Chatbot Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your Business

Chatbots can interact with your customers one-on-one just like a human agent might. This simulated conversation can help drive conversions and sales by gathering data, pre-qualifying leads, and even assisting with purchases. These factors, and others, make chatbot marketing essential to conversational success. A chatbot marketing strategy can help a business by automating common processes, responding to common customer inquiries, and even processing sales and closing the deal. Companies commonly rely on both rules-based chatbots and AI chatbots to serve customers and reduce workloads for human agents. As we navigate the dynamic world of digital marketing, chatbot marketing stands out as a powerful tool to enhance customer engagement and streamline marketing processes.

Take advantage of our free 30-day trial to see how Sprout can support your social customer care with a balanced mix of chatbots and human connection. Follow these 12 steps and you’ll be well on your way to building a chatbot experience customers love. The data you collect from your chatbot conversations is also equally important. It can give you valuable insights to improve your chatbot experience and marketing strategy. The next step is to figure out what content you want customers to engage with throughout the chatbot interaction. Frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be a good start by building out chatbot conversation flows to guide users to the best possible answer without having to pull in your team for individual support.

Chatbots increase conversions

Interactions with customers are always at the center of a successful marketing strategy. Deliver consistent and intelligent customer care across all channels and touchpoints with conversational AI. WidgetGuide provides detailed information about the widget, including its specifications, pricing, and availability. But first, Sarah has some additional questions about the warranty and return policy, and WidgetGuide responds with helpful answers. Similarly, you can do this with your UTM codes for the content you link from your bot. Give it a UTM source of chatbot and you can measure the clicks and traffic that come from the bot, as well as track the UTM all the way through your customer journey.

Consider the linguistic diversity of your target audience and implement language options that resonate with different user segments. Make your chatbots sound more “human” by incorporating a conversational and friendly tone. Gone are the days of robotic and sterile communication – today’s users crave a personal experience.

• With that in mind, let’s explore some of the ways businesses use chatbot marketing.
• Looking for even more ways to streamline and automate your marketing objectives?
• Imagine you work for an e-commerce company called “Acme Widgets,” which sells a variety of widgets and accessories.
• Businesses use chatbots to determine how likely a customer is to purchase a product or service.

Consider including Quick Replies for “Speak to an agent” or simply a generic “Something else” option. A good example comes from Sheetz, a convenience store focused on giving customers the best quality service and products possible. This is important because the interaction with your brand could lead to high-value conversions at scale, without any manual sales assistance. Build out a conversion tree for every question you ask and each response you will provide the user with.

Other data that you can collect for analysis is about the bot’s performance and efficiency. After analyzing the data, you can put additional information into your knowledge base, and make your bot more effective. You can even put a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the chat to get insights about the visitor’s opinion of your brand. You can use information like this to improve your chatbot marketing strategy moving forward and ensure there is a balance between the human element and automated responses. The most important step towards creating chatbots for marketing is to zero in on what you expect from them.

As a marketer, it’s tempting to try out new tools but you have to ask yourself a few questions before diving in. These emojis were chosen well because all are relevant to the messages that accompany them. This example looks at a fictional restaurant which needs to communicate things like store hours, specials and loyalty programs.

Imagine you work for an e-commerce company called “Acme Widgets,” which sells a variety of widgets and accessories. Your goal is to use chatbots to enhance the marketing efforts of your business. Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019.

Reasons Why Social Media Chatbots Are Valuable to Brands

Simply let people know as part of the bot’s welcome messages that the user is invited to get in touch with a human at anytime. These bots can use sophisticated technology like artificial intelligence and natural-language processing. We want to help you be one of those brands with a rockin’ chatbot strategy. Since you know the basics, let’s check out some of the best chatbot marketing examples on the market. You can also share news and updates of your company to keep your customer base informed about your latest products and services. Chatbots for marketing can help you segment traffic and advertise your products to the right audience.

You have developed a great product or service, appointed a big team of talented salespeople,… Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty. Marriott Hotel introduced ChatBotler, available to guests through text messages. The bot helps the guests to request basic hotel services, essentially acting as an in-phone concierge. Thus, there is no need for a middleman as it enables requests to be met quickly and efficiently. You can use those bots to reach a new customer base for your brand and tap into new demographics without much investment.

