Chatbots, as a relatively new technology, are a practical tool that allows companies to access their customers at a critical stage of the marketing cycle. Chatbots have developed across all industry sectors, taking on various roles and responsibilities that an ordinary user must perform manually.
According to CNBC, up to 90% of health and banking queries are expected to be handled by chatbots By 2022. 60% of millennials have used chatbots, 70% of them report positive experiences, and among millennials who have not used them, over half say they are interested in using them.[2]
Marketing and sales teams are leveraging the power of chatbots and live chat services to convert new visitors and meet their existing customers’ expectations in various ways. This article will review eleven ways chatbots can help your marketing strategy.
What is Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot Marketing is a type of marketing that uses chatbots to promote products and services and engage with potential customers to get a sale. The first chatbot (Eliza) dates back to 1966, which makes it more ancient than the internet.
Yet it wasn’t until 2016 that Facebook allowed developers to place chatbots on Messenger. And the buzz about chatbots began to fade in 2019. Since then, the chatbot industry has flourished since the pandemic.
Why Should You Integrate a Chatbot into Your Marketing Strategy?
The main advantage of a chatbot in marketing is its ease of access. They don’t need a large amount of memory, nor do they require long setup and configuration times. The user will not need to open a browser or mobile application to chat with the bot.
Here are some of the main reasons why you can use bots in your marketing strategy:
Availability
By making live chat or chatbot features available to organizations such as eCommerce marketing agencies, they reduce the waiting time of your visitors to a minimum. Chatbots can respond instantly to your visitors to encourage them to stay on your site and forward questions to a human representative in case of difficult questions.
Your visitors can get immediate, real-time answers to their questions through a one-on-one conversation with an agent or representative. Compared to traditional communication models such as phone or email, live chat and chatbots are more prominent. They are preferred by over 50% of consumers. Using chatbots is a great way to ensure your customers are available 24/7 without human intervention.
A superior customer experience
Every brand must strive to provide exceptional customer support services to build clear lines of communication between the organization and its customers. Here’s where live chat and chatbots come in handy.
While chatbots are still a little limited in providing the human element in conversations, the development of chatbots using artificial intelligence has proven to improve chatbots’ abilities to resolve complaints.
Chatbots can converse with real human beings while assessing users’ moods, empathizing, and responding to specific customer needs. Not only can chatbots provide quality information and solutions to customers, but they are also able to make their interactions fun.
Giving your chatbot a character and a touch of humor to your conversations can significantly improve customer engagement, make the discussion interactive, and increase the number of visitors, leaving a lasting impression in their minds.
Versatility
Different types of chatbots are also used in every field, from e-commerce to insurance! It is easy for you to find the one that best suits your needs. No matter your industry, you can easily tune and adapt your chatbot according to your customers’ needs.
Scalability
As your business grows, your chatbot will also grow with it, interact with thousands of visitors, and help you generate qualified leads for marketing with minimum effort.
Multilingual
Chatbots can interact with your customers worldwide in their language, creating a better customer experience and improving the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Budget
As a marketer and entrepreneur, you’ll want a communication system that is affordable and offers a good return on investment. Contact centers or phone chat rooms are costly for most businesses and need to get the desired customer satisfaction. Chatbots help satisfy your customers cost-effectively, generate leads for your business, and make you gain the trust of your existing customers.
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11 Ways Chatbots Can Help Your Marketing Strategy
1. Communicate with Website Users
Communicating with website users is one of the most common and requested actions of website chatbots, which has many benefits. As visitors come to your site, they need answers about products or services. If visitors don’t find answers, they leave the site. Surprisingly, customers like to chat.
Econsultancy found that 57% of users prefer to chat. In a survey conducted by Ubisend, half of the respondents chose to speak by email or make phone calls. That’s where bots come in.
Setting up the bot allows you to very easily create a chat environment to simulate a live chat and talk to customers without needing a dedicated sales team. You can provide your users with customer support through a chatbot and build customer relationships.
Customers will ask the chatbot how to resolve an issue related to their shopping experience or account. The customer support chatbot is always available to offer direct assistance to users, which can help gain trust by communicating with them regularly. The reason why people trust chatbots is that they are not pushy and always take into account the customer’s preferences.
Make Your Brand More Proactive
A chatbot sends a welcome notification when a person arrives on your website and takes a proactive approach to interactions with them. Your chatbot can simply greet the visitor or take it a step further by offering assistance. But to get details about your prospects, you can also ask questions such as:
– What has brought you to our website?
– Would you like to learn more about our products or services?
– What alternatives are you considering?
It allows you to initiate conversations with your customers, and increased interaction between the customer and your brand can be helpful in terms of gathering data and understanding where your prospect is in the sales funnel and positively affect your sales figures.
2. Use Chatbots to Make Website Navigation Easier
Even if your website is straightforward, some still need helps finding the content they need. The problem is even more significant if they seek a specific product or service. In this case, poor navigation can drive them away from your site. So having a chatbot as a digital assistant to your visitors becomes essential. A chatbot can offer help and guide users through the website and will maximize the chances of converting prospects into full-time buyers.
