Chatbot Marketing: Leverage the Power of Bots for Scaling Your Business

Chatbot Marketing is basically a means to products/services using a Bot. A Bot is nothing but a computer program designed to perform automated tasks. Chatbots can be programmed any which way as we want to perform the actions we need them to. In this case, the action is being in the automation of direct communication with a user. 

Using machine learning & artificial intelligence, chatbots can be the game-changer for your business if you are looking to scale things up.

After all, there is a reason why the chatbot market size is projected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024 at a whopping rate of 29.7%

Surely you do not want to miss the party!

Why Use Chatbot Marketing

• Tons of Data to Play With

  I am personally a big fan of data. Any smart marketer should be!

  Chatbots communicate directly with your customers/visitors. They know what they want, how much they want when they want, why they want. Ask any smart marketer the value of the above sentence.

   Such complete information of your potential/end customers collected by chatbots is a gold mine.

  You can tweak your overall strategy and design your efforts focused around solving and giving what your customers really ask for or expect out of your services.

• 1. If a person shows interest in pricing, chatbots can encourage them to make a purchase from the chat itself.
  2.  If a user is inquiring more about the features, chatbots can present the entire catalog.
  3. If the sale has already been made but the customer is visiting for after-sales service, chatbots can guide them through the process and collect basic information before diverting them to the necessary team member.
     

     Segmentation 

     Chatbots can help you segregate your customers and segment them depending on their inclination towards your product. They can easily be designed for the cases below – 

• Push Your Sales Funnel 

  Chatbots can seamlessly guide your prospects through the sales funnel till the point the end sale has happened. Be it showing features, suggesting options, or payment interface, chatbots can incorporate it all for you and help you scale up your business massively.

• One Time Investment 

  A chatbot can work wonders for you day and night. Without a salary. Even without much upkeep. Too good to be true right? Chatbots not only cut operational costs by around 30% but also save an even more valuable commodity. Time! Operational 24/7, they can help you serve multi-time zone clients with far fewer resources and hassles when compared with traditional setup for the same requirements.

• One Machine Show 

  Chatbots fit in any business for various requirements and processes you design it for. If that was not enough, Chat Bots help you reach a highly targeted audience at a large global scale. I don’t see many business owners complaining about that.

When to Use Chatbot Marketing

It is a common belief among marketers that Chat Bots are good for only conversational marketing. Well, I beg to differ. The point here is that chatbots have multiple usages owing to their versatility. Easily customized & programmed, a Bot can handle –

• Order Information 

  Be it collecting the order from the customer, or tracking the order, a Bot can easily handle it. Be it a retail store or a grocery, chatbots can easily scale your business and level things up for you. After-sales services such as order status & inquiries can also be handled by these chatBots. Imagine what a scalable tool it can prove to be for your Business.

• Engagement

  It is perhaps one of the most important factors every serious Brand looks deeply into. User Engagement!

   And of course, chatbots are a lifesaver here, too. Your bot can keep your visitors engaged and even improve their on-screen time by showcasing offers/ features as well as sharing the latest updates/news with them in real-time. Longer the customer spends time with your Brand, the better it is for Business.

• One Machine Assistant

  If you are a one-man show for your business, you can definitely use an assistant right? What better than a Bot! Update your calendar? Done! Schedule a meeting? Done! Remind to renew licenses? Done! 

  Instead of a small team doing basic tasks, your bot can do it all for you. And quite easily so.

  This is immensely powerful if you are a new startup or looking to scale your existing Business but are working on a tight budget unable to afford a big team.

  Even for large enterprises, chatbots can be used across various internal functions seamlessly.

• Customer Support 

  One of the most widespread usages of chatbots today among various multinational brands is customer support. Being operational 24/7, chatbots can collect customer feedback, complaints, and answer their queries. And all of that for your customers across the world even as you sleep happily. Sweet!

Below are the actionable pointers any Business owner can apply to put in place a solid Chat Bot strategy for their Business. Before you actually implement a chatbot, make sure to cover the below pointers –

• Leverage FAQ’s 

  You can know a lot about what customers think and how they perceive your Business by the questions they ask about it. Deep dive and know the FAQ’s that your users are asking when visiting your website. Feedback from your customer support team can really be insightful here.

• Conversation Flow 

  Anything aside from the designed task for a chatbot will not be responded well which will be a very awkward situation for your Business. Limit the options your chatbots offer and have a clear answer/forward paths for each of these options if picked by the users. 

  When not in your conversation script, it is usually best to direct the user to your representatives.

  Your chatbot should be implemented with a very clear precise goal. You want it to guide the users to a specific page or you want it to convert users to customers, it needs to be defined beforehand.

• Test Your Bot 

  Try the chatbot yourself and experience a conversation with it. Think about how you can improve the experience further. Take insights from the users interacting with the bot in real-time to optimize it.

• Assure that a Human is Just Around the Corner

  According to a study by Aspect Consumer Experience Index, 86% of customers believe there should be an escalate to agent option when talking to a chatbot.

  As with most users, give them the comfort of knowing that a user is just around the corner for them if need be. Remember not all of your customers would want to chat so this would be an ideal option to have in place for enhanced customer experience.

• Build Your Chatbot Subscription List

  Ask your users their email addresses if they prefer communicating in the future via mail. This way you can build a subscription list from your chatbot. You can share updates, news, and offers with your subscribers directly from the chatbot.

• Promote Your Bot

  Also, the more people experience it & spread the news, the more customers your Bot will eventually attract to your Business.

  You need to promote your chatbot via social media and specific landing pages to ensure more people use it. That way you can further build your subscription list as discussed above.

Conclusion

Chatbots can be pure magic for your business if done right. Remember it is just a program designed by humans for humans. So, if played right, it can change your game massively within a very short span of time and very few resources.

With around 50% of Businesses planning to spend more on Chat Bots than on mobile apps, it is a very clear indication of the kind of impact chatbots will have in the coming years.

The sheer vastness of problems a single Bot can handle for your business is immense. With the evolving customer experience and diffusion of boundaries for customer acquisition, over 50% of customers expect your business to be up & running 24/7. 

If not done right, they can highly degrade user experience so it is important we test our strategies as mentioned above and then implement a clearly defined fail-proof plan to help scale your Businesses rapidly backed by the power of chatbots.