Grabbing new communication methods and more enagaing channels of marketing is always a need for every marketer. So, firstly in this chatbots marketing strategy and guide, let’s first talk about what are chatbots? Here we go….
What are Chatbots? – Chatbots Marketing Guide
There is nothing complicated about chatbots, they are just a set of code, basically a computer program which automates certail tasks for you as directed by developer or coder. These bots are powered by artifical intelligence technology which helps them in understanding complex requests, personalized reponses and improved resposes over the time.
For example: You can set some questions and their answers in your chatbot which are frequently asked by customers. What will happen is that you no longer have to manually answer customer FAQs. They will choose the FAQ in chatbot and get their answer instantly. Still for the questions which are not yet programmed in chatbot, you can also ask customers to leave query and email address, so you can contact them later.These bots can also be integrated with existing platforms like facebook messenger, whatsapp, wechat and Viber. In simple words, bots makes your task simpler with automated assistance to customers with predefined instructions.
Here is a Chatbot Example, This is how it works:
Complete Guide to Chatbots Marketing
Our experience with chatbots has been like, some makes us happy and some freaks us out. It all depends on how you have programmed it. These chatbots aren’t here to take over the world with automation but to make tasks easier for marketer by providing better communication operations with less or no human interaction. In this chatbots marketing guide, we will be telling you about how to leverage these chatbots in order to benefit your business or purposes. You can save your time by using chatbots and spend it over something else in order to make your business better.
In order to try chatbots, we’ve worked with collect.chat which is an interactive chatbot solution for websites. Websites like Airbnb, Canada Startups, Bank of Bhutan, amcat and Paysack are using collect.chat for their purposes. You can try create a free account and use it on your website.
Chatbots can be programmed to respond according to the queries and specific keywords. Chatbots are capable of understanding different situations and giving response accordingly.
Facebook recently have released a set of data in which they have mentioned the value bots for businesses. These are some metrics which are mentioned in that facebook data:
- There are nearly 2 billion mesages sent monthly between people and businesses.
- 56% people prefer to message instead of calling customer care.
- 53% of businesses prefer to shop businesses with which they are in regular touch through messaging or any other medium, but messaging tends to be easier and profitable.
Chatbots are not the new thing in market, it is quite old but is now gaining momentum. Here is a graph of google trends showing interest of people and businesses in chatbots over last 5 years:
Predicted Uses of Chatbots
There are a lot of uses and purposes of chatbots. What do you predict that for what purpose you will use chatbots for? Let’s find out answer of this question through 2018 State of Chatbots report prepared by Drift, Audience, Salesforce and MyClever. Here are the predicted uses of chatbots:
- Getting a quick answer in an emergency – 37%
- Resolving a complaint or problem – 35%
- Getting detailed answers or explainations – 35%
- Finding a human customer service assistant – 34%
- Making a reservation – 33%
- Paying a bill – 29%
- Buying a basic item – 27%
- Getting ideas and inspiration for purchases – 22%
- Adding yourself to a mailing list or newsletter – 22%
- Communicating with multiple brands using one platform – 18%
- None of the above – 14%
- Buying expensive product – 13%
What Customers want from Chatbots?
There are various reasons and purposes about what customers want from chatbots as you saw in the state of chatbots report above. Some key things about what customers are looking from chatbots are:
- Quick answer to the questions.
- Getting a problem or complaint resolved.
- Get more detailed answer to a query.
- Finding a human customer service agent.
For you, the purpose of having a chatbot will be time saving, success and more sales.
Value of Chabots
In order to be a competitive business in this modern era, you need to automate processes of your business as much as you can. This will make you save time and spend it more on innovation instead of just getting revolved around daily tasks. An example of this is self-checkout at grocery stores.
Amazon recetly have launched a store without any human cashier. Below we have mentioned 5 major benefits you will be getting to your business with usign chatbots:
Saving of Money and Time
Automation of a process which usually requires involvement of an employee will obviously save money for your business. These funds can be allocated to some other efforts of your business. Also, if you are having some employees which are managing multiple tasks which includes customer interaction too, then you can save their effort and let them focus on other important tasks. You can save countless hours by automating process with chatbots.
Generate Leads & Revenue on Autopilot
Chatbots are capable of sending one to one messages to the visitors visiting your website. One important question which is to be generally asked is why people are visiting your website? Chatbot will do this for you on autopilot. Chatbots allows users to start initial conversation without any human interaction.
Chatbot helps in delivering qualified leads to the sales company and also reduces involvement of humans. Leads are generated in more quantity and in less cost.
Initiate Conversations for Better Outcomes
Most of the visitors don’t actually know where to look for the information they are looking for. Sometimes, people come to your website by just your brand name. They just want to explore your website and serices, but it is hard for them to get to the pages containing information they are looking for. Chatbot, by asking a serier of questions can redirect them or guider them towards the exact information they are looking for.
Some of the initial questions which a bot can ask will be:
- What problem are you trying to solve?
- What are your goals?
- Where are you located?
- What industry are you in?
- Would you like personal support?
- What are you searching for?
- Would you like to talk to a human on call?
- Would you like us to keep you updated?
- What is your purpose of visiting us?
This will save customer’s time and gives them a personal touch. Customer will feel like they are personally connected to you and more likely to give you conversion or sales. Also, it will grow your brand value and trust. This will lead your business towards a better customer experience.
Off-Hours Support
Off hour support is lacking with a lot of business. When you are not available, like if your company works on a 12 hours schedule, then there will be no one to assist the users which are coming on off-hours. So, what you can do is, you can put set of questions and information which are frequently asked by visitors. When someone visit your website in off-hours, they will find this chatbot over there, they can get answer to their questions from it or even they can write down their query and send it to you so that you can contact them later.
So, we have talked about what are chatbots, what are uses of it, how it can benefit your business and what customers want from chatbots in this chatbots marketing guide so far. Now it’s time to start with working on chatbots. So, let’s start now.
Getting Started with Chatbots
Now as you are ready to create your own bot. Just forget about the fear of a bot assisting you. Focus on what values it will provider users and think about the time you’ll save and how more enagaging your business will be even without human involvence. Here are the steps about starting with chatbots for your business and automate your marketing efforts.
Define Your Objectives and Use Different Cases
There is a huge range of interesting cases and objectives for which you can use bots. It is hard to narrow down a specific goal of a chatbot. So, take your time and findout what are the purposes and cases you can use chatbot for.
Like, are you looking to solve a problem? Promoting a new product? Generating quality leads? In order to findout these, talk with your marketing team. Or, you can ask us in comments section below.
If your team says that they are not able to leverage all the channels by themselves, then chatbots will leverage those channels without fatigue. Also, if you are getting low conversion rates, then chabots probably can increase it. Whatever the case will be, use your mind and think about your goal.
Platforms to Leverage for Business Growth
Your conversation and initialization messages will depend on pages, network and channel you are using chatbot on. Three main considerable platforms are:
- Your Website
- Facebook Messenger
- Twitter DM
People visiting your website will be more known to your product instead of people coming on your blog or social media page. So, we need to configure chatbots according to the page it is being used on. Each social media platform serves to a different audience of different demographics. So, your bot will be programmed according to the platform on which you are going to place it.
It is always suggested that you must study your audience carefully so that you can create best and customized content for them. This will help in establishing a better understanding between you and cutstomers which directly results in better sales and conversion.
Build Content Strategy for Your Audience
Now as you have studied your audience. It’s time to build content strategy for your audience. You need to prepare content which you will be putting into chatbots on different platforms according to the need.
Start with frequently asked questions. Think about what are those questions which are frequently asked by customers and those you need your chatbot to ask them when they visit or try to connect. Now with that questions, prepare complete and helpful answers.
If you are not sure about the FAQs then talk with different departments in your company that interacts with customers. Ask your sales team, customer service team and marketing team. Otherthan these, you can also research on quora, just search about your topic or words related to your concern, you will get a lot of questions which you can consider for content building strategy.