3. Lead Generation
You can use a lead generation chatbot when a new or regular user enters your website and automatically greet them. A chatbot may send a tiny ping, but it doesn’t harm visitors’ browsing experience. The small ping and chat windows are there if your visitors need help. And when you need help, you will voluntarily open the window and interact with the bot.
A chatbot can distinguish a regular visitor from a new visitor and, through conversational marketing and questionnaires, can guide them to purchase or offer a discount or particular messages to regular visitors. A lead generation chatbot will also help you better understand your most and least effective products.
To generate a lead, an e-commerce store can use a sales chatbot. Generate Leads Even When You Are Not Available Moreover, a lead generation chatbot can inform the visitor that the live chat agent is busy at that particular time and offer them the option to wait or leave their contact information to be contacted later.
Customers value their time and hate waiting – their patience runs out after 10 minutes. Instead of annoying them, please allow them to wait or be contacted later.
4. High Engagement Capability
Chatbots are unique because they engage with your customers and keep them hooked after the interactions. It means that a chatbot can retain your customers longer than any other form of marketing.
With an AI chatbot, you can make the most of any visit – such as contacting a visitor trying to leave the website or shopping carts for whatever reason. A chatbot can engage the visitor at that very moment and help solve their problems, answer their questions, or gather a lead. Your chatbot learns from interactions, sends your customers relevant information about your brand, products, and services, understands your users’ interests, and sends them relevant notifications even after the interaction.
5. Using Chatbots to Collect Customer Information
The simplest way to include different types of chatbots in your conversion strategy is to collect relevant information about the people who interact with your business. A lead generation chatbot can ask for name, email, phone, address, and other customer information. By offering autofill options, you can allow the customer to type less, speeding up the detail process.
When users talk to it, a chatbot will take polls, ask questions and quizzes to collect data, personalize the user experience, and provide offers that perfectly match a customer’s expectations. Chatbots allow you to identify consumers’ product interests, likes, and dislikes, enabling you to understand your audience quickly.
6. Audience Segmentation
Segmentation keeps your content relevant and helps you retain potential customers and generate new customers. Your chatbot will segment the audience based on the data you have obtained based on many factors such as demographics, interests, age, gender, etc.
Suppose a consumer belongs to a specific category. In that case, you can process a solution for that segment which can make a significant impact as it allows you to target the audience with a tailored solution.
7. Capture and Analyze Customer Feedback And Data
You can integrate a feedback form into your conversational flow and ask users to write their experience with your brand in your chatbot. Your chatbot can effectively collect customer feedback by naturally introducing questions into their conversations. Not only will it allow you to track effectiveness, but it will also allow you to improve on areas where you think your brand could be improved.
Once you’ve analyzed the feedback, you can reshape your marketing strategy to be more customer-centric, creating an inbound marketing approach.
8. Qualification and Evaluation Of Leads
Chatbots can interact with leads, ask them relevant questions and use the collected data to evaluate and qualify them. Instead of intimidating your customers by making them fill out massive forms with a million fields, you only ask them one question at a time. The following questions will only appear once they have started the process.
Once the prospect is engaged, your chatbots can ask them conversationally qualifying questions. You need to make this process as quick as possible by asking preliminary questions about their needs, available budget, etc., and then handing off qualified leads to a natural salesperson who can close the deal.
One way to make this process faster is to add buttons for answers; all the prospect has to do is click the buttons instead of typing the answers. Doing so will give you consistent data without varying answers and spelling. And based on the answer to each question, you can display the next relevant question to qualify and segment prospects into specific groups.
9. Provide Relevant Recommendations or Educate the Audience
One more thing an intelligent chatbot can do for your business is to give relevant product recommendations. Since chatbots can capture and analyze data, they can also send personalized notifications on social media that are relevant to each user.
You can even consider answering frequently asked questions or informing users about different topics related to your business, such as product tutorials and other industry-specific processes. Having your chatbot serves as a subject matter expert for users as a 24-hour resource can go a long way in building trust and engaging users.
10. Move Your Customers Seamlessly Through the Sales Funnel
Sales chatbots also help you with lead nurturing, an essential part of any company’s marketing strategy. By gathering the information you need, chatbots can speed up these delicate processes and then create personalized messages that can help guide your users through their consumer journey. This way, you can tailor your marketing efforts to each prospect that visits your website or social media profiles.
11. Integrate Chatbots into Your Social Media Marketing
Chatbots can go beyond websites and enrich your marketing strategy on social media and messaging platforms for a wider reach. AI chatbots are the most popular messaging platforms. They can reach a new customer base for your brand and be integrated across multiple messaging platforms, making you more easily accessible to help your customers.
The most well-known examples are Slack and Facebook Messenger bots, which are more suitable for potential customers. Engaging visitors who read your articles will improve lead generation. When using a chatbot, you can ask your reader if she is interested in a particular product or service, collect her contact information, or send her a discount to increase your chances of conversion.
11 Ways Chatbots Can Help Your Marketing Strategy – Conclusion
You must adopt the most advanced user engagement capabilities to integrate chatbots into your marketing strategy. Chatbots, in conjunction with your content marketing strategies, can help you increase your overall blog readership – and increase engagement and conversion rates through personalized conversations. Feel free to leverage the power of chatbots as an excellent tool for automating the lead-generation process to grow your online business.