24 Oct How to Use Chatbots in Digital Marketing? 10 Actionable Tips
As the name suggests, digital marketing is all about automation – and the art of getting more done with less effort.
In other words, using intuitive automation tools such as chatbots to work smart, with speed, and deliver greater efficiency. At this point, it’s natural to wonder – “Why chatbots?”
Good question.
First off, data suggests that “Around 1.4 billion people are already using chatbots.” All in all, chatbots are becoming ubiquitous.
Two, IBM claims that chatbots have the capability to answer as much as 80% of the standard questions. Basically, that if trained right, chatbots can offer error-free results at lightspeed.
Three, there’s growing acceptance amongst businesses, sectors, and industries for adopting chatbots. Further research suggests that a staggering “$5 billion will be invested in chatbots by 2021.”
Long story short, chatbots are the future of digital marketing services, and the future is now.
In this blog, we will look at the top-10 ways in which you can use chatbots to advance and enhance your digital marketing strategy. Let’s get started.
Top-10 Applications of Chatbot in Digital Marketing – Coupled with Real-World Examples
1. Connect with your Website Visitors
With nearly every business going online, owing to the global pandemic, this particular use-case comes in handy. Your customers today shop differently, on diverse platforms, and around-the-clock.
You can think of chatbots as every customer’s personal virtual guide — ever-ready to answer customer queries and offer customized help:
Additionally, bots are extremely capable of answering routine questions and handling basic requests that do not require human effort or intervention. As you can imagine, this helps take some of the workload off of your already-overwhelmed CX, sales, and digital teams. As per data:
“64% of agents who use Chabot’s are free to spend their time solving more difficult and complex problems.” – SalesForce
Key takeaway: The bots of today have evolved into smart and efficient online ‘agents’ that can emulate conversations between live agents and customers. So make sure to keep this in mind when building your bot’s personality, tone, and style. Typically, bots that are warm, friendly, and helpful are the ones that get most of the traction. In short, chatbots delivering one-word robotic answers is a thing of the past.
2. Qualify and Nurture Leads
Whether your business is just starting out or whether it’s well-established, lead management can be a tiring and exhaustive process. You’ll be surprised to know that bots can lend a helping hand in capturing and nurturing leads. This can be done by programming them to help understand where your customers are in the sales funnel via a set of questions.
Here’s a useful example of how a Chabot helps nurture leads, particularly at odd times in a day:
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So even if your customer service team is offline, none of your leads will go unnoticed or unanswered as the bot is available 24x7x365 to capture all important information (think: contact, email ID, name, etc.), find the right product/service for your customers, and contribute to lead generation round-the-clock.
Key takeaway: Chatbots are capable of handling all the ‘grunt’ work when it comes to lead generation – starting with capturing leads that land up on your website. That said, it is best to use live agents in conjunction with chatbots who can ‘close the deal’ while the bots work on getting leads in the first place.
3. Improve Team Performance – Especially with Remote Work
Remote work is on the rise, and teams are struggling to keep up as they continue to work-from-home. It has been seen that one of the major contributors to low productivity is unorganized, messy management. This is where bots can help.
They can assist your teams to stay accountable and in sync by automating and simplifying the organization process. As with customers, bots can ask employees a bunch of routine questions such as:
- Which goals did you accomplish yesterday?
- What projects and tasks are you working on today?
- What kind of issues/challenges are you facing?
Once the bot gathers all the important information, it organizes it and makes it ‘available’ in a centralized place where team members can access it at the click of a button.
Key takeaway: Organizational bots help enhance team performance in addition to delivering a host of benefits such as making teams accountable, helping them to stay on top of their goals, and eliminating any roadblocks by empowering teams to always stay in sync.
4. Customize the User Experience
A personalized experience is a coveted competitive differentiator for brands – big or small. The customers love it, with over 71% of them preferring personalized ads. In fact, personalization is not just restricted to ads. Customers love personalized suggestions by brands and don’t mind sharing information if that guarantees them a more tailor-made experience that better suits their needs.
Bots can help customize the customer experience by asking a series of logical and sequential questions and gathering customer inputs so that they can offer relevant suggestions:
An excellent example of bot-led customization is CNN’s bot, which rolls out personalized news feeds to readers based on lists of predefined options:
Key takeaway: Numerous brands across the board today are making use of chatbots to gather critical data about the users so that they can offer a more relevant and personalized user experience. This sits well with the well-informed customers of today who are constantly looking for brands that can truly ‘understand’ them – both literally and figuratively.
5. Combine the Power of Bots & Instant Messaging – All Hail Facebook Messenger Bots
Did you know that “There are over 300,000 active chatbots on Facebook Messenger?”
Clearly, chatbots have made their way onto popular social media platforms and messaging apps such as Facebook, Slack, etc.
