How to use a chatbot for Ramadan to boost booking conversion
Food-related queries increase by 120% in Malaysia and 220% in Indonesia during Ramadan.
With the month of Ramadan around the corner, bookings and appointments, especially for restaurants and beauty salons, are bound to rise. Chatbot solutions are often used to assist and improve the quality of customer service, especially when it comes to managing bookings and appointments or attending to customer enquiries. No matter if it’s to automate the flow of conversations on apps or websites, or to save up manpower and increase efficiency, a chatbot can play a significant role in increasing conversions while allowing teams to focus on more varied and creative tasks. This is why businesses should learn to take full advantage of a chatbot for Ramadan as part of their Ramadan marketing campaigns to maximise online sales.
What are some shopping trends during the month of Ramadan?
Ramadan is the best time for promotions and discounts, and as Muslims prepare to welcome Hari Raya for brand new beginnings, they tend to spend more time browsing through social media. They are also more likely to make bookings at restaurants to break fast (iftar), or get an appointment at a beauty salon as Raya nears.
According to research, website traffic and e-commerce sales increased 3 weeks before Ramadan and spiked during the third and fourth week, with a surge of 110% and 77% respectively. Malaysia and Indonesia also observed greater traction during the month of Ramadan, increasing by 106% compared to previous years. Even during the pandemic, Ramadan kept its position as the highest spending window, with $38.5 trillion achieved for just gifts and groceries.
The data just further proves the importance of incorporating technological innovations such as a chatbot for Ramadan to cope with the rising demand when Ramadan arrives.
Why use a chatbot for your business during the month of Ramadan?
Attend to customer enquiries or leads from Ramadan social media campaigns faster with more accuracy
When a lead comes in from your Ramadan social media campaigns, a chatbot for Ramadan can also offer appropriate assistance to guide the potential customer through product discovery to conversion. Chatbots can also help with answering customer queries and providing accurate information quickly and efficiently. This ensures that customers get the help they need quickly and improves customer satisfaction.
Efficient working hours during the month of Ramadan
Take advantage of the fact that chatbots are active 24/7. During the month of Ramadan, customers might send enquiries at odd hours, such as 4 am during sahur or 11 pm after they are done with iftar and preparing for the next day. Having a chatbot for Ramadan ensures that customers can interact with your brand anytime they want. This will improve work efficiency and reduce the customer waiting time, other than making sure that your customer support team has more time to attend to more complicated requests.
Personalised experience for your Ramadan digital campaign ideas
A chatbot can help in personalising your Ramadan marketing campaigns by collecting customer data and making product recommendations accordingly. With personalised messages and interactions, your customers can develop a closer relationship with your brand. With better customer relationships comes greater brand confidence. Your customers can then make buying decisions more often and encourage them to return for more.
Cost-effective appointment booking chatbot
Finding ways to make the most our your company budget? By providing instant responses 24/7, a chatbot for Ramadan can save on human resources so the customer support team can focus more on dealing with angry customers and upselling your products, instead of just spending time answering repetitive questions. With an automated appointment booking chatbot in place, you won’t have to worry about missing orders or reservations due to unanswered calls.
What do you need before using a chatbot for Ramadan?
To make sure that your chatbot for Ramadan or appointment booking chatbot runs smoothly and achieves the goals of your Ramadan business ideas, follow the checklist below:
1. Define the objectives of your Ramadan business ideas
What do you plan to achieve with your Ramadan business ideas? Is it to increase Ramadan sales for your restaurant by 30% using an appointment booking chatbot? Make sure to set realistic, achievable targets with numbers to measure the success of your Ramadan business activities.
2. Understanding your Ramadan customers as your target audience
Find out the best time to interact with your Ramadan customers and understand their purchasing behaviour. Start from something as simple as sending Ramadan wishes to clients to build customer relationships.
3. Choosing the right platform for your chatbot solutions
Use the communication channels that are most preferred by your Ramadan customers, or even better incorporate an omnichannel inbox for your customers to reach out to you on whatever messaging channel they prefer. Set up an automated flow for your live chat support on as many social channels as possible to make it convenient for your customers.
4. Creating the scenarios you’ll need for your Ramadan customer interactions
Map out the scenarios for your Ramadan marketing campaigns or common customer enquiries. That is the best way to ensure a smooth chatbot flow to satisfy your customers.
5. Test and track the metrics from your interactions with Ramadan customers
Test if your chatbot for Ramadan is running smoothly and logically. Get other people to help, so that you can get an outsider’s opinion. Make sure to also track the metrics of the customer interactions of those who engaged with your chatbot. Find the problem to make constant improvements.
