Chatbot marketing is an approach to promote products and services using a chatbot.
Chatbots with artificial intelligence(AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities carry conversations with the users in real-time.
A survey conducted with 1600 marketing experts determined that 61% of them assumed that both AI and ML would be significant data initiatives in the near future.
Brands usually create this virtual assistant with a chatbot builder, integrate it with messaging platforms like Messenger, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc., or simply add it to your website.
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Brands that understood its capabilities have built their chatbots for marketing their product or services. Chatbots help companies achieve customer engagement, solve user issues and even assist with lead generation and sales.
How are Chatbots Changing the Ecosystem of Digital Marketing?
Now you might have got an idea about chatbot marketing. But you are in a bit of confusion about how we do it in real-time.
Let’s through light on it-
Chatbots automate most of the marketing process, which helps you focus more on complex or significant tasks. Chatbots can handle all the basic or beginning processes of the sales or customer support team work that frees their time and energy to work on other things.
You might have thought that chatbots are going to replace humans, but that is not the case. Chatbots will just complement humans. Chatbots will take care of all the repetitive tasks and gather all the necessary details from your customers. So that, when your turn comes to handle the customers, you will be ready with the most probable solution for customer queries and engage them.
Let’s discuss it further in detail-
Chatbots Boost the Volume of Marketing Conversations
When your sales and customer support team already knows the customer’s details from the chat history done with the chatbots. Then they will get enough details to get prepared and handle more conversations & close more deals.
You can also add a high level of personalization to customer communication. All these lead to the overall development of your marketing and business operations.
Chatbots Marketing Fill the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
Due to a separate department of sales and marketing team, there will be a gap between them. Both departments don’t have an idea about which team is focussed on which factor.
Chatbots are a great way to bridge the gap between the marketing and sales departments. It’s considered a more efficient strategy to collect the information from the users, qualifying leads, meeting the milestones, and other success.
By connecting the sales and marketing team in one loop, you can easily bring customers, convert prospects to customers, and nurture the customer to retain the same.
Let’s Know the Benefits of Chatbot Marketing in Detail:
Communicate with Website Visitors
Here is where chatbots are found to be more helpful as you can’t keep a customer executive 24/7 to reply to your website visitors. Chatbots can automatically answer the probable answer to the visitors so that users won’t get disappointed whenever they visit online.
It helps you convert your prospect into a customer; it will be difficult for you to handle the same with a small customer support or sales team.
You can even set up a live chatbot and talk with your customers. Actually, customers appreciate your efforts.
In one survey by Ubisend, most of the respondents preferred chatting rather than calling or emailing.
Chatbots have provided a way of creating a messaging environment without requiring a dedicated team of sales representatives.
Chatbots with AI capabilities can understand and sound more like humans than robotics.
You can customize your bots that please the customer. Most chatbots permit this kind of customization.
Conduct Research
Conducting research takes time, though you have a vast database and sources. It was really a daunting task to do a more efficient analysis, and to your surprise, chatbots can exactly perform this for you in just a couple of seconds.
Chatbots can perform analyzing, surveying, and finding prospects to analyze other parameters of your business operations to make strategic business decisions in the future.
You can use chatbots on social media platforms like- messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp, Telegram, Slack, and many other platforms and channels.
Being a digital marketer, you already handle multitasking every day and have lots of tasks to complete. Chatbot frees you to perform more complex tasks and takes some part of your responsibilities.
Chatbots can do better research for your business. Still, you need to focus on every metric and analysis before deploying it for your business.
Qualify your Leads
Chatbots can help you in taking care of your customers. At every sales funnel, chatbots can help you in engaging with your brand.
Companies need to nurture their customers better; chatbots can do it for you to stand out from competitors.
You can frame a set of questions to find out where a customer is in the sales funnel.
It’s one of the practices chatbot marketers do that makes your customer feel like they are talking with humans and in a more personalized way.
Chatbots chats are more like people usually do on messengers, and they are happier to engage with your brand.
It also helps you in bringing leads and converting prospects into customers. By suggesting the right product or services to your customers.
It collects all the necessary details from your customers, so it will be easy for your sales representatives to close the deal and even nurture customers after the sales.
Organize your Team
When we talk about digital marketing, the things that come to mind are blog posts, social posts, ads, SEO. Yes, they are the backbone of digital marketing but will not fulfill your entire purpose.
To perform everything smoothly, we need a strong team collaboration. Chatbots can do this for you; the entire team can easily collaborate on a centralized platform. That adds transparency to your team, even if you’re working remotely.
Chatbots can even help you to track everyone’s work and update them to work on further tasks. In short, chatbots can even help your team to work and engage with each other better.
Personalize the User Experience
Chatbots can access the database of your customer chat history and analyze the customer’s behavior and intent. Based on the details of the customer, chatbots communicate with the customers in a more personalized way.
