Best Chatbots -You know the one word I keep hearing? Chatbots.
What the heck are chatbots? Turns out that best chatbots have evolved a great deal since the last time we saw them in AOL. Remember those days? When you were super bored and you would prefer to chat with an automated machine just to see what answers you could get?
These days the best chatbots are way smarter and are actually helping grow businesses like never before.
According to ChatbotMagazine, "A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface". That's probably the best definition that I've found so far for a chatbot.
What does that mean? and what does it have to do with online business?
Here are the top 5 ways to use a chatbot to grow your business, let's jump right in.
#1 - Use a chatbot to get key data
Chatbots are efficient machines that can be programmed to do any task. They could have their eyes on your entire business and calculate stuff in moments.
One example of this awesome ability is StatsBot. This chatbot integrates with Salesforce to display the most important data in seconds. It can display the areas where your business is lacking, it can display irregularities, and draft reports for you very easily.
#2 - Use a chatbot as a shopping assistant
The most common use of chatbots is in the retail business. You can use a chatbot to offer the customer an option to purchase a product through chat. Isn't that incredible?
One of the best examples of this is Nordstrom's chatbot that the company launched to help with its busy winter season sales.
Another example of this is the food bot BellyHungry which you can use to find your favorite meal. Just type in a dish you like and this amazing bot will find the closest restaurants to you that serve that dish.
#3 - Use a chatbot as a CRM
Speaking of food, there is way more to chatbots than meets the palette. Besides helping you order food and find the best restaurants out there, the best chatbots can also act as a CRM.
One example is a chatbot company that builds chatbots for restaurants. They are called Chatobook and They have templates that are super easy to set up and help you keep track of customer orders. Once a user makes an order everything gets recorded on the backend and voila!
#4 - Use a chatbot to increase your open rates to 88%
What? 80%? You gotta be kidding me.Yep, it's true. If you send out your content through a chatbot on Facebook Messenger (instead of email) you get 80% open rates. It looks so damn natural and informal that people click on it. Some claim the open rate is even at 100%.
Why Facebook Chatbots? I think this picture says it all.
You can't get this anywhere else. #chatbots #marketing pic.twitter.com/X9YewUre84- Justin Wu (@hackapreneur) October 23, 2017
I like to use ManyChat to grow a list of subscribers, build chatbot landing pages, and send out automated broadcasts.
I was doing some lightweight LinkedIn hacking the other day when I stumbled upon this neat way to build chatbot subscriber lists. So I published a post that offered a free piece of content and then funneled all the traffic to a nice looking landing page with a "Send to Messenger" button. Here is what it looked like:
If you want to see it in action click here.
I got 27 subscribers from that post. I bet you that if you use this for every single post on all of the various social media channels that you have you can get 2-3k subscribers per month very easily. 40k subscribers in one year - what do you think? Doable?
#5 - Use a chatbot as a brand ambassador
Chatbots can speak for you, and help your customers get a sense of your vibe. Only try this at home if you have an actual brand.
Disney created a special chatbot for its film Zootopia. The chatbots conducted a game with each participant where it was Judy Hoops, one of the characters in the movie, and you were supposed to help it solve a murder mystery. It looked pretty cool and was interactive too. Got my kids to stop crying for a few minutes. Now that's the best chatbot!
In Conclusion About Best Chatbots
I know you are seriously wow'ed right now. That's a lot you can do with chatbots. They are so flexible in their uses that you can literally be in any industry and benefit from having one around (and they don't make any annoying beep-bop sounds).
For a great list of what's already out there check out BotList.
Leave a comment and let me know if you are already using a chatbot, and if not which one would you create? What is your best chatbot?
Cheers =)
Ben Kazinik ( @eclincherrocks ) is an inbound marketer for eClincher , He enjoys hiking, cooking, soccer, and visiting his family around the world. Email me at - [email protected]
