Visitor Engagement: How to Reduce Bounce Rates and Increase Conversions with Chatbots?

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Why is your incoming traffic not boosting your conversion rate?

You’ve busted your back trying to pull in traffic to your website, from optimizing for organic search and customizing for targeted display ads to leveraging blog content on social media. Analytics show that it’s all worked in your favor- you have successfully generated traffic to your website!

That being said, the SAME analytics also show that your website has an unusually high bounce rate a.k.a a lot of people are coming to your website but they’re also leaving just as easily.

You’ve managed to entice them but failed to engage them, what steps should you adopt?

Big players like HubSpot and QuickSprout recommend quite a few engagement, conversion and retention strategies like speeding up page load times, using various engagement hooks and improving your call-to-actions. You’ve put these conversion rate optimization hacks to use but are still not seeing the results you were hoping for?

Using chatbots to bridge the gap between your efforts and results

Bots are automated, they love making conversation and when trained well, act like visitor engagement ninjas. They go hand in hand with hacks that considerably decrease bounce rate and prevent visitors from leaving your site.

So without further ado, here’s how business owners can lower bounce rates and increase conversions on your site with a little help from chatbots:

1.Apply smart engagement hooks

Engaging your visitors is arguably the single most sure-fire way of reducing bounce rates and subsequently increasing conversions. Driving real engagement however calls for interactive content, intense A/B testing, trial, error and much more to truly establish what works and what doesn’t.

Source. Heatmap showing how the ‘crazy deals’ hook on Ebay’s landing page druves visitor engagement
Source. Heatmap showing how the ‘crazy deals’ hook on Ebay’s landing page druves visitor engagement

With messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, WeChat predominantly taking over how we communicate today, smooth conversations have come to form the crux of every successful engagement strategy.

With chatbots you can boost your engagement strategy even further and actually keep visitors hooked.

Chatbots deliver engaging customer experiences

For starters, a chatbot can ask your visitor or potential buyer what they’re looking for exactly, know their needs and in return engage them specifically based on those needs and ultimately drive them to convert. In fact, on our chat bot platform Bottr.me, users have seen a 40% rise in the average time spent by visitors on their site since they installed a bot widget on their website.

Wholefoods Fb bot in action: Uses a friendly tone to ask customer-specific questions and suggest relevant content
Wholefoods Fb bot in action: Uses a friendly tone to ask customer-specific questions and suggest relevant content
suals, etc and sure they work but with everyone using these hacks, how does your content readability actually grab a skimmer’s attention?

Bots and the Art of Storytelling

Chatbots encapsulate your content into rich micro content cards that attract easily, reduce bounce rates and improve conversions. By default, they support a clean and concise grid-like layout which is both easier to read and write.

These content cards in turn support text, images, GIFs, URLs etc which goes a long way in making your visitors linger on.When people hear or read information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later as compared to a whooping 65% when the same information is teamed with a relevant image.

3.De-clutter your Landing Pages

User experience or the lack of it more often than not drives visitors away and results in higher bounce rates.

Now you can always turn to various existing landing page formula that predict combinations of headlines, ads, pop-ups, recent post suggestions, social share buttons, etc but you must extensively test and analyze what works for your readers, your site and your landing page conversion rate before settling.

Conversion focused pop-ups are known to annoy visitors the most, especially when they’re not timed right leading visitors to leave your site with the blink of an eye.

Chatbots Create Memorable User Experiences

Bots can help your UX and bounce rates more than you realize, and are a great way to form an impression.

Unlike pop-ups, a live chatbot widget on the bottom left corner of the screen stays visible at all times without hindering a visitor’s site experience.

Remember, your chatbot knows how to chat and can always be trained to ask your visitor for their contact details in a smooth flowing conversation. It can also give them value first, get them intrigued or interested, that way your visitor won’t hesitate to submit their email ids.

4.Resolve all visitor queries and doubts

When your visitor doesn’t understand something in particular, finds it difficult to navigate on your site or wants to clarify something before say making a purchase, chances are they’re going to leave your site if they don’t get the help they’re looking for.

However you knew that already but don’t have the time or manpower to maintain a live chat, same reason why you wrote out your FAQs in the first place?

Chatbots can resolve FAQs on the fly

Now imagine if you had a virtual automated assistant showing your visitors the way and responding to all their questions in real-time.

A powerful FAQ tool, an AI chatbot will remember every piece of information you share with it and never turn a single visitor away.

iWebz’ community based learning bot on Bottr instantly answers all web hosting FAQs
iWebz’ community based learning Bot instantly answers all web hosting FAQs

Moreover, most Q&A-type bots only require you to copy paste your FAQ list into their knowledge base, could be a website URL, a document or plain text and your bot will take it from there.

To conclude:

Quite a few conventional strategies can collectively make your bounce rate lower and conversion rate higher over time but overall they require you to really brainstorm, test, test and test more.

Chatbots on the other hand are convenient and simplify the whole process of engaging incoming visitors and potential buyers on your site. Most importantly they not only reduce bounce significantly, they also reduce the effort you would have put in to drive said results.

Having said that, they’re definitely light years away from replacing us marketers but when it comes to assisting us, they could be more useful than we realise. What do you think? Can bots truly boost conversion rates?

Nidhriti Bhowmik
Digital Markerter and Chief AI evangelist at Bottr. Loves to read about bots and document it all over the internet.

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