If you want to simply streamline certain aspects of your customer engagement, such as helping your customers navigate your website or purchase journey, a rule-based chatbot can be helpful. However, if you want to solve complex customer queries, such as a postal and delivery services across regions, a virtual assistant can do the job better. In addition to user interactions, pay close attention to feedback from real users. Whether positive or constructive criticism, the feedback gives valuable insights into how well your chatbot meets user expectations.

HR – FirstJob – Mya Chatbot

Over 70% of customers expect a conversational care experience when they engage online with brands. So they built the BB chatbot to provide a personal, timely, and accurate answer. With BB, KLM is taking the next step in its social media strategy, offering personal service through technology, supported by human agents when needed.

For example, on Zenefits’ contact us page, the chatbot leads with a value-driven message and offers to connect the visitor to sales instantly. The messaging data bots collect can provide insights into your audience’s needs and wants. The information you gain from this data can inform other chatbot marketing strategy tactics, future campaigns and your product roadmap. Businesses use chatbots to improve user accessibility and ensure their digital channels are inclusive of all users. Many chatbot tools allow the integration of rich content, which means audio files can be uploaded to provide auditory responses.

Build out your chatbot content strategy

Some people just don’t want to communicate with a bot, and that’s when your reps should come in. Make sure that you give your website visitors the option to speak to a human agent in case that’s their preference. These were some of the main benefits of implementing a chatbot marketing strategy. During the conversation, your marketing chatbots can collect visitors’ names, contact details, and interests.

It can help businesses promote their products or services with targeted messaging to boost customer engagement and increase brand visibility. Chatbots for marketing can maximize efficiency in your customer care strategy by increasing engagement and reducing friction using chatbot for marketing in the customer journey, from customer acquisition to retention. Instead of dedicating your team’s time to answering all incoming customer queries, chatbots can automate many activities, such as responses to frequently asked questions or gathering customer feedback.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is an excellent example of using chatbots in hospitality. KLM’s bots streamline their internal operations by providing fast, personalized customer care. Expect these sorts of offers to become more common as brands look for new incentives to encourage people to interact with their bots. Whole Foods’ Facebook Messenger Bot is just as exciting, connecting with users by providing recipes, products, and cooking inspiration. It offers filters and options for different types of food, including international cuisines with each message.

If you aren’t sure how to build marketing bots that work best for your business, WebFX is here to help. While chatbots are known for answering questions and offering preprogrammed responses, that doesn’t mean you can’t take an active role in the conversation. By trigger specific chatbot flows based on user behavior, you can be more proactive in how you engage with your site visitors. Chatbot marketing is the practice of using automated conversations and AI-generated responses to chat with website visitors at scale.

What’s more, conversational bots require thousands of interactions to learn the most basic nuances. Even then they are best suited for carefully constructed questions that are more common in a customer service context than sales. Chatbot marketing is an excellent form of conversational marketing to provide your audience with customer service fast. You can help them find relevant products they need and get them to convert.

Sephora elevates customer care to the next level, creating a compelling experience while supporting brick-and-mortar sales with chatbot services on Messenger and Kik. We’ve put together a list of chatbot examples that show practical uses of bots online and the diverse range of businesses rolling them out. Check out why these brands are deemed the best of the bots and what your business can learn from them. Removing those extra steps on the customer’s end reduces friction in their journey.

By the end of the campaign, Mountain Dew won a Shorty Award for Best Use of Chatbots and saw some impressive metrics. Viewers watched over 11.6k hours of branded content and the campaign earned 48 influencer shoutouts. Mountain Dew’s Twitch fans increased by 265% and the channel engagement increased by 572%. The campaign also reaped long-term benefits by collecting insights about Mountain Dew’s Twitch community for future promotions.

HelloFresh manages to show off their brand voice by playfully introducing the bot as Brie. It improves the recruiter efficiency by 38% and increases candidate engagement by over 150%. Apart from that, Marriott rewards members can interact with chatbots on Facebook Messenger to research and book travel at more than 4,700 hotels. In fact, businesses in logistics are adopting using AI-powered bots to increase efficiency across the entire logistics value chain. Find critical answers and insights from your business data using AI-powered enterprise search technology.

