Chatbots have become increasingly popular as messaging applications have become the way brands reach consumers.
Chatbots have evolved significantly in recent times, thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that powers them. They’re now extremely sophisticated and versatile tools that can help you automate a number of your business processes.
Aside from being awesome for helping with customer care queries, AI-powered chatbots can be part of your marketing initiatives and help push your customers seamlessly through your sales funnel. Here are some ways chatbots can fit into your marketing strategy:
Offer your audience a personalized experience.
Having an interaction with someone who knows you by name can completely alter the nature of a conversation. Chatbots integrate with social media, gathering data about every single person with whom they interact.
When a user has a customer care inquiry, the chatbot can answer it accurately and take the conversation a step further by offering personalized shopping advice based on the customer’s purchase history and preferences.
Larger engagement capacity.
Chatbots are unique because they not only engage with your customers, they also retain them. This means that unlike other forms of marketing, chatbots keep your customers entertained for longer. For example, let’s say you catch your audience’s attention with a video. While this video may be extremely engaging, once it ends, it doesn’t have much more to offer.
A chatbot can catch your audience’s attention and learn from the interaction, allowing it to send relevant information regarding your brand, products, and services. Essentially, it’s able to up-sell and cross-sell in a personalized, conversational, and engaging way.
Reach a wider audience.
Because chatbots are predominantly found on social media messaging platforms, they’re able to reach a virtually limitless audience. They can reach a new customer base for your brand by tapping into new demographics, and they can be integrated across multiple messaging applications, thus making you more readily available to help your customers. This, in turn, opens new opportunities for you to increase sales.
Gather and analyze customer feedback and data.
Your chatbot offers the perfect opportunity for you to gather feedback from your customers. Unless there’s an incentive to do so, people don’t want to spend their time completing surveys. A chatbot softens the approach to gathering feedback by naturally introducing questions their conversations.
Additionally, with the right machine learning tools, your chatbot can analyze feedback and other information it gathers from users, giving you more insight into what your audience truly wants. From there, you can remodel your marketing strategy to become more focused on your customer’s needs, thus creating more of an inbound marketing approach.
Send relevant notifications.
Consumers don’t want to be bombarded with emails, text messages, and other notifications every time something happens regarding your business, products, or services. Because chatbots are able to capture and analyze data, they’re also able to send personalized notifications through social media that are relevant to each and every user.
Make communicating with your brand more fun.
While it’s no secret that chatbots can deliver quality information to customers, they’re also able to make their interactions fun. An example of this is would be Whole Foods’ chatbot. The chatbot allows consumers to search for recipes through Facebook Messenger using simple emojis.
This type of chatbot makes your marketing more fun and interactive, leaving a lasting impression on the user. It can also increase the number of visitors to your website by sharing links to your relevant blog posts and other pieces of content.
Automatically make tour brand proactive.
Oftentimes, brands have a passive approach to customer interactions. They only communicate with their audience once a consumer has contacted them first. A chatbot automatically sends a welcome notification when a person arrives on your website or social media profile making the user aware of your chatbots presence. This makes you seem more proactive, thus enhancing your brand’s reputation and can even increase interactions, having a positive effect on your sales numbers, too.
Move your customers seamlessly through the sales funnel.
Lead nurturing is an essential part of every company’s marketing strategy; unfortunately, it’s also extremely time-consuming. Chatbots allow you to gather the information you need to then create personalized messages that can help guide your users through their buyer’s journey.
To make your chatbot lead-nurturing campaigns as effective as possible, gather the information you need and conduct some split testing on your personalized messages. With this, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing efforts to each and every lead that visits your website or social media profiles.
Keep your social media presence fresh.
Expecting your customer care team to be able to answer every single inquiry on your social media profiles is not only unrealistic, but also extremely time-consuming, and therefore, expensive. With a chatbot, you’re making yourself available to consumers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Aside from saving you money, chatbots will help you keep your social media presence fresh and active.
How to create your own AI-powered chatbot.
While the thought of creating an AI-powered chatbot may seem daunting, chatbot-building platforms like ChattyPeople actually make the task easier. With Chattypeople, you can create a chatbot in a matter of minutes without spending a fortune on developing it, and without any coding knowledge whatsoever.
The enterprise chatbot-building solution uses machine learning technology to develop data-driven applications for businesses of all kinds. Chattypeople chatbots can:
- Create user incentivisation by pushing personalized deals and offers, on demand
- Recognize variations of your trigger phrases and words
- Integrate with your preferred messaging applications
- Take payment directly from your social media pages through major payment systems
Finally…
Messaging applications have become the top destination for brands to reach consumers; it’s no surprise why chatbots have become so popular. By implementing a chatbot into your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to learn about your audience, tailor your marketing efforts, reach new consumers and monetize your social media profiles.
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This article first appeared in www.entrepreneur.com
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