Marketing with Chatbots: We are living in the age of chatbots. We are already used to chatbots booking our flights, balancing our bank accounts, and resolving our claims. We ask Siri for the current weather, describe our symptoms to Healthily, and trust ChatGPT to review our software code.�
There are thousands of chatbots out there – Facebook Messenger alone hosts over 300,000 chatbots, and it is not the only platform that supports conversational software. Many customer-facing businesses implement chatbots to provide all sorts of services – product recommendations, real-time support, provision of information, claim handling, you name it.�
While serving all these undoubtedly practical purposes, chatbots can bring another benefit – they can be a marketing tool helping businesses promote their products and boost sales. Let�s see how chatbots can be used in marketing.
What Is Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot marketing is a part of the general marketing strategy that uses conversational software to achieve promotional goals – boost the brand�s awareness and recognition, increase conversions, and raise customer engagement and satisfaction. This strategy of using chatbots for marketing is not exactly new – 82% of businesses claim that chatbots are an essential component of their sales and marketing strategy.
However, if you still need to incorporate a chatbot into your marketing activities or are looking for ways to make it more effective, this post is for you.
Best Tactics for Using Chatbots for Marketing
If you are planning a marketing strategy and looking for practical digital marketing ideas, you should definitely consider using a chatbot. Read on for actionable tips and examples.
Include a Chatbot in Customer Support
Make a chatbot a member of your support team and put it on the first line of contact. Let it handle the most straightforward issues and answer the most frequent questions – in 69% of cases, they can maintain such conversations from beginning to end with no human intervention necessary. Such things as order tracking, account updates, changes of reservations, as well as various information queries can be assigned to chatbots safely.
Needless to say, this way, the time it takes the customer to resolve their issue is reduced greatly, which contributes to raising the general level of satisfaction. Add a chatbot to your website or social media page and let it greet customers when they visit and browse for information. Moreover, since a chatbot is just a piece of code, it is there 24/7 providing service to people in all time zones and even when your team is on their well-deserved weekend break. See, for example, the chatbot on the Dollar Shave Club website, which not only helps with customers� requests but also informs when the team is going to be back online:
Use a Chatbot for Lead Generation
If you include a contact form in the chatbot script, it can become a source of leads that you can further pursue in email marketing campaigns. The emails you get from the chatbot help to grow your customer base and allow you to target your campaigns more precisely.
If you need assistance in setting up effective chatbot scripts, choose a customer service platform that supports chatbot creation and offers a chatbot builder (well, Zendesk springs to mind). Yet, many tools have such options. Thus, you might want to check if Zendesk competitors provide those (trust me, it’ll save a penny or two). For instance, HelpCrunch includes an intuitive drag-and-drop editor where you can compose and test your chatbot script or use pre-made templates for the best results.
Offer Personalized Recommendations Through the Chatbot
A chatbot can �look up� the user�s shopping or browsing history and make product recommendations based on the orders the user made previously. Social media chatbots can also build recommendations derived from the user�s personal data shared in their account. For example, the address or location can be the base for a local special offer or an offline event.
Some chatbots can suggest products in a real-time conversation in response to the information the customer provides. They ask you directly what you are looking for and recommend the items that match your inquiry best.
This technique is used in the H&M chatbot that can help you browse the vast stock of this clothing retailer. It asks you for some keywords and then redirects you to an online store page already filtered according to your input.
Deliver Interactive Content
You can use a chatbot to implement engaging interactive techniques, such as quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, or subscription forms. Based on the user�s answers, the bot can provide personalized content with product recommendations. It can have all kinds of formats – links to web pages, e-books, reports, or whitepapers the user subscribed for, and so on.
More advanced chatbots based on artificial intelligence and augmented reality can offer immediate custom content intended specifically for the current use. Such chatbots are, most often, found in the beauty and healthcare industries, where they provide makeover or diagnostics suggestions.
For example, Youper, a mental health chatbot, not only offers support in a real-time chat but also creates personal reports for the user showing their current state and progress.
Collect Feedback via a Chatbot
If you add a feedback widget to your chatbot, you will be able to collect your customers� reviews and ratings of their interactions with your brand. When the customer is about to close the chat, the bot might ask them to rate their experiences.
Such a technique of obtaining feedback is almost non-intrusive as it asks the user for just a couple of minutes of their time. However, the data you can get from it may be valuable. When processed together with other analytics gathered from different sources, it might reveal issues that need attention and highlight areas where users are quite happy with your business.
The Facebook Messenger bot of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines suggests to rate their service after an interaction. When all the information has been provided, the customer can share their feedback, if they want to.
Use a Chatbot to Engage Customers on Social Media
If you are using a social media chatbot, for example, a chatbot running on Facebook Messenger, you can leverage it to attract customers to your social media page and turn them into your followers.
Of course, the primary purpose of the chatbot must be service – answering questions, assisting with issues, or serving as another channel of online shopping. However, it is also a great chance to enhance your social media follower base. If your chatbot offers useful service and creates positive experiences, it may be a natural next step for the customer to follow you on social media.
This way, you are getting another opportunity to communicate with your audience and deliver notifications, announcements, and reminders via the social media bot. For the customer, the chatbot remains a convenient vehicle for reaching out, if they are looking for support or want to shop with you again. If you are planning a social media campaign, you might want to consider a chatbot as one of its essential components.
Adobe, for example, maintains a Facebook Messenger chatbot offering a variety of help topics. The page already has 1.4 million subscribers, and more may come from the support bot, too.
Create Marketing Materials Based on Chatbot Interactions
Analyzing the questions that customers pose to the chatbot, you can identify the topics and issues that occur the most frequently. This analysis may suggest new subjects for your marketing materials.
If, for example, you are getting many questions about how to get started with the product, the first thing you need to do is review your onboarding guide. However, it may be a good idea to create and publish a special piece of content explaining how to begin using your product. Depending on your specifics, it may be a blog post, a page in your knowledge base, or even a video tutorial.
Similarly, if you see many conversations about your payment or delivery conditions, review your website content and check that these important details can be found easily and are written clearly.
By maintaining proper self-service resources, you are, on the one hand, reducing the load on your support team and, on the other hand, improving the overall customer satisfaction rate. Customers love it when they can resolve their issues independently, and as many as 70% of them expect to see self-service content on a company�s website. Therefore, use the data from your chatbot history to create or improve your content.
Make the Chatbot Your Customer�s Personal Assistant
Set a goal to create a chatbot that is not just one of the channels for customers to contact you but, rather, the first thing they reach out for when they need your services. Turn it into a personal assistant that can answer questions, resolve issues, make appointments, send reminders, and do basic operations.
For inspiration, check out MOBA, a virtual assistant of HSBC Bank. The chatbot on the bank�s website offers quite a variety of digital services that you can get right in the chat window, which creates a very convenient service for bank clients. They can resolve their issues quickly and easily and this easiness becomes associated with the chatbot. Next time, when the customer needs some basic service, the chatbot will be their first stop.
Conclusion
Nowadays, it is no longer easy to separate �marketing� activities from �non-marketing� ones. Everything that is customer-centric works for marketing. From this point of view, chatbots are extremely marketing-oriented, and when designed correctly, they can contribute a lot to the expansion of your audience and the strength of your brand.
Hope our tips on how to use chatbots for marketing help you set up this versatile tool for the maximum advantage.