Through personalized, human-like conversations, chatbots can gradually guide site visitors into becoming leads. Not only are chatbots able to answer questions and educate people on what your business does, but they also help you capture more interest. After all, only 5% of buyers prefer to fill out a form over interacting with a chatbot. The instant gratification of @-mentions, DMs and chatbots has influenced the trajectory of social messaging and customer care. The need for conversational commerce remains high as customers want to interact with brands in a way that feels natural (and efficient).

And with our Conversation Cloud platform, you can deliver a unified experience across your marketing, sales, and customer teams to ensure your pipeline turns into revenue. With AI chatbots, you can have more flexible conversations at scale with minimal intervention from your marketing and sales teams. https://chat.openai.com/ Similar to Domino’s, Sephora lets users take a variety of actions without having to leave the chat. The bots answer basic customer service questions like order tracking and product availability, but each platform leverages its own unique features to offer a more personalized shopping experience.

A chatbot might greet a returning customer by name, provide information based on the size of their enterprise, or provide other customized information. This personalized information can enhance the both UX and customer journey, and send consumers further down the funnel toward conversion. The sales funnel opens with awareness, then narrows toward interest, decision, and closes at the action, which is in many cases the conversion. This means the sales funnel maps out your customer’s journey and thought process, as well as their decision-making process. A potential customer named Sarah visits the Acme Widgets website looking for information about a specific widget she’s interested in purchasing. As Sarah lands on the website, a chatbot named “WidgetGuide” pops up in the corner of the screen with a welcome message offering assistance.

Chatbot marketing uses software called chatbots to automate conversations with end-users. Users will find that chatbots can converse and respond in a way a human agent might, often using programmed responses based on what the end-user inputs or requests. Many conversational marketing strategies include the use of both AI chatbots and rules-based chatbots.

Businesses use chatbots to assist their customers in sourcing the products they are seeking. From finding a favorite in a new color to determining the best fit, a chatbot can interact with a consumer just like a sales agent to help customers find products. A rules-based chatbot might be programmed with a menu that provides access to information about available products and services and be used to gather information about what consumers want. Rules-based chatbots often rely on clear call-to-action buttons and logical next steps. Watsonx Assistant automates repetitive tasks and uses machine learning to resolve customer support issues quickly and efficiently. Roma by Rochi is a clothing ecommerce that uses chatbots to upsell products through its Facebook page.

Give your bot a voice … and a warm welcome message

Upselling involves nudging customers toward a more expensive version of the product or service they seek; cross-selling involves suggesting additional complementary services or products. Comprehensive communication solutions, like chatbot marketing, are important because they can provide on-the-spot answers to your customers’ burning questions. You can use the visual builder to drag and drop elements into the right places and customize all the actions to your needs. There are many templates you can use to build task-specific bots for customer support, lead generation, and others. This brand provides a learning platform for personal development and uses bots to promote its services.

A chatbot might be used to welcome guests, schedule appointments, and answer questions. With so many consumers seeking immediate responses, a chatbot can deliver the right answer to website visitors in just seconds. No matter how perfect the product or service, many businesses have found that you can’t please everyone all the time. Customer complaints will happen at some point, and both rules-based chatbots and AI chatbots can be equipped to handle them. It might drive customer engagement, improve the customer journey, and even help drive revenue.

Having visitors self-select their experience is one of the easiest ways to deliver personalization at scale. In order to speed up the sales cycle, marketers need to facilitate fast and easy interactions that provide potential customers with what they want, when they want. In this ultimate guide to chatbot marketing, we tackle what exactly chatbot marketing is and all the benefits you can expect to gain from it. Plus, we showcase top-notch examples and best practices to help you make the most of your chatbot software.

Beyond a space to receive news and discuss the latest in entertainment, Twitter is an excellent source for brands to deliver valuable information to users. The right chatbot type for your brand or business will depend on your unique requirements, goals, and budget. Regardless of the chatbot platform you choose, Lift AI can help make the new experience as seamless and effective as possible. If you’ve never built a chatbot before, you may not know where to start or how to do it.

Support Multiple Platforms

These chatbots can qualify leads by collecting information such as contact details, company size, or specific challenges the visitor is facing. Advantages include sales optimization, improved support service, social media, and CRM integration. JivoChat offers a number of plans and solutions to help your business establish the best chatbot marketing strategy for your unique needs. Some have AI chatbots to aid their sales team in improving the customer journey, collecting qualified leads, and encouraging sales. Others use this computer program as part of a support team to provide help in real-time. Chatbots are one of the most common types of artificial intelligence (AI) we interact with estimates saying that 91% of internet users interact with a chatbot on a daily basis.

