Introduction
You have probably heard of the increasingly widespread use of Artificial Intelligence and robots in different industries. Most likely, your marketing strategy includes some automated processes through these softwares.
You already know: robots do not come to take away work, but to do our simplest tasks, also in the world of marketing.
By adding these types of tools, procedures that are long and cumbersome are carried out quickly and efficiently.
Did you ever think about incorporating a Chatbot into your Digital Marketing planning ?
If you already have some of your business tasks automated, a Chatbot can be a good way to move to the next level.
Here we bring you some of the reasons why this is a great idea.
Chatbot: What are they?
A Chatbot is a program whose automated task is to have 1 to 1 conversations with people: it is designed to reply to received messages.
They can be prepared to always reply the same thing, for example a welcome message. They are also capable of giving different answers according to the Keywords they contain and, it is even possible to add machine learning to them so that they learn with each interaction and adapt to each particular situation.
Chatbots can be simply programmed to answer simple yes or no questions, but they can also incorporate artificial intelligence and language processors.
Siri, Apple, and the Google Assistant are clear examples of some types of Chatbots.
We also find them in the automatic messages that can be programmed in WhatsApp Business, in Facebook Messenger and even in some websites, where they are always ready to answer frequently asked questions.
This indicates that there are many types of Chatbots, with a variety of potential responses. Current technology allows from simple texts, such as “yes”, to audios, videos, GIFs, etc.
Why Include Chatbots in Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
Any interaction with your customers is always welcome: having part of the automated process is a great way to grow it.
Chatbots have great value in helping you boost your Digital Marketing strategy and grow your business.
Here we bring you some of the reasons why you should include them.
“A Chatbot is a program whose automated task is to have 1-to-1 conversations with people: it is designed to respond to received messages.”
Engagement: The audience prefers them
Chatbots, first of all, serve to communicate with your audience.
They are useful to have a first and quick answer to specific questions about products or services. If a user enters your site and can’t find what they want, they probably won’t come back.
That is why attention to the public is paramount; however, we know that it is difficult to have a team dedicated exclusively to this task. A Chatbot will help you cover it.
Also, believe it or not, customers prefer to send and receive messages when contacting a brand.
An Econsultancy study shows us that not only more than 80% of users need help to complete the purchase process, but also more than 50% prefer to use chat for inquiries.
Chatbots will help you create an environment in which the user feels comfortable asking questions and accompanied in the purchase process.
For this, it is key that you configure your Chatbot in the most human way possible: write responses that represent your brand with your own voice.
Give it a name and a profile picture – most providers allow it, and it’s a nice touch to give it a friendlier, less robotic personality.
This will help the level of engagement to be much higher:
you are offering your audience a new way to communicate with your brand that will not take time away, but will increase your potential leads.
Communication fluency
Incorporating a Chatbot on your website will allow the interaction with your audience to be much more fluid, especially at the beginning of the conversation and in the response time.
One of the biggest frustrations users have is not receiving a reply on time, which often delays the purchase process.
With a Chatbot, responses will be automatic, even overnight or on non-working days.
Furthermore, by incorporating a Bot to your website, you can be the one who has the initiative, instead of waiting for the user to ask a question.
A Chatbot can act in the same way as a sales representative, greeting potential customers the moment they enter the store.
When you start the chat, you guarantee a response from the user, which moves him almost automatically through the sales funnel.
A Bot will give you the possibility to carry out this process with several clients simultaneously, regardless of the day or time, making sure that each one receives the information they need.
With these characteristics,
a Chatbot will allow your brand to have much more fluid conversations with its users.
The mechanism will make more customers engage in the purchase process and, therefore, engagement will be enhanced and you will achieve more and more interactions.
User experience
It is proven that people prefer personalized interactions, whether through announcements or chats.
To keep up with your competitors,
you need to provide the customization your customers are looking for, and Chatbots can help you achieve that.
They can be programmed to collect data as the conversation progresses and then use it with each customer. You can prepare a questionnaire, a series of questions, or a list of options to obtain specific information.
