Why bots are the ultimate marketing tool
The first time I encountered a bot was on Telegram. It wasn’t very smart. In fact, it was actually pretty stupid.
All it did was provide instructions about what the time and date of certain races and what to eat between each run. There was no AI, no IVR. The only thing it had going for it was reach. It spoke with a lot of people.
The second bot I saw provided content and information, similar to the way the CNN and Techcrunch bots work. This was a few months ago and while these bots were a bit smarter, I didn’t really get the point of getting information without the ability to perform actions like purchasing or even filling simple leads forms. I also felt that the range of actions I could have the bot perform was limited and repetitive.
I believe that a bot should always do something more than only provide content or information, otherwise, why can’t I just look at their website? How can bots provide more value to both the business and the end user?
I believe the answer is about having the bot get leads, collect more information about the end user, and use that information to build a relationship with the customer. Ultimately, this should lead to in-chat purchases.
Bots have many great characteristics: living where your customers are, being AI-based, not requiring download, easy to improve/self improving etc. The best part though is that bots are the ultimate marketing tool and you can use them to vastly increase your customer engagement and bottom line.
But how?
Let’s walk through the steps required to launch a successful bot that becomes your best marketing tool
Step 1 — Starting your distribution community
The first step to great marketing is to grow a community. There are many different ways to grow an audience, but an audience you want to funnel to your bot should be built where your bot is. So if you have a Facebook Messenger bot, it makes sense to build an audience on your Facebook page.
- You can attract your audience for the first time either by offering discounts for your products or by providing useful information about an event. You shouldn’t however market just for the sake of the bot. It should come as a byproduct of marketing your core business.
- Bots are still very new, so build simple flows at first. As time goes on and your customers grow more comfortable with your bot, you can easily add more functionality and intelligence to your bot. A bot with too long a flow will surely turn off your customers.
Step 2 — Once people use your bot
Any successful customer interaction follows more or less the same progression from lead generation to purchase. But of course, it’s never perfect. You’ll inevitably lose people along the way; some at the beginning, some at the end, and even some when they have your product in their cart.
Your job is to figure out when people are leaving, why, and most importantly what you can do to fix it.
With human customer service reps, it can be really hard to figure out those stages and reasons. For any individual conversation, it’s easy. But try analyzing hundreds or thousands of conversations and you’ve got yourself a problem on your hands.
Bots though, make it easy. Bots let you see how they converse with customers, at what point those customers left and why they left.
You can see actually these analytics in almost every bot creation platform.
At what stage your users churned:
But unlike a web site or an app, with bots you don’t have to make an assumption about why your user churned. You can immediately see what the “negative trigger” was.
Reviewing and improving your churn is a crucial phase in conversational interfaces and a dashboard with rich analysis one really helps you do it right!
Fixing the bot flow and human-bot conversational experience will increase the odds of converting future users and the cycle continues.
Step 3 — Remarketing and automated marketing
Now that you know when and why each churned customer left, you need to attract them back. Pesonify.ai allows you to send different users different messages and by that, increase the odds that you’ll win them back.
Although this methodology is not new and every marketing manager probably uses it on weekly basis, with bots it’s a lot simpler.
The classic way of remarketing are email, SMS, and ads. Let’s compare them first.
Email:
It’s delivered straight to the customer’s inbox and it can have a really appealing design. But it’s a long way from where the purchase or conversion needs to happen. The email must be clicked and the customer needs to navigate the website. The worst part about email is how competitive it is. Every company is doing email marketing. The whole point of marketing is to be where other companies aren’t, not where they are.
SMS:
SMS isn’t as common as email marketing because you need the person’s phone number, but it does arrive directly to the customer. That’s where the pros stop though. It has no design and it’s often seen as spammy-er than email.
Remarketing Ads:
You know those ads that follow you on websites AND apps? Those are remarketing ads. They don’t give up and they’re super targeted. They work for certain businesses, but they are annoying. You want to build fruitful relationships with your customers, not annoy them.
Remarketing with a bot brings the benefits from the other tools into one place.
- You know how the last communication with the the customer went and what it was about.
- You know what needs to be offered in order to push him or her to action and convert.
- You send him/her the perfect message to the apps they use the most — messaging apps. Where he spends most of his session time and it’s on his smartphone.
- You send the customer a well designed message with a simple and intuitive UI that he/she already knows.
- With bots you don’t have to move to a different app, wait for the website to upload or register. You’re already signed in and set up on track. The distance between the user and conversion is seconds away.
- If the user asks a question the bot can’t answer, it will call you to intervene, something email, SMS, and ads can’t do.
In the near future (AI domination is closer than you think :) ), every business will learn the benefits of having their own bot. Beat your competitors and build your own bot now.
This post first appeared at http://personify.ai