It’s easier, faster, and cheaper to use a chatbot platform than to develop one in-house. To save yourself some time and trouble, you should use a company that provides artificial intelligence chatbots for marketing. Once you have a chatbot marketing tool, you might be tempted to create a chatbot to handle every single thing you can think of. Chat PG You’re less likely to get overwhelmed that way or end up disappointed when your chatbot doesn’t perform the way you want it to. Sure, it’s not flashy, but it adds an element of personalization and friendliness so your website doesn’t feel like a static thing. As we’ve touched on briefly already, chatbots can help recover abandoned carts.

Marketers use chatbots to welcome new site visitors, convert and nurture leads, direct existing customers to customer support, and more. Chatbots can help automate marketing communication and ensure instant and timely responses to customers. By making conversational AI chatbots a part of marketing initiatives, your business can also push customers seamlessly through the sales funnel and drive conversions. And when conversational bots are leveraged, you can achieve all your digital marketing targets without increasing your headcount.

This is important as research shows that around 77% of a company’s return on investment (ROI) comes from segmented and targeted communication. You can collect contact information in a low-risk way, engage with shoppers who are leaving your store, offer discounts to returning (or abandoning) shoppers, or even qualify leads. Hola Sun is a popular travel agency that specializes in vacation packages for Cuba. The company uses a chatbot on Messenger to make sure that customers never go unanswered even if it’s outside working hours. Here are some examples of brands using chatbots in a B2B and B2C environment. They use the chatbot to give the customer a quick response and prepare for the next step by asking them to keep the necessary details handy.

Chatbots designed to understand the context and intent of the user in order to perform more complex tasks are called conversational AI. NLP algorithms in the chatbot identify keywords and topics in customer responses through a semantic understanding of the text. These AI algorithms help the chatbots converse with the customers in everyday language and can even direct them to different tasks or specialized teams when needed to solve a query. Supporting multiple languages as a part of your chatbot marketing strategy can significantly broaden your brand’s reach.

Customers are getting used to instant replies and might be less willing to wait for your BDRs to call them back or even to leave an email in exchange for a document download. Information collected by a chatbot can be used by your product team to improve your offering or make it more compelling to its target audience. When you install a chatbot on your website, it’d be programmed to greet every visitor with a predefined message, such as “How can I help you? Your website visitors then have the agency to steer the conversation where they need it to go and expect the chatbot to use conversational UI to adapt. One way you can dial up your personalization is by tailoring your chatbot experience to enhance your account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.

Simple things like hours of operations, daily deals, etc. can make for a delightful experience. If you want great results from your chatbot marketing campaigns, you should combine them with other channels and live chat. And don’t underestimate the human touch—aid your representatives instead of replacing them. So, if you’re a funeral products store, then your bot probably shouldn’t be playful. But, if you’re an ecommerce store selling kids’ toys, then make your chatbot cheery and humorous.

The reason consumers and businesses love chatbots is that they offer a fast response to inquiries. Faster response to customer questions can lead to increased sales, improved affinity, and increased trust. Rule-based chatbots are programmed to respond the same way each time or respond differently to messages containing certain keywords. AI chatbots use machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP)  to understand the intent of the message received and adapt the responses in a conversational manner. Moreover, seamless platform integration allows chatbots to gather valuable insights from various touchpoints.

• If your website team is seeing low conversion rates, that may be something bot marketing can help increase.
• Even then they are best suited for carefully constructed questions that are more common in a customer service context than sales.
• Whole Foods’ Facebook Messenger Bot is just as exciting, connecting with users by providing recipes, products, and cooking inspiration.
• They adeptly collect contextual information and user details, creating a comprehensive understanding of the issue.
• Sure, it’s not flashy, but it adds an element of personalization and friendliness so your website doesn’t feel like a static thing.

This integration expands the reach of chatbot marketing and enhances the overall user experience. Users appreciate the convenience of engaging with your brand wherever they are, be it a popular social media platform, a dedicated mobile app, or your website. Chatbots simulate natural human-like interactions, offering users a seamless and personalized experience. As a result, they can understand what users are asking and give them the information they need. This adaptability is a crucial strength that can help businesses refine their chatbot marketing strategies based on user feedback and evolving trends. The purpose of bot marketing is to answer support questions and start conversations with website visitors as and when needed.