Any of these alternatives will
present the user with a series of options from which they must choose the one that is most suitable for them. With this response, the Bot collects results that make it easier for it to provide a detailed and personalized response depending on the specific situation.
You can also ask for his name and call him that during interactions. Regardless of the format you implement, with a Bot you will have multiple possibilities to customize your interaction with customers.
With this type of communication, you will make users generate a deeper relationship with your brand and, therefore, the level of engagement will grow.
Capturing User Insights
We already let you glimpse a bit in the previous section:
a Bot is an incredible way to collect information about your customers.
Best of all, if you do it right, your audience won’t feel like they’re answering a questionnaire, but rather that they are having a casual, friendly conversation with someone else.
Remember that more than half of users prefer messages as a form of communication, so they will surely be willing to chat with a Bot.
If the Chatbot provides them with a safe and comfortable space, customers can even give you personal data.
You can know what they want to buy and what they don’t, what their tastes and preferences are, and even what their purchase history is.
All this information is recorded and you can download it to analyze the behavior of your audience.
With a Chatbot you can collect the data you want about your users to get to know them better, depending on what you detect that your business needs.
This data will be extremely useful to adjust or continue with your marketing actions since, as you know, focusing on your audience is the key to any successful strategy.
“A Bot is an incredible way to collect information about your customers”
Qualified Leads: How Chatbots Accelerate the Sales and Marketing Funnel Closing Process
Chatbots can help you qualify your leads , leaving part of the nurturing process in their hands, which you know is usually quite exhausting.
How?
You can program your Bot with specific questions that determine where the customer is in the funnel.
If you do it right, you won’t even realize you’re not talking to a person.
Asking why the user is visiting the site is essential to know their location in the funnel .
A Chatbot is designed to collect information through messages. In this way, thanks to the interaction you have with the user, you can qualify each lead and refer it to the corresponding team.
For example, a Chatbot can split leads by asking some for their email address and putting others directly in contact with sales reps.
Knowing what stage of the sales process each lead is in will allow you to focus on those most likely to convert, which will increase the conversion rate.
Optimize your team’s time
Some of this was glimpsed in the previous points, but it is one of the greatest advantages of using Bots in your business.
Bots will help you optimize time and delegate those most repetitive and tedious tasks, such as answering the same questions over and over again.
By using this tool, your team will be freer to focus on more specific and sensitive issues, such as, for example, achieving that conversion that the Chatbot detected as a potential lead.
Chatbots: How to include them in your Marketing Strategies?
You already know how useful Chatbots are when thinking about a digital marketing strategy, but how can you include them? Here we bring you some ideas to get started.
Do a Research
For your Chatbot to perform better, you can do some research on the frequently asked questions your team receives.
The most important thing when implementing this tool is the content that it will have available to users: it must respond to their requests.
The first thing will be to distinguish the role that the Bot will have and its objective. For example, you can decide to have a Bot that fulfills the customer service function, with the purpose of helping users in the purchase process.
You must be prepared with all the answers to the possible questions. The best way to discover the latter is to consult the members of your team.
“Chatbots can help you qualify your leads, leaving part of the nurturing process in their hands.”
Research of Each Team: Generate a List of FAQs
Each of your team members could recite the most frequently asked questions from memory. That is an incredible material to program your Chatbot.
Carry out research within each team.
There are certain sectors of your business that are in constant contact with your audience and that are the ones that can most help you establish the FAQs «Frequently Asked Questions».
The
customer service team is very clear about the main doubts of customers when making a purchase.
For their part,
social media managers also receive hundreds of inquiries daily via direct messages and tags.
Finally, the
sales and marketing team has an overview of potential customer concerns as they progress through the funnel.
Another excellent way to deepen your research is to take into account the Google suggestions at the bottom of the results page; It is also useful to visit forums or community pages for which your product is intended.
Your Bot must be prepared to answer any questions your customers may have, so it is necessary to go ahead and do everything possible to make this type of interaction useful.
Create Chatflows
A Chatbot works best by having a specific series of questions to answer, with specificity and planning.
