A tale of two stores
Imagine you’re in a big store, all alone—just you and a self-checkout machine.
There’s no one around to care if you buy something or not, if you have questions, or if you’re able to find what you’re looking for. There’s no one to say anything if you leave, and no one cares if you ever come back. How likely are you to make a purchase there?
Unlikely. Unless you have an urgent need or one of their products really strikes you, you’re not incentivized to buy. You’re not being engaged or assisted, and it’s not an enjoyable or memorable shopping experience.
Now, let’s imagine you move on to another store. At this one, they’ve employed someone friendly and helpful to be immediately available for any questions you may have about the products.
It’s not an overbearing sales associate who pressures you into buying. It’s just someone who pops up at the right time—when you need them—yet gives you space to browse at your own pace. Someone whose one goal is to help you find the right product for you.
In fact, it’ll bother this employee if you leave unsatisfied without getting what you like or need. To bring you back, this employee might even knock a few dollars off the price. His purpose is to send you home with a great product that suits your needs.
How likely are you to make a purchase there? If you’re like most consumers, much more so.
Bringing conversation back to commerce
The first example represents the shopping experience at most ecommerce stores today. The second represents what the eCommerce shopping experience can be.
Bringing conversation back to commerce is the future. Do it now, and you’ll be ahead of most—if not all—of your competitors. Your customers will enjoy themselves more and buy more, and your conversions will skyrocket.
Here’s the best part: It’s lots easier to do this than you might imagine. We’ve got two tools to share that can help you provide this kind of exemplary experience for your Shopify-store visitors.
These two tools are each designed for a different stage of the funnel, but they share one goal: minimize abandoned carts. One focuses on preventing abandoned carts in the first place, which your customers are still onsite browsing. The other tool helps bring customers that are long gone back to your store, so you can close the deal.
Why do shoppers abandon carts?
First things first: What makes shoppers abandon their carts? Why is the average abandoned cart rate for ecommerce so high—69.57%?
It’s just like we said: Most stores aren’t giving prospects reasons to stay, or to come back. And some are even giving them reasons to leave.
But before we introduce the tools that’ll get shoppers to stay or come back, you’ve got to make sure you’re not driving them away in the first place.
Here are the top three reasons people abandon online carts:
- Extra costs are too high (shipping, fees, taxes, etc.)
- Site forces you to create an account
- Checkout process is too long or complicated
To remedy the first one, consider offering free shipping. It doesn’t mean your bottom line has to suffer. You can build it into the price of your items. The words free shipping have a psychological effect that tends to make people more likely to buy, even if the total ends up being the same anyway.
To solve the second two, focus on optimizing your site and checkout process to make the customer experience as simple and smooth as possible. One abandoned cart study says that the average, large-sized e-commerce website can increase their conversion rate by 35.26% with better checkout design alone.
Focus on creating a great user experience on your website. Test it, get feedback and gather data, and iterate until it’s the best it can be.
Tool #1: Avoid abandoned carts with Gobot
Gobot focuses on converting visitors while they’re still on your site. You can set Gobot to be triggered into action two different ways:
When a user clicks the widget. You can have an initial message appear from the bot in the corner of your website. It can offer assistance (Need help?) or even a discount (Get 10% off!), and will expand into a chat window with your bot when a visitor clicks.
Based on a user-behavior trigger. Or, you can have your bot pop up automatically based on how users behave on your site. If they’ve been on your FAQ page too long, it can pop up and offer help. If they’ve added particular products to their cart, it can appear with a discount code or an upsell. Or, it can pop up whenever the user opens or closes their cart—more on this below.
What Gobot can do
Whether you set it to appear as a button/tab or only pop up based on certain triggers, Gobot will help minimize abandoned carts and maximize conversions. It can:
- Answer questions.
- Help users find the right products via guided selling.
- Incentivize action.
- Increase engagement.
- Collect feedback.
- Gather emails.
#1. Answer questions.
Gobot can answer FAQs, whether the visitor clicks the icon or the bot is triggered by an action. It can respond to everything from general questions about your brand or policies to specific questions about the status of their order. There are three benefits to this function:
- The shopper gets an instant answer—no waiting around for a response.
- Your support reps save time, since they only need to jump in when requested.
- Help avoid cart abandonment by making sure visitors have everything they need to pull the trigger and buy.
Caption: Gobot can answer FAQs, whether they’re generic or related to a specific product or order.
#2. Help users find the right products via guided selling
As we talked about before, there’s nothing like attention from a knowledgeable sales assistant to move a customer toward a purchase via guide selling (conversational search). Gobot plays this role well.