71% of customers prefer personalized ads over general ads that are irrelevant for them.
Chatbots can even engage customers by creating quizzes with personalized questions. It’s one of the factors why chatbots grab more attention from the customers.
This personalization concept goes a long way at every stage of the customer journey. Chatbots can collect precise levels of details from the customer to generate better insights into the customer.
Sell your Products
You can use a chatbot to sell products online. Chatbots can analyze the interest of the customers and suggest products and services.
For doing so, It collects the basic details of the customers like- their age, style preference, gender, colors, designs, and similar others based on the type of business you have. And communicate with customers just like we do it with our kith and kins.
It’s actually an outstanding achievement for marketers as users get guidance at every stage of their customer journey and help them make decisions quickly.
Get Demographics and Psychographics
For digital marketing, data plays a vital role. A data-driven concept that is introduced in digital marketing helping the customers to reach the customer at the right time with the right message and offers.
The significant advantages of chatbots are they can access databases and provide results based on that. Customers also don’t hesitate to give information to the bots than customer executives.
There is some information that people generally don’t want to discuss with unknown persons; chatbots can really do the best job here; chatbots can get that type of information for surveys or any other purpose for customers’ well-being.
Generally, they use that information to design new products and services and make other strategic business decisions in the near future.
Let’s Know- How Can Chatbots Help You?
Now you have got how beneficial chatbot is for your business marketing. Let’s know some of the functions it can handle for your business.
Automate Taking Orders
If you’re into the eCommerce business, chatbots can automatically assist and suggest your customers with the most relevant and exciting products and help them in making purchase decisions quickly.
Delivering Customer Support
It helps the customers in clearing their doubts that hinders them in making further decisions. Additionally, chatbots work 24/7 for your business and solve customers’ queries in any time zone and multiple languages. It avoids the business of hiring customer support executives for two shifts.
Scheduling Meetings
Chatbots are proven to be very efficient in scheduling meetings, booking tickets, and booking appointments in almost every industry like hospitals, fitness, salons, etc. You just need to connect your chatbot with the Google calendar for this.
Tracking Orders
Chatbots help track orders easily and free from the worry we usually have after ordering a product like-
- Will it reach on time or not?
- Status of the order,
- Refund,
- And other details.
Even take the feedback from the customer after getting delivered and assist them if they find the product is not up to their expectations.
Update With Latest Offers and Discounts
Generally, it’s an essential technique to grab your inactive customers’ attention. Chatbots, based on the customer profile, sends notifications and reminders to purchase products or services. Offers and discounts are something that customers love most and buy more than they desire.
Chatbot Marketing Tips
Create FAQs List for Your Business
Analyze in which area your customer support team is getting more queries and what those queries are and difficulties they are facing while using your product or services.
You can get this information from your chatbot chat history or survey, or feedback you take from your customers.
Build Particular Conversation Tunnels
The chatbot you build must be very specific to the particular problems. So that customers get to know their answers very specifically, otherwise it results in unpleasant experiences for customers.
Check Before you Deploy
First, launch a chatbot with some friendly group of people who generally use such types of bots. Take feedback from them, work on things that are not working as intended, and then launch it for the public.
Have your Unique Presence
The chatbot you build must have some unique features that attract your audience. The theme your brand has should match with the standards you maintain while communicating with the customers. Everything you do must be professional, and according to the type of business you are into.
Take Consent
You must take permission from your customer before storing their details and using them for various marketing purposes. It helps you to build loyalty to the customers.
Also, don’t bombard your customers with a group of messages after taking permission. Send scheduled messages and notifications with a particular frequency.
Ask for Data
Try to collect the details of your customer, such as their age, gender, location, name, email, mobile number, etc. All this information helps you to make more informed decisions and better serve your customer in the future.
Promote your Chatbot
Ensure people know about your chatbot.
Conclusion
Chatbot marketing is not a new concept; it’s already deployed by big brands in taking their business to the next level. Chatbots you can deploy at any part of your business operations.
In digital marketing, you have multiple tasks where most tasks are repetitive and need automation, such as research, analysis, handling the basic level of queries, and many more. Chatbots can be greatly helpful in that.
Deploying a chatbot for your marketing strategies will reduce your overall work to the maximum extent, increase efficiency, reduce the overall cost, workforce, and energy you require.
After knowing the chatbot marketing benefits, you might have got excited to deploy a chatbot for your business and don’t know where to start.
Don’t worry; we are here to assist you.
You can go for SmatBot chatbot; you can build your customized chatbot irrespective of the industry or functional features you’re looking for.
SmatBot chatbots use advanced technology and a dedicated technical team to handle the same.
You can try a 14-day free trial now! You will be amazed by the changes you get in your business.