Everything You Should Know About Chatbot Marketing

What is Chatbot Marketing

Chatbot Marketing is basically a means to products/services using a Bot. A Bot is nothing but a computer program designed to perform automated tasks. Chatbots can be programmed any which way as we want to perform the actions we need them to. In this case, the action being automation of direct communication with a user. 

When to use Chatbot Marketing

It is a common belief among marketers that Chatbots are good for only conversational marketing. Well, I beg to differ. The point here is that chatbots have multiple usage owing to their versatility. Easily customized & programmed, a Bot can handle - 

Order Information

Be it collecting the order from the customer, or tracking the order, a Bot can easily handle it. Be it a retail store or a grocery, chatbots can easily scale your business and level things up for you. After sales services such as order status & inquiries can also be handled by these chatbots. Imagine what an economic scalable tool it is.

Engagement

It is perhaps one of the most important factor every serious Brand looks deeply into. User Engagement. And ofcourse chatbots are a lifesaver here too. You bot can keep your visitors engaged and even improve their on screen time by showcasing offers/ features as well as sharing the latest updates.It is perhaps one of the most important factor every serious Brand looks deeply into. User Engagement. And ofcourse chatbots are a lifesaver here too. You bot can keep your visitors engaged and even improve their on screen time by showcasing offers/ features as well as sharing the latest updates.

One Machine Assistant

If you are a one man show for your business, you can definitely use an assistant right? What better than a Bot! Update your calendar? Done! Schedule a meeting? Done! Remind to renew licenses? Done! Instead of a small team doing basic tasks, your bot can do it all for you. And quite easily so.

Customer Support

One of the most widespread usage of chatbots today among various multinational brands is customer support. Being operational 24/7 that way, it can collect customer feedback, complaints, and answer their queries. And all of that for your customers across the world even as you sleep happily. Sweet!

Why to use chatbot marketing

Tons of data to play with

I am personally a big fan of data. Any smart marketer should be! Chatbots communicate directly with your customers/visitors. They know what they want, how much they want, when they want, why they want. Ask any smart marketer the value of the above sentence. Such intense information collected by chatbots of your potential/end customers is a gold mine.You can tweak your overall strategy and design your efforts focused around solving and giving what your customers really ask for.

Segmentation

Chatbots can help you segregate your customers and segment them depending on their inclination towards your product. They can easily be designed for the cases below - 

• If a person shows interest in pricing, chatbots can encourage them to make a purchase from the chat itself.
•  If a user is inquiring more about the features, chatbots can present the entire catalogue.
• If the sale has already been made but the customer is visiting for after sales service, chatbots can guide them through the process and collect basic information before diverting them to the necessary team.

Push your sales funnel

Chatbots can seamlessly guide your prospects through the sales funnel till the point the end sale has happened. Be it showing features, suggesting options or payment interface, Chatbots can incorporate it all for you and help you scale up your business.

One Time Investment

A Chatbot can work wonders for you day and night. Without a salary. Even without much upkeep. Too good to be true right? Chatbots not only save money but also an even more valuable commodity. Time. Active 24/7, they can help you serve multi time zone clients with far fewer resources and hassles when compared with traditional setup for the same requirements.

One Machine Show

Chatbots fit in any business for various requirements and processes you design it for. If that was not enough, chatbots help you reach a highly targeted audience at a largely global scale. I don't see many business owners complaining about that.

What not to do with Chatbot Marketing

Everyone do not want to chat

Chatbots work fantastically well because they let people who want to engage with representatives do so without having to call them up first. It eases the entire process and is super convenient for interested prospects. But be wary of people who do not want to engage. You clearly need to define whether chatbot conversation is necessary or just a better option.Usually for simple direct tasks like building an email list by asking for subscription emails, a pop up would work way better than a chatbot in place.Pricing, Features, Event pages should usually deploy chatbots where confusions and doubts may arise which chatbots can easily solve by engaging. There is no need for a chatbot to appear on your homepage or your about page.

Chatbots as diversions

Any shiny new toy can easily distract any kid. Same way your readers or prospects can easily be distracted away from the page you want them to actually read and spend time on if you place bots on them trying to engage with them. Chatbots are usually not ideal to be put on long form content pages which the visitor needs to actually read. This will defeat the entire purpose of chatbots. For any business, big or small, knowing where NOT to place your chatbots is extremely important.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Please understand that chatbots are strictly inbound sales tools and nothing more to it. Google Ads or other outbound marketing strategies have to be in place if you need to convert your visitors. Chatbots are only effective as long as users want to willingly engage with them. They can solve their doubts or guide them through your website. But they can never compare to outbound marketing strategies as they are not designed for that.They can not increase traffic to your site, they can only optimize your conversions from the users who are already visiting your site.

Chatbot marketing strategy

Below are the tips you can apply to put in place a solid chatbot strategy for your business. Before you actually implement a chatbot, make sure to cover the below pointers - 

Leverage FAQ’s - You can know a lot about what customers think and how they perceive your business by the questions they ask about it. Deep dive and know the FAQ’s that your users are asking when visiting your website. Feedback from your customer support team can really be insightful here.

Conversation Flow - Your chatbot should be implemented with a very clear precise goal. You want it to guide the users to a specific page or you want it to convert users to customers and needs to be defined beforehand. Anything aside from the designed task for a chatbot will not be responded well which will be very awkward for your business. Limit the options your chatbots offer and have a clear answer/forward paths for each of these options if picked by the users. When not in your conversation script, it is usually best to direct the user to your representatives.

Test your chatbots - Try the chatbot yourself and experience a conversation with it. Think how you can improve the experience further. Take insights from the users interacting with the bot in real time to optimize it.

Assure that a human is just around the corner - As with most users, give them the comfort of knowing that a user is just around the corner for them if need be. Remember not all of your customers would want to chat so this would be an ideal option to have in place for enhanced experience.

Build your chatbot subscription list - Ask your users their email addresses if they prefer communicating in future via mail. This way you can build a subscription list from your chatbot. You can share updates, news from your subscribers directly from the chatbot.

Promote your bot - You need to promote your chatbot via social media and specific landing pages to ensure more people use it. That way you can further build your subscription list as discussed above.

Types of Chatbot - social media & website

Social Media Chatbots - This comes in as no surprise with the advent of messenger apps around us. Whatsapp, Wechat have changed the way people communicate and even do business on  a daily basis. Twitter & Facebook chats can augment the user experience and give your social strategy a new dimension.

Website Chatbots - There is an increasing trend these days to use chatbots on your website. This can add value to your online business in any of the below ways -

• Ease Sales Process
• Connect with customers & prospect
• Build your subscription List
• Optimize your inbound sales

Future of Chatbot Marketing

Chatbots are here to stay. You might not want to implement it just yet but soon it may even become a necessity. With the trend that is being shown across globally, many business owners are leveraging chatbots to optimize their marketing efforts.For businesses as well as customers, chatbots can be revolutionary. They can streamline the processes, make it convenient and personalized for end customers.But overusing or rather ill using the power of bots can be disruptive in nature too. They can highly degrade the user experience which can hit your business adversely. Whether you use one or not right now is a choice every business needs to take. What is more important is how you use chatbots for greater user experience.