There are many ways to do marketing today. With the evolution of online channels, social media and e-mail, digital marketing is taking over. Traditional marketing is still relevant, but online marketing allows organisations to be more versatile in terms of content and be more accurate when engaging the right people at the right time.
In this context, the concept of chatbot marketing enters the scene. A chatbot is a disruptive tool for customer engagement with tremendous marketing potential, as 60% of people have recently engaged with a chatbot, and most organisations plan to implement them in the coming months.
So what is chatbot marketing, and how does it work? First, let’s understand why these concepts can help your business thrive and stand out in terms of marketing practices.
What is Chatbot Marketing
As the name suggests, chatbot marketing is the strategic use of chatbots to promote your business’s products and services.
Chatbot marketing allows your business to have a proactive approach to customer communication and make marketing more dynamic. Since you can simulate a human conversation with your bot, chatbot marketing can make marketing communications more natural and less salesy.
Further, organisations can set up flows in a way to automatically promote a particular product or service in strategic points of the conversation. Therefore, it doubles your chances of up-selling and cross-selling!
Organisations can implement chatbot marketing in their preferred channel. For example, you can employ marketing chatbots on your website, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram or even SMS!
The chatbot is a versatile and interactive tool, so there are many possibilities for adopting a chatbot marketing strategy.
The Benefits of Chatbot Marketing
Chatbots are the masters of automating and driving relevant conversations to business in the online space. And we all know how good communication is at the forefront of good marketing and good sales results!
Let’s deep dive into some of the main positive attributes of implementing chatbot marketing to your strategy:
- Automate the Marketing Process: The marketing chatbot can streamline the marketing funnel into an automated and natural conversation that adds value to your business. It makes your marketing journey more interactive and engaging. Marketing bots can convert customers at scale and offer real-time support in all steps of the marketing funnel.
- Increase Marketing Conversations: A chatbot marketing strategy helps to stay one step ahead of your customers’ needs. You can create an interactive experience and build flows that include marketing-related conversations. You can accompany your customer in all marketing process steps and help them navigate and convert more effectively.
- Qualify and Nurture Leads: According to research published by Harvard Business Review, organisations are seven times more likely to qualify leads if they answer customers promptly within an hour of receiving a query. With chatbots, your business can respond to customers almost instantaneously. This way, your bot’s availability can help you to generate and qualify leads more effectively.
- Personalisation: The volume of data generated by a chatbot can facilitate personalisation. You can use your customer data to personalise the conversation and send customised marketing messages. Customers like to feel unique, and they are more likely to be interested in a product or service that feels tailored for them.
- Increase Your Reach: With bots, you can handle thousands of conversations at the same time and ensure the quality stays on a certain level. Not only saves you operational costs of having hundreds of human agents, but it increases your capacity and you can reach way more customers than traditional forms of conversation.
- Drive Conversations with Prospects: On top of qualifying your existing customer relationships, businesses are always looking for prospects to increase their revenue and drive conversions. Marketing bots are perfect for scaling the outbound outreach and reaching new audiences through cold conversation starters. Once the prospect responds to your initial interaction you can take the user down to your typical marketing funnel.
- Segmentation: Chatbot helps with traffic segmentation, and it helps to identify who is more likely to become a warm lead, in other words, more likely to convert. In this case, the bot can provide all the necessary details and send the right marketing message.
Best Practices for Chatbot Marketing Implementation
Chatbots can give you infinite possibilities to improve your business performance. Your business will indeed have a top-notch marketing strategy by driving engaging conversations and building trust with your audience via chatbot.
However, if you wish to implement chatbot marketing in your business, there are some best practices you should keep in mind when managing your chatbot marketing.
- Do your research: You need to have a clear understanding of your objectives when it comes to marketing and how they fit into your overall business goals. Conduct an audience analysis, reflect on your messaging and positioning, set your objectives, and define the most relevant metrics you need to measure. For example, the number of leads, conversion rate and engagement rate.
- Test and refine your strategy: A company never releases a product without testing, right? The same applies to bots and chatbot marketing. When you set up your bot, especially if you have never done it before, the chances of having to make some adjustments in your flow are high. Take time to test your bot and to test the strategy with yourself. If it was you talking to your bot, would you be engaged?
- Use appropriate language: Define your language and approach by having a clear understanding of your audience. For example, if you were selling toys, you probably could have a more outgoing and fun approach than selling software. But, of course, it all depends on who your audience is and what are you trying to achieve. Still, having a bot with personality increases your chances of success, as your audience can have more sympathy with your bot and easily engage with it.
- Make sure to use triggers at the right time: If you are sending a promotional message, avoid an overselling approach. There are many ways to sell and do marketing without being too salesy. Forbes gives some great tips that will surely be valuable and help build effective chatbot marketing.
- Have a human that can handle the conversation: A lot of queries and marketing efforts can be automated with a chatbot, but having a human agent available to handle more complex interactions sure will make your audience happy. Not everyone interacts with technology the same way, so make sure you have available options.
- Chatbot newsletters: We all know about newsletters on e-mail marketing, but did you know you can also send a newsletter using your chatbot? It is an excellent way to market your business! You can send short updates and include anything that can be relevant to your customers, such as products on sales, offers and news.
- Use a chatbot builder: It is more accessible and straightforward to use a chatbot platform than trying to build a chatbot in-house. Choose a chatbot builder that can set up your bot in your preferred channel and can provide support in all steps of the journey.
- Use data in your favour: Successful companies use the power of data to guide their marketing decisions and achieve better results. Data-driven marketing increases ROI, and about 3 out of every four marketing leaders base their conclusions using data analytics. Further, data is the key ingredient behind personalisation, which allows enterprises to deliver a tailored marketing experience and make it as relevant as possible. By monitoring your data, you can also have a more accurate view of your chatbot marketing and identify improvement points.
Conclusion
Chatbot marketing is a strategy to promote your business’s services or products by using a chatbot. This technique automates the marketing of your business, saves you time and resources, helps you collect leads and generate sales, and all that by connecting with your audience in their preferred channel. Marketing chatbots can boost your conversion rates, create a more meaningful connection with your customers and allow your business to be available 24/7.
Still, having a solid chatbot builder is key to making all these incredible benefits to your business come true.
Flow XO offers an interactive and intuitive chatbot building platform that can expand your marketing capabilities. We offer support throughout the process and a wide range of features that can take your engagement to the next level, closing the gap between a visitor and a customer.
What are your thoughts on chatbot marketing? Would you like to give it a try?
We totally recommend it! And we invite you to try for free today.