather than designing their experience based on broad assumptions.
Until now it’s been extremely difficult to do that at scale. But using chatbots, it’s now possible to tailor the experience to every single person who interacts with your chatbot and make them feel understood.
WHY CHAT BOTS ARE IDEAL FOR PERSONALIZATION
There is huge potential to offer users a relevant, personalized experience through chatbots.
Yet surprisingly, even in 2020, most chatbot conversations are a very impersonal experience. Aside from inserting the users name into the conversation, chatbots generally do very little (if anything) to personalize the user experience.
When you walk into a shop, a good salesperson can personalize your experience by asking you questions, getting to know you and then offering personalized recommendations based on the information you give him.
The sales person was able to personalize the experience because he had a two way conversation with you. Through a two way conversation you can get to know the customer and that’s where personalization begins.
Chatbots allow your business to have two way conversations at scale. These two way conversations give you the opportunity to collect the information needed to create a valuable personalized experience, which benefits the user.
Watch the demo below to see how a product recommendation bot can offer an improved, personalized experience for users.
Both businesses and consumers generally think of websites, email and social media as a one way conversation. And for the most part it is. A one way conversation will never allow for the same personalization that a two way conversation does.
Some businesses will use landing pages to ask questions and collect information about their users. But people usually don’t want to answer a lot of questions on a landing page. That’s why most landing pages will only ask for name and email address at most.
From my experience, people are far more willing to answer questions from a chatbot.
In one of my chatbots, I recently set up a onboarding sequence for new users. This onboarding included six questions that the user had to answer in order to access the rest of the chatbot.
So far, 473 people have started the onboarding sequence. Out of 472, 328 (69.6%) have answered the first question.
Then out of those 328, 267 have answered all six questions from my chatbot.
Keep in mind that, the average landing page conversion rate is under 5% and with every field you add to your landing page, your conversion rate will drop between 8% — 50%.
All information your chatbot collects from asking the user questions, should be tagged so it can be used in the future to create a more personal experience.
HOW TO IMPROVE THE CHATBOT EXPERIENCE WITH PERSONALIZATION
In your efforts to personalize your chatbot experience, you firstly need to consider what will genuinely be of value to the user.
In his recent sales book Way of the Wolf, Jordan Belfort talks about controlling the inner dialogue in your prospect’s mind.
Every time your business interacts with potential customers, whether it be in person or through a chatbot, there is an inner dialogue taking place in the prospect’s mind.
If their inner dialogue is working against you, it’s going to be very hard (if not impossible) to make a sale.
Think about the conversation taking place in your mind when you receive an email with your name inserted in the subject line. Many people will think “Who are they trying to kid? I know I’m not the only person they’re sending this email to.”
You have to consider what will be the inner dialogue taking place when someone uses your chatbot.
If you personalize the conversation in a helpful, valuable way, the inner dialogue will work in your favor.
As I said before, you can improve the chatbot experience by personalizing it in a way that makes the user feel more understood, solves a problem for them or makes their life easier.
Online fitness brand Verve Health Co has a chatbot that acts like a personal trainer, giving users workouts and fitness advice.
New users are asked if they have any injuries or health issues. Then when you ask the chatbot for a workout, it warns you what exercises you may need to avoid because of your injury.
This is a fantastic example of personalization that is genuinely helpful and improves the users experience.
REVERSE ENGINEER THE PROCESS
When personalizing your chatbot user experience I suggest working backwards.
Start by asking yourself what part of the interaction with your chatbot could be personalized to improve the experience. Remember it needs to make the user feel more understood, solve a problem for them or make their life easier.
It could be offering personalized product recommendations. Like Amazon does on their website.
It could be using language that the user will understand. If someone doesn’t have much experience with your product, they may not understand the language you would use with your regular customers. Tailoring the language to people based on their experience with your product could help.
If you have a restaurant, it could be not showing your meat dishes to vegetarian customers.
There are so many ways to personalize the chatbot experience. Take some time to think about this.
In my chatbot development business, my chatbot offers personalized suggestions about how users could use Messenger marketing and chatbots in their own business.
These suggestions are based on information that the user provides about their own business and goals.
To try it out click here.
IDENTIFY WHAT INFORMATION IS NEEDED TO OFFER THIS PERSONALIZATION
Once you know how you want to personalize the chatbot experience, you need to work out what information you need from the users.
There are two ways of collecting this information — actively or passively.
By actively, I means directly asking the user for the information. This is probably the best way to collect the information needed to personalize the experience.
Your chatbot might ask the user about their location, goals, needs, experience with your product, age, concerns, etc…
Any information you get from asking these questions, should be tagged so you can use it in future to tailor that user’s experience.
Information gathered passively will come from their behaviors and actions.
For example, a coffee shop might have a chatbot that allows users to order drinks and food. If a users regularly orders a coffee using the chatbot, the coffee shop could personalize future conversations in a way that makes the user feel special for being a regular customer.
The coffee shop chatbot could also identify what drinks the user orders most often and provide personalized recommendations or special offers in the future.
CONCLUSION
Using chatbots you can create personalized digital experiences for your users at scale.
Don’t forget that creating a false sense of personalization will do nothing to help your business or the user.
The goal of personalizing your chatbot is to make the user feel more understood and make their life easier.
Instead of making the user search through your website or emails to find information relevant to them, you want your chatbot to find this information for them. All it takes is training your chatbot to ask the user questions so it can find that relevant information.
You should consider how the chatbot experience will affect the internal dialogue happening inside the user’s mind. If you can use personalization in your chatbot effectively, the internal dialogue will work in your favor and that will increase conversions.
It’s simple to create your own personalized chatbot using these tips, with a tool like Mobile Monkey.
To see how I personalize the experience in my own chatbot for my business All Chat Solutions, click here.
