Customer loyalty and retention are things that play a vital role for businesses. Because getting new customers costs five times more than retaining a customer. Instagram chatbots and customer loyalty go hand in hand.
Customer acquisition costs are growing with competition in the market. For SMEs relying on ads and PPC campaigns is no longer sustainable. That’s why maintaining customer loyalty and retention has become mandatory for the brands to be successful.
So how can you improve the loyalty of your customer? It can be achieved by building strong relationships and regular interaction with customers. Social media is the best tool for you to be in touch with your audience and potential customers.
Instagram is one of the most active social media platforms with more than 1 billion users throughout the world. It provides brands with a high niche audience to target and work on. It has become a go-to social media platform for marketers and entrepreneurs, SMEs and business professionals irrespective of its industry B2B or B2C.
With the commencement of the Instagram business API, Instagram chatbots are enabled with more powerful features such as automating DMs. It helps Instagram users to get fast and accurate answers. Brands using Instagram’s new features can improve brand growth, engagement, sales and ROI.
First know-
What are Instagram Chatbots?
Instagram chatbots are not like those computer-generated accounts that are generally used to make it appear as though someone has more likes, comments, or followers than they really do. This type of chatbot often tags random accounts in comments, sends irrelevant DMs, or even scams your account.
Instagram chatbots are a new feature to Instagram business for automating conversations between customers and businesses. It uses artificial intelligence to start automatic conversations with Instagram users. Using Instagram API and creative application, Instagram chatbots can assist you in automating your account for social listening, customer support, instant messaging, replying to DMs and much more.
Instead, Instagram chatbots act as a go-between communicating from a brand to a customer in real-time.
In short, Instagram chatbots are a legit customer service tool, while the other bots are means to scam your account.
The other interesting things to know about Instagram chatbots are–
- Brands can create loyal customers by converting followers using automation techniques.
- Businesses can automate marketing, lead generation, customer support and more.
It helps in personally connecting brands with their customers through multiple avenues like Mentions, Stories, Feeds, and DMs. - Instagram messenger API helps brands to manage their customer communication at scale.
Why Instagram Chatbots?
Building customer loyalty takes time; it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a continuous process to gain and retain customers. Brands need to build strong relationships with customers. You can try different loyalty-building programs to gain the trust of the customers. Businesses data analysis will help what needs refining and what is worth keeping.
Here are some features of Instagram chatbots that help you in gaining customer loyalty.
Break the ice:
Start interacting with your customers both the new and existing customers about your existing products, offers, discounts and updates. Ice breakers within Instagram are great for automatic replies to FAQs.
24/7 Customer Support:
Instagram chatbots can handle multiple queries at the same time with accuracy and ease using conversational AI. Using Instagram chatbots, you can enable faster replies for FAQs such as track order, refund policies, cancellation, replace change shipping etc. thereby reducing wait times and delivering an improved customer experience.
Generate Quality Leads:
It helps sales and marketing teams to save their time as most of the tasks of a sales team can be handled by the chatbots such as collecting basic details of the customers, segmenting customers based on certain parameters, initiating conversations with customers, transferring calls to respective departments in real-time whenever there is a need.
Trigger Keyword-Based Conversations:
Trigger interaction with customers based on particular keywords to create user interest and drive engagement. You can promote keywords within the caption of your Instagram post promoting customers to use them to chat with your brand in DMs and have automated conversation flows
Let’s see some of the Instagram stats that will help in why brands must go for Instagram chatbots
- Instagram is used by more than one billion people every day
- 44% of Instagram users use Instagram to shop weekly.
- 90% of Instagram users follow businesses’ Instagram accounts and do some actions.
- Two in three Instagram users say that Instagram assists them to connect with businesses.
- One in two Instagram users has used Instagram to find out about new brands.
- 2% of Instagram users said that they’ve taken action after seeing a product or service on Instagram.
To put it in other words, Instagram has provided massive opportunities for businesses, either big or small. Just like Instagram stories, reels, posts, and ads can engage potential customers in public, Instagram chatbots can assist businesses in converting interest into sales in private.
Here are the tips you can follow to build loyal customers using Instagram chatbots:
1. Engage with Customers
Preprogram your Instagram chatbots in such a way that will always be ready to provide solutions to customer issues with little or no human interaction. Like- responding to customers queries, comments and messages.
Appreciate or thank customers for being valuable customers in the past and help them in buying more from you by cross selling or upselling your products or services.
Customers feel privileged when you care for their needs and provide the right solution to them. These actions encourage your customers and most importantly maintain your brand’s voice.
