Chatbot marketing has genuinely taken off in popularity since platforms like Facebook and Kik made chatbot marketing automation for businesses possible. By July of the same year, Facebook had 18,000 chatbots, up from 0 in February.
In the first seven months of its chatbot, Kik’s chatbot platform saw 350,000,000 automated messages exchanged by roughly 300,000,000 registered users.
Most likely, you’ve observed chatbots in action. They may be found on a wide range of websites, including those for large retailers, mobile phone service providers, and many other categories of websites and applications.
You might initially believe you are speaking with a genuine person. A popup having a photo and the name of the agent is often displayed. The “agent” enquires, “May I assist you in any way?” Alternatively, “Do you have any questions?”
In order to address any queries, a user could have, chatbots often employ artificial intelligence that is highly complex. If the chatbot is unable to help the user, it will typically direct them to contact, email, fill out a support form, or visit a FAQ page.
Modern chatbots are highly sophisticated, and many of them can nearly make consumers believe they are conversing with a real person.
This is helpful because it enables businesses to reduce their expenses by replacing customer care workers with chatbots in many situations. Only when the chatbot is unable to help the consumer must a real agent intervene.
Although chatbots have certain disadvantages, they also offer many advantages. You will discover more about the marketing bots in this tutorial, as well as whether your company might receive help from using them.
Chatbot Marketing Benefits
Chatbots are quite helpful for a variety of uses, including basic user communication, question-answering, and even helping with the sales process.
Having fewer actual workers is one of the main advantages of adopting chatbots since they can handle many tasks that would otherwise occupy paying employees’ time. This gives paid staff more time to help clients with pressing problems and frees them up for work that is more crucial.
Customers also benefit from this since they may obtain assistance with issues and answers to queries much more quickly than they could if they ended up contacting customer support through conventional channels.
If you record and examine these discussions, you can see the kinds of customer questions that the bots are asking, which may provide you with a ton of highly useful information about your clients. Never pass up the opportunity to learn more about them through those logs.
Drawbacks of Chatbot Advertising
Chatbots do, of course, have certain disadvantages. Bots aren’t flawless, and neither are any other technologies.
The major disadvantage is that, despite its potential advancement, artificial intelligence is still not at a point where it can fully replace people.
This invariably results in not assisting clients at times, which may ultimately cause the user to get so frustrated that they quit your site. Even if it’s unlikely, you must make sure your chatbot can point clients toward life help if necessary.
You must also watch out for improperly developed bots since many of them were hurried to market in order to capitalize on the boom in chatbot usage.
It’s important to properly test your chatbot to ensure there are no issues with it that might wind up irking your clients because the cheapest way isn’t always the best.
Is it Right to Use a Chatbot for Business?
Every firm may not benefit from using chatbots. You might not need a chatbot if you discover that you rarely interact with clients on a regular basis.
On the other hand, if you do interact with consumers often, notice that many shopping carts are abandoned, or notice that your customers often have questions or want further assistance, a chatbot could be the ideal solution for your requirements.
Here are several scenarios when a chatbot might benefit your company:
- Your customer service representatives are overworked. It makes perfect sense for you to deploy a bot if you discover that your agents are overworked by the number of support requests you receive each day, especially if they are straightforward inquiries that a bot might easily handle.
- Your rate of shopping cart abandonment is high. A chatbot may be useful if you notice that many website visitors are abandoning their shopping carts or leaving your website without becoming customers or email subscribers. The chatbot can ask the visitor what went wrong when they try to leave your website and then guide them through the conversion process.
- The same queries are often raised by customers. Customer FAQ pages are rarely read, let’s face it. You may occasionally ponder the question, “Why even bother establishing a FAQ page? It appears that no one reads them. That is right. However, chatbots are a fantastic method to encourage more people to look for straightforward answers without taking up your or your agents’ time. You may program often-asked questions into your bot and let it respond to them.
- Your company’s focus is on customer service. Chatbots may be quite helpful for clients to seek assistance if you run in a field that is known for being service-centric, like the travel industry, for instance. They can also relieve some of the first work that agents might otherwise have to do.
These are only a few instances, but maybe you can start to see how a bot might work for your company.
How to Use Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot marketing strategy may be used for business in a variety of ways, and businesses are always coming up with new, creative uses for them. Let’s look at a few ways that chatbots may help your company.
Content Delivery
Many businesses are utilizing chatbot technology to present material in novel and engaging ways. Through messaging applications, websites like CNN are providing their users with engaging information.
