If you’ve ever wished you had a business assistant who didn’t cost much but took care of time-consuming tasks, good news. You probably can have that, thanks to some big improvements in the way chatbots work. Chatbots used to be good for answering only the simplest questions but now they can do a lot more. Thanks to advances in chatbot tech, a growing number of chatbot plugins and Facebook Messenger’s chat tools for business, bots can handle several important customer service and marketing tasks for you.

Here are 6 ways a chatbot can make your small business better.

1. Instant Customer Service

Nobody wants to wait for answers to basic questions about your business. With a chatbot, they don’t have to. No matter what time of day people visit your site with questions, and no matter how busy you are, chatbots can take care of those basic Q&As for you.

2. Marketing Data Collection

Chatbots are a great way to build your marketing lists. If your customers sign into the chat with their Facebook profile, you can receive their public profile data. You can also request an email address and phone number to build your marketing lists.

3. Personalized Product Recommendations

chatbots does a great job of delivering personalized recommendations to people.

4. Help Customers Find the Products They Want

With the right chatbot, your customers can find what they’re looking for while they chat, without having to click around the site on their own. For example, some WordPress chatbots integrate with WooCommerce to support product searches, upsells and cross-sells within the chat feature. This creates a customer experience that’s more like in-store service than online click-and-search shopping. Why would you want customers to shop through your chatbot instead of browsing your site? Because unless a site is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use, they’d rather not. “Hard to navigate” sites were the number one frustration of online shoppers in a 2018 report. More than 1/3 of the respondents said they’d been frustrated with an online store’s navigation within the past month.

5. Remind Customers About Items in Their Shopping Cart

The average cart abandonment rate for online commerce hovers around 70%, year after frustrating year. There are a lot of factors that make customers ditch their carts, like a clunky checkout process and high shipping fees. But sometimes shoppers just get distracted, or have to get back to work, and forget there’s something they meant to buy languishing in a digital cart. Chatbots can help with that, by sending a reminder to shoppers about those products, or an invitation to ask questions, or a discount offer on the items in their cart. That can raise your conversion rates without any effort by you.

6. Send Campaigns via Email, Chat, and Text

The real power of today’s chatbots is how much data they collect and organize for business owners. When you have a chatbot that gathers Facebook Messenger information, email addresses and phone numbers, you have instant marketing lists. And when you combine that contact information with details about how those shoppers used the chatbot and your site, you have an easy way to segment those lists and create more effective campaigns. We’ve already talked about the ability of some chatbots to remarket to shoppers who’ve left items in their online cart. But you can also use your chatbot data to quickly create campaigns based on

Past purchases. Maybe 10 people bought dog crates from your store last week? Those customers might need a special offer on chew toys their pups can enjoy during crate time. Product searches in your store. Were shoppers looking for fall jackets before you had them in stock? Let them know as soon as you have them available. Questions shoppers asked your chatbot. Did a shopper spend a lot of time asking about and looking at your store’s woodworking tools? Update them whenever you have new woodworking items in stock. Some chatbots will let you send chat campaigns to your whole list or segments. Some integrate with other marketing tools so you can build email and text campaigns, too.

Now that you’ve seen how chatbots can help your small business, how do you get started? We cover that in an upcoming post that looks at the most popular and powerful chatbot plugins for WordPress, including plugins to help you integrate Facebook Messenger into your site.