Customers can click Gobot to ask for help finding a product. Or, it can pop up based on preset triggers—like if the user spends a certain amount of time on your site without buying. From there, Gobot can answer product questions, or inquire as to the user’s preferences and suggest relevant items. It can even upsell and cross-sell, but in a helpful way that customers appreciate.
Caption: Gobot can appear on your website to guide users through the purchase process.
#3. Incentivize action.
A limited-time, personalized discount offered on the spot can be just the ticket to convincing an undecided user to buy. Gobot can offer these at exactly the right time—based on triggers—for maximum impact.
Caption: Gobot can appear with timely offers or discounts to convince and convert hesitant shoppers.
#4. Increase engagement
It’s simple: If you can get your audience to authentically engage with your brand, they’ll be far more likely to buy from you. It’s the principle conversational marketing is built on, and precisely why bots are exploding in popularity for ecommerce merchants.
By making personalized recommendations, answering questions, and even cracking jokes, friendly Gobot draws visitors in and interacts with them in a meaningful way. Plus, Gobot can collect user emails in the chat and get permission to contact them later. That way, you’ll be able to re-engage them again in the future.
#5. Collect feedback
Gobot is great at collecting feedback from visitors in its easy, conversational style.
Gobot can easily collect visitor feedback by engaging them in easy conversation. It’s a great way for you to uncover pain points in the checkout process or at any other step.
Caption: Gobot can quickly and easily gather useful feedback from shoppers.
#6. Gather emails
Gobot can also set you up for success even after visitors leave your store. It can gather user email addresses easily so you have a way to reach out to them in the future.
It works best when the user has an incentive to share this information. For example, if they were interested in a particular product on your site that’s out of stock, Gobot could ask for their email so you can follow up when it’s back in stock.
Caption: Use Gobot to gather visitor emails, so you can follow up with them in the future.
How to set Gobot up
Gobot is designed for ease of use. You can get a chatbot loaded on to your site in a single click! It has off-the-shelf bot templates for all of the use cases above, and more. You can also easily customize your bot using the drag-and-drop interface.
Linking Gobot to cart triggers
As we hinted at earlier, you can set Gobot to appear any time a visitor opens or closes their cart, too. It’s a uniquely effective way to reduce cart abandonment because it’s the perfect time to remind your visitors that you’re there for them. It can:
- offer to answer their questions
- walk them through the purchase process
- give out last-minute discounts
That’s how Gobot can offer 24/7 assistance to visitors when they’re most at risk for abandonment: when they’re opening or closing their cart.
Tool #2: Bring back users who abandon carts with Chatfuel’s new plugin
How it works
Chatfuel is a no-code platform for building Facebook Messenger chatbots. Their new Abandoned Cart functionality for Shopify can help ecommerce store owners recover up to 7x more revenue. It takes just minutes to set up your chatbot to send highly effective abandoned-cart reminders via Facebook Messenger.
Note that the very first step in this process is key. It’s crucial to make the opt-in that appears on your website enticing, so it will get users to connect with your brand on Messenger.
Because from there, your Facebook Messenger chatbot can do the rest. It’ll then be able to tell if the user abandons their cart, and will reach out with your custom reminders if they do. Customers get the product they wanted, and your conversions increase. Everybody wins!
Caption: Set up your Messenger chatbot to send cart-abandonment reminders to users via Facebook Messenger.
Why it’s effective
Some ecommerce brands already deliver abandoned-cart reminders via email. Send them via Messenger bot as well, and you’ll win more conversions than ever.
Content from a Messenger bot has 80% open rates on average, plus click-through rates of 20%. Facebook Messenger is a medium your business simply can’t ignore if you want to minimize abandoned carts and maximize sales.
Plus, the conversational style of your friendly Messenger chatbot can make all the difference. Cart-abandonment reminders via email are typically one-way communications from a NOREPLY email address, telling them to buy. From a Messenger bot, however, they can initiate a two-way conversation designed to help the shopper find the right item for them.
Instead of: Hey, come back and buy this, the message becomes Hey, I wanted to make sure you found what you were looking for. Did you need any help? It shows that your brand’s top priority is customer satisfaction, not just making another sale.
Minimize cart abandonment, maximize revenue
So a new prospect lands on your ecommerce store. Now’s your chance to dazzle them!
- Don’t leave visitors to browse on their own—use Gobot to engage and provide helpful guidance. Use Gobot’s ecommerce triggers to engage them just as they are adding or removing products to their cart or expressing intent to leave your site!
- Don’t let them leave and never hear from you again—use Chatfuel’s abandoned-cart plugin to get them to come back and find what they need.
Stop missing out on customers, conversions, and revenue for your Shopify store. Download Gobot and get started with Chatfuel today!
