If you’re an active internet user and have done your fair share of website browsing, you may have noticed an active chat window on the side of your screen, prompting you to ask questions or engage with a suspiciously cheerful company employee. This is the front-end of chatbot marketing.
As you already know, chatbots are automated computer programmes built to engage and interact with website visitors who enter bot-enabled sites.
Leveraging advanced AI programming and natural language processing, chatbots help address some of the more standard queries website visitors have, reducing the burden on human agents during the preliminary, information-gathering stage.
So what does this entail and how can you leverage this trend in your marketing strategies? Continue reading our post to find out.
Find out what your customers/website visitors are most curious about
One thing you need to understand about chatbots is that, at the moment, these AI assistants can only provide the information your visitors are looking for and nothing more.
To make sure that your bot is improving communication lines, it’s best to identify some of the most common customer queries that come your way, especially if you’ve enabled a customer service bot (yes, there are different kinds of chatbots like those for sales, lead generation, and more).
By working together with your content and outreach teams, you can figure out what most of your queries relate to and come up with a list of questions your chatbot will be able to take care of. In this process, make sure that your chatbot is programmed to understand the different ways in which the same question can be asked.
It may also be more useful to your customers if you can provide them with a list of questions they can ask your chatbot, preventing stilted, open-ended conversation.
Make your chatbot quirky and interactive
Naturally, some, maybe many, of your visitors will be reluctant to engage with your chatbot if the conversation seems mechanical. You know what I’m talking about.
Having gone beyond robot-like conversations, these AI-based chat applications can now respond with GIFs, emojis, audio messages and just about anything you can think of, catapulting chatbot marketing to the limelight.
By programming your chatbot to be quirky and engaging, visitors will not only feel compelled to engage with your chat application but also report a better website experience, on the whole.
One of the best examples of a quirky chatbot is Cleo, a smart assistant whose goal is to get you to make better financial decisions. With her use of emojis and tailored communication style, Cleo has become a popular financial planning app in the UK, almost overnight.
AI combined with personalisation is the name of the game (surprise, surprise)
It’s no secret that AI has singlehandedly transformed the way we do our marketing and this is true for chatbot marketing as well.
If you have vast swathes of customer data, you can anticipate the questions they will ask and provide them with the answers and solutions they need before these even cross their minds.
Together with these insights and suggestions, personalisation can go a long way towards helping you build a base of more engaged website visitors and loyal customers.
They say there’s nothing more powerful than engaging someone by using their name. While this is just one type of personalisation we will see in the future, the same is true when it comes to AI-driven, human-chatbot interactions.
Reassure individuals that they can still get in touch with you, i.e. a human agent, if they want to
If you plan on leveraging chatbot marketing strategies in the future, full disclosure is important so that website visitors know what they’re dealing with.
It is likely that in certain instances, your chatbots will not be able to address the kind of queries customers have or provide the kind of support they need. There’s also the fact that certain folks will prefer to do things the old-fashioned way.
According to the Aspect Consumer Experience Index, 86% of customers believe that they should be able to continue their conversation with an agent when talking to a chatbot.
Leverage chatbot marketing strategies to fast-track your pathway to the future
Chatbot marketing is becoming a huge part of the trends and strategies catapulting the industry far into the future.
By making the most of these chat applications, you can provide website visitors and customers with customer support, wherever they are and whenever they need it.