Two billion worldwide users are on WhatsApp, and chatbot marketing can help you serve your customers from within that platform. You can build a Facebook Messenger chatbot that will interact with users through a product quiz. Then, create some ads for your Facebook page that will direct potential customers to the chat on Messenger. This way, you can increase engagement, show off your products in a fun way, and improve click-through rates to your ecommerce store. The first successful use case for chatbot Messenger marketing is Lego’s Christmas newsletter campaign. They used marketing chatbots to help parents decide on a perfect Lego set for their children.

​​They offer a novel way to interact with brands and businesses on social media channels, whether you’re hoping to make a clothing return or catching a flight. Chatbots have been gaining popularity across all types of businesses with astonishing speed. That way, when people ask these questions through a Messenger bot or the bot on your site, you can answer those questions fast. Not only does this save your business time, but it enables your audience to get answers fast. When they get answers quickly, they’re more likely to purchase products because they don’t have questions holding them back. Before you use Facebook messenger bots or integrate a bot into your site’s chat function, you’ll want to generate a list of frequently asked questions.

The customer responses gathered from your chatbot can provide insight into customers’ issues and interests. But it is also important to ensure that customer responses are being properly addressed to build trust. Depending on the conversation, use CTA buttons to lead consumers to a specific product category or page on your website, to share their experience with a friend on social or to go directly to their cart.

This makes the interaction more enjoyable for users and helps establish a positive brand image. Just like in face-to-face conversations, a little humor or a touch of empathy can go a long way in building rapport. Knowing your audience is crucial for developing a chatbot that can engage users effectively. Conduct thorough research to understand their demographics, behaviors, and preferences. This round-the-clock availability caters to diverse global audiences and considers the evolving needs of the modern, always-connected consumer.

After all, a team of conversational marketers might have hundreds of sequences (or playbooks) running at the same time. Despite popular belief, you don’t need to be a technical wizard or programmer to get started with social bots. Sprout’s Bot Builder provides a variety of pre-built bot templates that make the process even easier. The chatbot also offers emoji direction services, which give travelers information based on their location. The bot will show directions to a destination of choice once the user sends a relevant emoji and their location on Messenger.

How businesses use chatbot marketing is also essential, as there are many different ways to apply a bot-based strategy. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The use of chatbot marketing can come with serious cost savings for businesses. In fact, between 2018 and 2023, chatbots are expected to save companies in the retail, healthcare, and banking industries $11 billion. We’ve had chatbots for decades, but only recently has true conversational AI been deployed in the marketplace.

Because, in truth, chatbots are a direct line of communication with your audience. This chatbot from Okta combines pre-set playbooks with artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure every site visitor will be able to access the information they need quickly. So, when the visitor asks to see a case study, the chatbot is able to deliver the right resource to them. Here are some of our favorite examples of really good chatbot marketing that you can draw on for inspiration. There are so many different things you can achieve with chatbots — and sometimes that makes it hard to know where to start. Sellers can also be notified when their target accounts are on your website — so that way, they can take over for the bot and deliver a personalized experience to their accounts in real time.

Chatbots and conversational AI are related technologies used for automated interactions with users, but they have varying capabilities. Many of the tools we mentioned earlier include the option for two button-based responses, which are perfectly suited for the mobile-first experiences of social media bots. One of the most interesting stats we’ve seen about chatbots is that people aren’t nearly as turned off by them as you’d think. Without a certain level of specificity and pre-planning, then it becomes infinitely harder for a chatbot to deliver a believable experience — much less the right answer. We ended up researching a number of different world-class chatbot experiences to learn from. Here is a list of 10 lessons for anyone about to get into chatbot marketing — like us.

The impact of the bot was that it answered more than 60,000 questions, received around 100,000 mentions per week, and 15,000 conversations per week. H&M, the well-known global fashion brand has developed an interactive bot with the purpose to guide users through the online store areas in a way that aligns with their purchase desires. The conversational bots help mobile customers navigate their search through outfit possibilities and get customized results quickly. “Be where your customers are” is more than just a basic principle of digital marketing. It is the reason that compels businesses to take attempts and meet their customers.