Choosing the best chatbot to manage your Ramadan bookings and appointments
When preparing your business for the upcoming surge of Ramadan bookings, knowing which social channel your audience is active on is one of the key aspects in determining the right chatbot platform for your business.
If you have a large customer base, it is always better to provide as many channels as possible. With the appropriate flow and automation, you will only benefit from the chatbot for Ramadan set up on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and more.
Here’s a summarised comparison of having your chatbot solution set up on various platforms:
Of course, not all businesses have to incorporate chatbots for Ramadan on all of these social channels, as an advanced chatbot solution on WhatsApp Business API may be taxing for a small business in the neighbourhood.
However, if you’re an enterprise or medium-sized business looking to scale quickly, the WhatsApp chatbot solution is a great option to boost sales and conversions.
Using a chatbot to manage bookings and appointments during the month of Ramadan
Businesses in the F&B, beauty and wellness, and retail industries will definitely find a chatbot for Ramadan relevant and effective for their work operations. Some scenarios illustrated can be seen below:
Scenario 1: a restaurant with online reservations for Ramadan
Restaurants generally experience a significant increase in orders during Ramadan, making an online reservation system one of the solutions.
A chatbot for Ramadan can help simplify your reservation process, allowing your business to make reservations or table bookings. This way, you can avoid having a long queue of walk-in customers outside the restaurant and losing customers due to the long wait.
If you want to attract customers who still haven’t made up their minds about making the online reservation, you can set up your chatbot flow to include sharing the Ramadan menu, where you can use the art of food seduction to lure them using pictures of food. You can offer them the option to speak directly to your customer support team if the above still does not work.
Example of a chatbot for Ramadan used by a restaurant
See how Le Dessert, the number one online pâtisserie in Hong Kong, doubled their sales while taking orders using the WhatsApp chatbot.
Scenario 2: a beauty salon that offers Ramadan discounts with online appointments
Businesses from the beauty and wellness industry may receive more appointments as female customers go for grooming and beauty to pass time before breaking fast. To bring in more customers during the month of Ramadan, beauty salons can organise Ramadan marketing campaigns with limited-time promotions to create a sense of urgency for customers.
On Facebook and Instagram, beauty salons can make good use of click to WhatsApp ads to direct customers to the WhatsApp chatbot, where the automated flow is triggered for them to make an appointment immediately using a discount code.
Example of a chatbot for Ramadan used by a beauty salon
Scenario 3: a hamper supplier that takes pre-orders for Ramadan gifts
Along with Ramadan wishes to clients, businesses often provide hampers as a gift of courtesy. As a hamper supplier, you must be having an overwhelming number of enquiries during the month of Ramadan.
To boost your hamper sales, you can incorporate a combination of a chatbot for Ramadan and CRM integration to ensure that you recognise returning customers. Using s structured system of customer segmentation, you can even create ads or Ramadan marketing campaigns and send WhatsApp broadcast messages to those who purchased from you last year.
Once they place their order from your booking chatbot, you can provide order statuses and shipping updates on your package delivery by automating personalised messages. This will save you time and effort so that you get more capacity to close more deals with other customers.
Example of a chatbot for Ramadan used by a hamper supplier
SleekFlow's chatbot turns automated responses into a 2-way conversation. It is much easier to build a one-on-one relationship on WhatsApp than other methods, such as SMS.
Joyce Tse
LUBUDS Group Assistant Marketing Manager
See more examples of automated flows from big brands like Bulan Bintang, Mudah.my, and more.
Boost booking conversion rate with a chatbot for Ramadan on SleekFlow
A chatbot for Ramadan, as shown in the examples above, is great for boosting the conversion rate for your booking and appointments. With an effective appointment booking chatbot, you are more likely to accelerate lead conversions. You can also increase efficiency, save costs and better utilise your manpower.
On SleekFlow, you can get the best chatbot for your Ramadan business ideas along with a wide range of features:
Free no-code live chat widget for your live chat support on e-commerce sites
Free automated comment and chat replies on Facebook and Instagram for your Ramadan social media campaigns
Automated settings on all customer-preferred messaging channels
Stripe integration for In-chat payment links to encourage impulse purchases
CRM integrations to keep track of returning customers from Ramadan last year
Broadcast messages on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to engage Ramadan customers at the right time
Detailed messaging analytics to measure the performance of campaigns and interactions on various channels
Be prepared for Ramadan. Get real results with SleekFlow Chatbot today.
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