Design Your Bot & It’s Personality
Well, as mentioned earlier, you can easily signup for chatbot software. Benefit for purchasing a pre-built chatbot will be that you don’t need to put time in creating one. Chatbot is already developed by team of experts in different departments to fulfill your purposes. If you do have a team which can do this work for you, then you must go with them.
A lot of companies gives their bots a name which is visible to visitors, this provides complete transparency to the visitor. Despite of transparency, there might be disadvantage of it. Not everyone likes to be guided by a bot, they may be looking for human interaction.
Make sure to take help from expert copyrighters in order to create content copies for bots. This will give your bot a very clear, guided and understanding content to send to visitors.
Draft a Perfect Opening Message
Welcome message is a very important part of a chatbot conversation. Your customer engagement will depend over you welcome message. Your opening message must inspiring, setting expectations and asking questions.
Insipire
Creating a robot to interact with customers doesn’t mean to make it all robotic. Make sure to draft your opening meesage in such a way that it inspire user to take interest in conversation.
Setting Expectations
Your should let your customer know that they are talking to a robot so they can be sure about limitations in conversation. And importantly, let your customers know about when they will be talking to a human.
Asking Questions
Try to ask a question relating to helping customer in your initial message. Don’t explain about your company. Tell little about your services and much include a question which leads them to engage in conversation. Try to make things relevant and engaging.
Make Conversation in a Series
Your conversations and messages must be in a series. Every question must be pre defined with all the possible answers and different cases. Simply, bot must know what to answer on a specific question and must be capable of counter questions. Although things will be pre-defined, so programme it well so it won’t such to the customers.
You can use google drawings to prepare a map of your conversations. Here you can access google drawings. Below we have given an illustration of series of conversation created with google drawings. Make sure to arrange each conversation with best possible responses. Create multiple responses depending on customer response. Create all conversation maps for each department and with all possible questions and answers.
Add Visuals to Your Chatbot Messages
You can make your messages more compelling by adding visual gifs and emoticons
Drive Results with CTAs
You can drive better results with call to actions. Once the user has answered all the questions and reached the conclusion, give them a CTA so that they can be finally redirected to a perfect page where you can meet goal. It will help you in getting user specific goals.
CTAs can be used to redirect users to a specific page or product. Or you can ask them for sharing your product or service if they like it using social media CTA buttons.
Test Your Chatbot
Once you have followed all the steps mentioned in this chatbots marketing guide, ask each and every member of your team to test it. Checkout all the scenarios and conditions you have put in chatbot to see if everything is working fine or not.
Publish Your Chatbot
Now as you have tested everything and now you are ready to publish your chatbot. Analyse performance of live chatbot for 7 days. If you are not getting decent results then don’t hesitate to ask a chatbot expert. You can comment down below regarding this and we’ll help you out.
Chatbots for Websites
From a long time, we have seen live chat option on a lot of websites. Live chat requires a human online 24*7 to assist customers. A lot of times, there is no person to assist and many times we see chats offline for a lot of time. So, chatbots are the solution of this. Chatbots are not that human friendly but if programmed well, they can perform a wide range of tasks from making bookings to answering frequently asked questions. And still, you always have the option for leaving your question when you want a human to answer it.
Why You Should have a Chatbot on Your Website?
Starting conversations with customers using a chatbot 24*7 is really a great advantage for any business. This will help you in maximizing your reach and availability to customers. Instead of asking customers to make a call to book tickets, meetings and appointments, you can assign this work to a chatbot who will do it always without fatigue.
Having a chatbot, doesn’t mean that it will do all the tasks for you. It will only do the tasks which are programmed in it and can be done on automation. Best this about chatbots is that they will be always available on your website for assisting customers.
We hove this article helped you in understanding chatbots, their usage, how to create them (do it easily with collect.chat), value of chatbots, how to draft content for chatbots and why you should have a chatbot on your website.