If it does not have these elements, it will be much more difficult for it to detect what the question is and, of course, what answer is required, in addition to the fact that the user experience becomes not very credible.
A chatflow will help you solve these problems.
What is it
A chatflow is a flow diagram in which, starting from the initial greeting, you build the possible directions that an interaction between your Bot and a user can have.
With a chatflow you can anticipate the ramifications that a conversation may have and anticipate the responses that you must upload to the Bot.
Whimsical is a tool that will be very useful to create a simple and easy to read diagram.
How to build it
It starts from the initial interaction: the greeting of the Bot and the possible response of the user.
Then, based on the research you have done, identify the keywords of the most frequent questions and establish what are the answers that you want the Bot to provide.
From there you can use the chatflow to cover all the possible questions that a user has when interacting with your Bot.
To enhance this tool, we have another tip to give you below.
Avoid Open Conversations
Open conversations are extremely confusing for a Bot, resulting in a bad user experience.
Unless you have access to advanced language processing software, it is best to narrow down your options.
This does not mean offering fewer alternatives,
but rather giving the customer to choose from a previously selected menu, to ensure that the Bot understands all the terms.
So instead of starting the conversation with something like “Tell me how I can help you”, you can show after the initial greeting a message that says “These are some of the most frequently asked questions”, followed by the options that the user can to choose.
In the first case, a much larger picture opens up that can be difficult to tackle; in the second, being more limited, it is possible to maintain a conversation and prevent the Bot from constantly clarifying that it did not understand the question.
With your chatflow you can have the responses to each of the options programmed: the Bot will know exactly what to respond to each time.
In this way, the relationship with users will be much more fluid and engagement will grow.
“Open conversations are extremely confusing for a Bot, which results in a bad user experience”
Customize your Chatbot according to the personality of your brand
We already said it: your Bot should not sound like such, but as the closest thing to a person who represents your brand.
In the same way that communication in social media, on your website or on your blog, your Chatbot must have your own imprint.
The way you communicate should be consistent across all channels, so your audience knows that they are always interacting with the same brand.
One of the most important aspects is the initial greeting of your Chatbot.
We mentioned before the importance of putting a name and a photo, but it is also key to let users know that they can contact a person at any time in the process.
That can be a nice touch to include in the greeting, as well as a catchy phrase or a solid question with enough options to capture as many customers as possible, no matter what stage of the funnel they are in.
Another fundamental aspect in the first message is to
make expectations very clear. The best thing is to tell the user that you are talking to a Bot, but make it clear that there is a person willing to assist you if required.
Maintaining the voice of your brand across all channels will help the audience recognize it and generate a much deeper relationship with it. This translates into loyal customers and an exponential increase in engagement.
Sell products through the Chatbot
Yes, a Chatbot can even serve you to sell your products.
You can create one that is used exclusively to support customers during the purchase process. This type of Bot interacts with them to help them find the right product and, in addition, they can checkout from there.
This type of Chatbot fulfills the same function as a sales representative when accompanying a customer in the face-to-face store.
With the help of the Chatbot, users go through the sales funnel alone: it does not take up the time of any member of the team and, additionally, the conversions that you are looking for are achieved.
Generate UTMs or exclusive Chatbot discounts
Another good practice when incorporating Chatbots into your marketing strategy is to use the data provided by this tool to check if it is working well.
This can mean many different things to each business, depending on the goals that have been set.
One way to measure the success of the Bot is
through links and codes.
Use a specific UTM for the content you link from the Chatbot,
so that you can detect it as a source of traffic for your site.
You can also
offer a special discount code for those who communicate through the Bot and then measure how many people used it to make purchases in your store.
Create polls in your messages
Finally, another way to include Chatbots in your marketing actions is to conduct surveys.
To know the performance of your brand and adjust those details that need it, it is necessary to know what customers think; however, email surveys often do not get meaningful responses.
Chatbots have very high engagement rates, which means that your surveys can have them too.
Use this tool to learn a little more in depth about your customers’ user experience.
Chatbots: Examples
Having defined the main advantages of using Chatbots and analyzed different ways of incorporating them, let’s stop at some examples.
These are some companies that you can work with to add this tool to your business strategy.
You can use them and get inspired and to incorporate this tool that will help your engagement levels grow.
Aivo
Aivo offers you a chatbots service that will allow you to provide personalized attention through the Artificial Intelligence application.
This company offers two products. On the one hand,
AgentBot , a chatbot with Conversational Artificial Intelligence that will allow you to interact with your customers in a natural way through multiple digital channels.
This bot manages the information, learns with each dialogue, and can resolve queries as they arise.
An unmissable feature of this chatbot is its conversation engine, which interprets not only specific keywords, but also informal language, typos, and even regionalisms, emojis and voice messages.
With this type of technology
the user experience acquires much more quality, by providing a relaxed, personalized and “more human” dialogue.
Also, to program it you don’t need technical knowledge. Aivo’s interface is intuitive and anyone on your team can use it.
The other product that Aivo offers is an
omnichannel live chat with AI for your sales agents . This engine will help your team members find quick answers to a client’s query.
If a user asks to speak to a person, the chatbot will quickly refer them, but with this technology they can stay in the conversation as suggestions for the sales representative. This way you will optimize the time of your team and the responses to customers will be much faster.
Chatfuel
This platform also allows you to install a chatbot without the need for technical knowledge not only on your website, but also on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
By installing one of these chatbots you will be able to start interacting in an automated way with your users and answer frequently asked questions. In this way you will get qualified leads that will help you increase sales.
Facebook Chatbot
If you still don’t use Facebook Messenger Chatbots, what are you waiting for? The site has an incredible adoption rate:
every month more than a million people use it and there are more than 100,000 Bots that you can find on the platform.
In Facebook Messenger you can use Bots to
send and receive texts, videos and even CTAs (messages that include a call to action). In addition, it is also possible to create visual templates for people to interact with your Bots.
It is key that you take this tool into account in your marketing strategy,
especially if your audience is on Facebook. Like any type of Bot, it must have its own particular purpose and you must spend enough time developing it.
Try to analyze what you want people to do with your Bot: define the path they are going to follow through it and the tasks they must complete.
It is not a matter of creating it just because you want to increase your online presence:
your goal should be to provide a valuable experience for your customers. If it’s suitable and useful for them, go ahead!
Once created, the platform allows you to promote your Facebook Messenger Bot to reach a wider audience through
web plugins, customer matching, codes and links.
Inserting a plugin on your site will encourage interaction with your customers through Facebook Messenger. In this way, those who come to your website can also use the Bot. This will bring you much more traffic and therefore increase the chances of engagement .
On the other hand, Facebook Messenger Bots incorporate
customer matching, a tool that connects you with other users in messenger, as long as you have their phone number and they have agreed to be contacted.
This provides a new possibility to approach customers in a more personalized way. When you start such a conversation, the message will come to them as a request. Thus, users have control over the bots and can select the ones they want to chat with.
Finally, this platform provides
codes and links that you can add to your website so that people can start interacting with your Chatbot.
By scanning the code with the camera, users can find you on Messenger and start chatting with your Bot – another fast and accessible way for your customers to start a conversation with you with just one click.
Facebook Chatbots have very attractive features to incorporate into your marketing strategy.
Being one of the most used social networks, it can help you significantly increase the engagement of your page through the interaction with your customers in a simple and fluid way.
But don’t forget: first check that your audience is really there.
How to create a Chatbot for Facebook? IN 15 MINUTES!
conclusion
Bots are here to stay and it’s time for you to take advantage of everything they can contribute to your marketing strategy.
This tool will help you strengthen and retain the relationship with your customers by providing a new, more direct and personalized communication channel.
Using Chatbots to facilitate processes and decrease response time is only the first stage of a process that will lead you to significantly increase your site’s engagement.
If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:
- What is a lead and how do they make you sell more?
- Engagement: what it is and how to take advantage of it
- Sales funnel: everything you need to know
- Digital Marketing: Learn Everything You Need To Know Today
- What is the conversion rate and how to calculate it?