Considering how often so many people use messenger bot applications like Facebook and Kik, it only makes sense to make content marketing to such platforms.
This enables businesses to connect with customers even if those customers don’t often visit their website.
Making Sales
Customers may now make purchases directly through chatbots from businesses like Taco Bell and Dominos using channels like Facebook Messenger or text messages.
Customers benefit from this since it’s often quicker and less annoying than phoning or using the internet, which benefits businesses like Dominos by preventing storefronts from being overrun with phone calls during busy hours.
A chatbot may help all kinds of businesses increase sales by supplying tailored product recommendations based on feedback from clients.
Customer Service
Chatbots are most often used for ordinary customer care tasks including responding to simple inquiries, offering advice, referring issues to the right departments, and more.
This is ideal for chatbots since they can be configured to provide answers to your most asked questions and spare you and your staff from having to deal with a lot of inquiries that the bot could have handled.
Additionally, chatbots can enhance the customer experience. Customers like receiving a response in a matter of seconds rather than having to submit an email and wait hours or days for a response.
According to studies, 51% of respondents think a company should provide a customer service chatbot around the clock. They no longer value businesses functioning during regular business hours.
Customer is becoming more and more elusive in the age of microwaves and overnight delivery. Who do you think customers would choose if your firm took 12 hours to respond to an email and your rival does it at 2 in the morning? To whom would they be most devoted?
Compared to email, 45.8% of individuals prefer texting when contacting businesses. They are aware that email might be sluggish. They’d rather employ a technique that produces outcomes more quickly and easily.
49.5 percent would choose texting over the phone to get in touch with a business. Nobody likes being placed on hold, and some individuals detest making phone calls. Those folks find messaging to be simpler.
The fact is that people desire chatbots. They save them time and frustration, and you also save time and money as a result. It helps both parties.
Chatbot Marketing Solutions
Many chatbot marketing agency products are already available on the global chatbot market. While some products have been clearly rushed to market and are full of flaws that will annoy you and your clients, others are incredibly effective.
Here is some chatbot marketing tool that is now available and regarded as being of high quality.
ChattyPeople
One of the most well-liked chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform, the chattypeople platform also integrates with Facebook comments. With a 30-day free trial and an ongoing free plan for fewer than 100 clients, they are amazingly economical.
You can even sell goods straight to clients through Facebook using the chattypeople platform and payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal.
Botsify
Another well-known platform that supports the Facebook Messenger chatbot is Botsify, which also offers a version that functions on your website.
Their premium plans (which may be used on a website) start at a relatively affordable $10 per month, but their free plan (available just for Facebook Messenger) has a lot of features.
Additionally, Botsify permits human takeover at any moment, so you may intervene if the chatbot is unable to help the consumer effectively.
ChitChatChimp
ChitChatChimp is in a strong position to become a leader in the chatbot market. It enables anybody, even those without any programming experience, to build their own chatbot.
Any kind of bot may be made with it, including:
- Customer Support Bots
- Sales Bots
- Research-gathering Bots
- Educational Bots
- Entertaining Bots
The best choice for you is certainly ChitChatChimp if you need something adaptable and affordable.
Conclusion
Even the most well-staffed organization is rarely able to give real-time interaction that is available at once as chatbots can.
While chatbots can’t take the job of every employee, they can help you reduce the number of times your support personnel must respond to simple inquiries because clients don’t read the FAQs or overlook information on the sales pages.
Additionally, they may offer client feedback that will enable you to simplify your sales and potential customer care procedures and make things simpler for prospective customers.
Give it a try if your company fits one of the categories of companies that could find a bot beneficial or even if you just believe a bot would be a good match. Even if nothing else, you could learn some useful details about your clients.
Chatbots are quite helpful for a variety of uses, including basic user communication, question-answering, and even helping with the sales process.
Having fewer actual workers is one of the main advantages of adopting chatbots since they can handle many tasks that would otherwise occupy paying employees’ time. This gives paid staff more time to help clients with pressing problems and frees them up for work that is more crucial.
Customers benefit from this since they may obtain assistance with issues and answers to queries much more quickly than they could if they ended up contacting customer support through conventional channels.
If you record and examine these discussions, you can see the kinds of customer questions that the bots are asking, which may provide you with a ton of highly useful information about your clients. Never pass up the opportunity to learn more about them through those logs.
Here is some chatbot marketing tool that is now available and regarded as being of high quality: ChattyPeople, Botsify, and ChitChatChimp.