2. Share your Milestones and success on Instagram Stories
Most of the customers’ buying decisions depend on companies ethical values and authenticity. Generally, customers want businesses whose every action is transparent to them, so that they can easily evaluate the quality, quantity and other values of the product or services with other brands and make wise decisions.
Sharing your business success milestones and other updates on Instagram stories will help you on this. It provides customers reasons why to choose you over other competitors.
3. Post What Matters to Your Audience
There’s no doubt that every audience likes to have high-quality infographics, videos, or beautiful images that’s something enough for businesses to boost the loyalty of the customer. However, your post must meet at least one of the two criteria:
- Encourages people to share, like or comment.
- Share relevant and informative content that helps your Instagram followers.
Your post goal must always be to connect with your audience personally and activate them to interact more with brands.
Customers generally want to know the backside of your businesses apart from what your business promises. That is possible only when you take them behind the scenes.
You can share the company updates regularly like company events, company culture, outing pictures of your employees, celebrating your success and milestones, updates on future products or services, what’s new with your products and many such.
4. Create Quizzes and Polls
Instagram stories have options to create and share built-in-polls. You can ask your audience what they want or expect from your product by providing various options to them, or simply ask them to select this or that scenario. You can even create Instagram stories built-in question features. These features you can utilize in various ways to understand the preference of your customers and to take surveys or feedback from your customers.
5. Publish User-Generated Content-
you can ask your audience to take some time and create some content, this idea will help your customers to engage more with brands. The content may include videos, social media posts, pictures, blog posts, testimonials and many such ways.
You can encourage your audience to post about you on their profile and then reshare your audience content on your Instagram stories or posts.
6. Start a Rewards Program
Generating a customer loyalty program is something that brands can regain their moving customers. A solid reward program will hopefully encourage particular spinning behaviors from customers by providing thm special benefits.
For instance, you can reward customers for engaging with your Instagram account. Customers can earn points for future discounts, and you will get a chance to connect with your loyal customers on your instagram accounts.
Brands generally provide an opportunity for brands to earn double or triple points if they spend the prescribed amount. You can also create Instagram posts and make it viral that invites customers to join brands loyalty programs to gain the reward points.
You can also add referral bonus to your customers, it works like magic for your brands to gain customers and also to improve the loyalty of your existing customers. For Instagram users who have more followers.
7. Provide Top-Notch Customer Service
People spend most of their time on social media especially on instagram because of various attractive features. Your presence on Instagram will help your customer to resolve their queries fast.
Generally customers don’t want to wait to get replies to their queries. Everything must be instant to them. A little delay may distract them to move to your competitors. Instagram chatbots with AI capabilities can help customers in all possible ways that help brands to gain, retain and also to maintain loyalty of customers. Instagram chatbots can answer queries and they learn with time and even provide suggestive information, links and connect it to the respective departments for complex queries.
All these abilities of Instagram chatbots will make them feel privileged to connect with your brand. After all, customer service is the primary thing that businesses must focus on to improve customer loyalty and take their business to the next level.
8. Respond to Reviews
Generally customers add their reviews on social media platforms either its positive or negative, you can use Instagram chatbots to thank for positive and resolve the negative comments.
Don’t ever try to ignore the negative reviews that will act as fire that ruins your brands. Resolve the queries in the same section and as spoon as possible that Instagram chatbots can do for you.
72% of customers will read reviews before making any purchase decisions of product or services. When you respond to negative reviews it will have a positive impact on your customers and they feel you’re genuinely handling the customer issues and they dare to purchase your product in the future.
Instagram chatbots evben help brands to convert your unhappy customers to happy customers by giving them the responses they are expecting. Instagram chatbots can even share any positive reviews on Instagram profiles that boost your customer loyalty.
Conclusion
Instagram with 2 billion users visit at least one business profile daily. Instagram is a great place for the marketers to build a strong personal relationship with brands and improve customer loyalty. It helps the brands to interact with customers at every stage of their customer journey. Instagram chatbot can assist gain this feat at scale.
Brands can utilize these advanced features of Instagram chatbots to strengthen their customer experience strategy. It helps businesses to provide on-demand support to customers, elevate customer experience by providing quick personalized experience. It manages multiple conversations without increasing workforce costs and much more.
If you’re also interested in empowering your businesses with Instagram chatbots advanced features. Can contact our Smatbot technical team, we will guide you how it helps you in building customer loyalty according to your business.
You can even take a 14 days free trial. Our technical team will provide complete assistance round the clock.