The real question then becomes – what’s led to this skyrocketing growth?
As per data by Facebook:
On the consumer side, over 59% of millennials and 60% of Gen Xers in the U.S. have interacted with chatbots. And according to a Facebook survey, more than half (53%) of customers say they’re more likely to shop with a business that they can connect with via chat.
Nearly one-fourth of the world’s population is on Facebook, and as we saw, ‘messaging’ has become second-nature to people of all generations.
Most eCommerce stores use Facebook Messenger bots to interact with customers and drive sales:
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Hence, brands need to capitalize on this feature and communicate with customers on the latter’s preferred platform of choice. Additionally, bots can also assist your customers as well as employees should they get stuck while browsing through your social media pages.
Here’s another example of a witty and humorous Facebook Messenger Chabot for inspiration:
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Key takeaway: Messaging platforms and chatbots are a match made in heaven. You can use Slack bots for demonstrating fun, more casual, and interactive content such as “behind the scenes of your organization,” while you can leverage Facebook Messenger bots to boost your leads.
6. Get to Know Your Customers Better
Going back to the basics, chatbots can be used to understand your customer’s demographics, behavioral patterns, shopping habits, preferences, and pain-points, among other things. After all, you can’t really create an impactful digital marketing strategy if you’re shooting blind.
By asking user-friendly and simple questions, the bot captures useful information. From the customer’s standpoint, it acts as a convenient way to gather data as the users don’t need to fill lengthy surveys or divulge useless information:
Image SourceBased on the information gathered, it can offer helpful tips and relevant suggestions, thereby enhancing the overall user experience and making it more positive throughout the customer’s life cycle.
7. Gather & Analyze Useful Customer Feedback
Every campaign or strategy is incomplete without measuring its effectiveness. One of the most effective ways to gauge its failure or success is by gathering user feedback, as shown below:
Key takeaway: All in all, chatbots are a seamless way to conduct customer-centric surveys, requiring minimal effort from the latter – a big plus, if you ask us. Plus, chatbots can engage with customers in a more informal and fun capacity by using GIFs, images, videos, etc. (as opposed to the boring, lengthy, and dull survey forms), thereby boosting customer engagement and encouraging more customers to participate in surveys.
8. Build a Knowledge Base & Drive Rich Leads to Your Assets
Circling back to the point of qualifying and nurturing leads, Chatbots also drives traffic to your website and other platforms by acting as a rich repository of the knowledge base. Take the following example:
Image SourceIn order to capture potential leads, the bot can offer in-depth and useful articles in exchange for their email IDs. The central idea is to converse with users in a thoughtful and engaging manner while boosting conversions and storing accurate information.
9. Up-Sell, Down-Sell, and Cross-Sell with Powerful Offers
“More than 70% of customers are interested in hearing from retailers after they make a purchase, especially if they provide personalized content.” – Harvard Business Review
Acquiring new customers is great, but retaining old ones is even better. So, if you wish to keep your loyal customers motivated and engaged, you can leverage the power of chatbots and offer deals, discounts, and incentives based on your customer’s shopping history
Additionally, bots can introduce customers to interesting upsell/down-sell offers and boost sales in the process:
In fact, one of the most brilliant examples of tracking the effectiveness of your promotional campaigns is using chatbot-exclusive discount codes (in this case – FRESHBOT25.)
As more and more customers download the app and use the code, the bot can track the number of customers that are coming in through the chatbot and analyze the campaign’s effectiveness.
10. Enhance the Overall Customer Experience
As we saw, chatbots can be used in varying capacities – from being a virtual Sales Assistant and onboarding products to assisting customers by showing demos and taking them on virtual tours of products/services, there’s much you can do.
Chatbots are increasingly becoming smarter and more conversational in nature, making the customer experience more detailed and positive.
That’s not all. Chatbots can be equipped and trained to roll out interesting contests, quizzes, and giveaways periodically so that customers genuinely look forward to engaging with your brand across diverse touch-points.
Way Forward
“85% of customer interactions will be handled without human agents by 2021.” Chatbots Life
To wrap up, chatbots can be thought of as useful multi-tasking tools that can help you:
- Connect with your website visitors
- Qualify and nurture leads
- Improve the overall team performance
- Personalize the customer experience
- Interact with customers on popular platforms and enhance social media marketing
- Get to know your customers better
- Gather and analyze useful customer reviews
- Build a knowledge base and drive rich leads to your resource assets
- Up-sell, down-sell, and cross-sell with powerful deals and offers
- Enhance the overall customer experience
So, go back to the drawing board if you need to and take a hard look at your digital marketing strategy to see where you can leverage the multi-functional benefits of a chatbot and boost brand loyalty as well as customer happiness, one interaction at a time.
Author’s Bio: Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate, and out of the box thinking woman having vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn