Chatbot applications used to be exclusive to customer service, particularly in the early days. But as the technology underlying virtual assistants has grown more widely available and consumer acceptance has continued to rise every year, so too has the range of applications for conversational assistants expanded. Bots began to demonstrate their ability to maintain their position across the entire client journey. This assertion is supported by a large number of chatbot marketing use cases.
It appears that using chatbots for marketing is becoming more and more popular, especially in the post-pandemic environment. As a result, a list of essential marketing chatbot use cases that you can use in any sector has been compiled.
What is Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot marketing is a marketing strategy that uses conversational automation to accomplish common marketing objectives, including customer interaction, lead generation, qualification, conversion, and, of course, support. Chatbots can be used in marketing on websites, within native brand apps, or on messaging services like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. They can be used in conjunction with sponsored or organic initiatives.
Benefits of Chatbot Marketing
The conversational approach offers several advantages that are hard to come across with other marketing techniques, such as:
- The responsiveness and reactions in real time
- Immediate Personalization of the Customer Experience
- Interactive Participation
- Instant Data Gathering and Analysis
For instance, to demonstrate some of the advantages of chatbot marketing in action, consider a conversational landing page campaign that engages prospective customers in an interactive conversation from the start. In this case, the bot can inquire to ascertain the customer’s profile, area of interest, or qualification level instantly.
Unqualified leads may be routed along a nurture path based on the preferences obtained from the chatbot dialogues. Qualified leads can schedule a demo. Chatting with your human agents is possible for the most attractive ones right out of the bot.
How Can You Use Chatbots in Marketing?
All things considered, chatbot marketing has a lot of untapped potential. You can envision many scenarios where a bot turns your next campaign around by looking at the use cases listed below.
1. Lead Generation
Lead generation is an essential topic of discussion when it comes to marketing. Given that it’s one of the most common use cases for chatbots in marketing in general, it really does deserve to be mentioned first. It’s highly likely that it will still be among the top bot applications as time goes on.
Why is lead generating, well, in the lead among all the potential applications?
- First of all, they serve as a humane replacement for the awful online forms that everyone despises.
- Second, they are the simplest and most direct kind of chatbot that websites may implement.
Thus, a lead generation bot serves as a company’s initial introduction to conversational marketing. For a client-based business where a salesman will be following up with leads, this is an especially perfect tool.
READ ALSO: Lead Generation | A Complete Beginner Guide To Generating Leads
2. Lead Qualification
For a lot of firms, lead generation alone is not enough.
They must automatically evaluate the quality and likelihood of conversion of the leads in order to optimize their client acquisition process. A well-designed chatbot can determine a potential customer’s level of interest and where they are in the customer journey.
Often, all that’s needed to create a qualifying bot is to use case-specific qualification questions to carry on the shorter lead-generating conversation.
With the growing availability of no-code tools and builders, chatbot technology is becoming more and more accessible, providing brands and businesses with the opportunity to gather a lot of qualifying data without detracting from the user experience.
3. Appointment Booking & Reservations
Certain businesses rely solely on reservations and bookings. Some employ them specifically as a marketing tactic to show clients demonstrations of their products and services.
In any case, scheduling meetings and making bookings is likely one of the greatest uses of bots for marketing, particularly for offline businesses.
Some businesses, for instance, use a bot that enables users to schedule an appointment for an in-store takeover. This leads to an impressive higher conversion rate than any of their traditional booking channels.
Participating in conversational commerce, even with something as basic as bookings, may have a significant impact on your organization, regardless of whether you manage a more traditional or online service.
4. Loyalty Programs
It’s a fact that most loyalty programs are underutilized.
Individuals merely lose track of their loyalty programs or are ignorant of the advantages they have earned. A remarkable 54% of loyalty accounts are dormant, and almost one-third of enrolled members leave the programs without ever taking use of the benefits (Capgemini research).
A chatbot on your website, mobile app, email reminder, or, most importantly, a widely used messaging service like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp can:
- Inform the users politely of their point balance.
- Make participating in loyalty programs more enjoyable by adding games or challenges
- Allowing users to take quizzes with personalization options, uploading selfies with products, soliciting feedback from customers, and more
- Urge users to use their points and awards
- Remind recipients of rewards
5. Contests
Contests have long been a powerful marketing tactic. Chatbots now provide them with the tools to become much more so.
Even though bots are already quite successful, believe me when I say that nothing will spark a conversation more quickly than the prospect of a large reward.
Furthermore, you may apply this chatbot marketing use case on any platform, such as social media, your website, landing page, app, or messaging service. It can also manage the entire procedure from beginning to end:
- Attracting attention
- Gathering competitors
- Responding to inquiries about the contest
- Share the results when the time comes!
- You can host a user-generated content competition, a comments/social sharing competition, or just a straightforward giveaway where participants sign up and hope to win.
It’s an efficient approach to grow your contact list, raise brand awareness, and have engaging, and enjoyable interactions with potential customers.
6. Reviews & Feedback
An essential component of marketing is testimonials and endorsements. You need to have client feedback in order to be able to showcase your success, yet most don’t provide it very easily.
In addition to offering reliable evaluations (or links to reliable reviews) to prospective customers, your marketing chatbot can act as a welcoming face that encourages current consumers to voice their thoughts.
First of all, because a bot responds naturally, users are more likely to respond to it. Particularly if a bot stays in its natural habitat and doesn’t compel users to stray from their usual routine.
Either way, it’s lot more convenient to respond to a chatbot than to have to click a button and complete an email form.
7. Content Distribution
A chatbot can assist you in expanding your audience and keeping people informed about your latest updates, whether your goal is to draw readers to your blog, listeners to your podcast, or viewers to your online video channel.
Whether you are working B2C or B2B, you can send proactive (notice) or reactive (on request) messages. Users can save a lot of time by sharing relevant material online, over Facebook Messenger, or on WhatsApp.
A chatbot for content marketing enables your customers or followers to:
- Instantly read articles, watch videos, listen to podcast episodes, look at case studies, etc. without ever leaving the bot
- Get information about upcoming episodes or publications.
- Look up content specific to a topic upon request.
Furthermore, you can customize bot notifications according to user preferences once you are aware of them. Not to add, the conversational arrangement makes it simpler and more relatable to react to pop-culture marketing trends.
How to create a chatbot marketing strategy
A strong chatbot can be implemented for your business without the help of a dedicated IT department, but it does require careful planning and development as part of a marketing strategy. The following are the methods available to accomplish this:
1. Choose the goal for your chatbot
You must first decide why you want to utilize a chatbot before you can begin creating one. Do you wish to automate any services, like scheduling appointments? Alternatively, would you like to interact with your customers more by using a bot for marketing purposes?
Make sure you specify how a bot will assist you in achieving your goal once you have established one for it. choosing your goal enables you to precisely define the bot’s function. Since the goal of the chatbot will serve as the cornerstone for everything you build around it, be as explicit and detailed as you can.
2. Make specific use cases for your robot
Setting a goal for your bot is not enough; you also need to know exactly what actions it will take to accomplish this goal. Stated otherwise, what are the duties that your bot is supposed to accomplish? Must it be?
- Give users directions?
- Provide customers with the latest flight information.
- Help customers in making restaurant reservations?
- Provide recommendations for stores to shop at?
- Respond to customer service FAQs?
When you first start off, make sure everything runs smoothly and keep things basic. Later on, you can always add to the foundation you already have.
3. Select the communication channels
As a third phase, decide the channels your bot will utilize to communicate with customers after you have established the objectives and use cases for it.
Do you intend to utilize the bot for GPT integrations, add it to a messaging app, use it on your website, integrate it into your app, or any combination of these? Would you like to employ GPT integrations? Remember that every channel is unique, including distinct technical specifications and modes of communication. Make sure the chatbot you build is optimized for the channel or channels of your choice.
4. Define your customers
Sometimes, while creating a chatbot, businesses focus a lot on the technology and neglect the user experience. That is a grave error! It’s crucial to know who your customers are, as your bot will be communicating with them. Provide answers to the following questions to help your chatbot choose who it will be speaking with:
- What is the history of your customers?
- Why are they contacting you?
- What do people anticipate from your business?
- What aspects of chatbots bother them (and how might that be addressed)?
Although no two people are alike, the human-bot dialogue will run more smoothly if you have a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs.
5. Give a personality to your bot
The majority of businesses give up on creating chatbots after step four. They believe they will be set once they understand the purpose and intended actions of the chatbot. But a lot of people overlook the fact that bots ought to have personalities as well. They will, after all, communicate with people.
Make sure the personality of your chatbot aligns with both your target audience and your brand when it comes to life-building. Your chatbot’s personality should be in line with your brand’s quirkiness if your target audience is youthful and stylish.
Prior to deciding on your bot’s personality, it can be beneficial to address a few important questions:
- What is your bot’s history?
- What is the life purpose of your bot?
- Where are the greatest areas of strength and weakness?
- What is the alter ego of your bot?
Your bot’s personality will be more engaging for your customers the more you consider it to be a real person.
Chatbots ought to be sentient beings! Human decision-making is, after all, driven by emotions. Customers will have a better experience, be more easily persuaded, and be more understanding and tolerant if your bot makes a mistake since they have a connection to it.
6. Make the dialogue flow easily
Creating dialogues for your chatbots really gets much easier after you’ve completed the previous steps because you’ll already know what you want the bot to accomplish and how it should communicate with your clients. It is now time to consider the dialogue’s fundamental tenets.
- Introduction: What will the bot say in its own words? Here, don’t be scared to show off its individuality!
- Information: How will the bot obtain and validate data?
Advice: at this stage, you should merely provide brief facts to your customers rather than amusing them. Here, the functionality should win out over personality!
- Invalid responses: How will your bot respond to questions it cannot understand?
While businesses would sometimes like to believe that their chatbots are error-free, miscommunication will often occur in chats. Teach your bot how to deal with them and be ready for anything. This might also be a fantastic chance to bring some humor into the conversation.
- Nonverbal communication
Even with text-based chatbots, there may be times when the bot is unable to communicate—for example, when it is attempting to obtain user data. Ensure that the client is aware of what is happening during these quiet times and doesn’t feel abandoned. The bot might say something like, “Let me verify your details.” I’ll return immediately.
- Fulfillment messages
Celebrate if the bot was able to resolve a customer’s problem! It will improve the user’s experience with the bot and provide your customers with a sense of satisfaction.
7. Test, measure, and improve
You have now created an enjoyable, interesting, and practical bot for your company and customers. Now is the time to test it out. Prior to launching the bot for all of your consumers, conduct smaller tests to allow yourself the opportunity to iron out any bugs and make improvements.
After your chatbot has been used, continue to gather data and evaluate its effectiveness. Establish success measures first. Some examples of these include time spent on each client query or completed discussions. Next, see how your bot is performing.
Bots aren’t perfect, just like people, and can always improve. But if you follow these guidelines, you’ll undoubtedly have a great chatbot for your business that will benefit both you and your customers!
Examples of marketing Chatbot
Business use cases include anything from customer care automation to assisting clients in moving up the sales funnel.
The top chatbot examples have been gathered and are arranged according to use cases. The chatbot examples are presented here, covering conversational AI, sales, marketing, and customer service.
1. Chatbots for customer service
The hidden weapon of effective customer service use cases is a chatbot. Offering clients the choice to communicate with a chatbot rather than a person allows firms to:
- Lower their hiring expenses and give staff members more responsibility for bigger, trickier issues.
- Give your team more time to work on worthwhile, satisfying projects. This may contribute to a rise in worker satisfaction and output.
However, chatbots also provide the extra advantage of giving your customers a sense of rapid attention. Increasing your response rates will increase sales and guarantee satisfied customers.
Customer service Chatbots are able to manage a high frequency of questions without experiencing overload. They are therefore perfect for responding to frequently asked questions day or night. Additionally, chatbots can be used to assist with customer support on social media platforms. Here is an example of a customer service chatbot.
Domino’s Pizza
Brands are continuously searching for methods to increase revenue from their social media platforms due to the rise of mobile and social shopping.
Domino’s Pizza features a chatbot on both their website and Messenger. Dom is the chatbot’s name, adhering to its brand voice. It’s easy to purchase your preferred pie because the bot lets users create their pizzas and place orders just through the chat box. Dom can locate the nearest store to you, save and recall orders, and more.
This is possibly one of the best examples of chatbot marketing that shows how a bot can take a task completed on a mobile device and make it just as excellent, if not better, on social media. Digital ordering is nothing new, but using a chatbot to place an order eliminates the need for app sign-ups or native downloads.
2. Sales chatbots
Chatbots and sales personnel are a match made in heaven. Chatbots can do administrative duties such as:
- Scheduling an appointment
- Following up on qualified leads
They can offer recommendations for products or services to help people move down the sales funnel. To close the purchase, sales professionals can then approach the situation personally and humanely.
Customers may even text neighboring stores straight from Google Maps thanks to chatbots. Customers will find it easier to locate and get in touch with your company as a result, perhaps increasing sales.
Another excellent use case for chatbots in sales is Omni channel conversation. Chatbots can communicate with customers via a variety of platforms, including live chat, SMS, and Facebook Messenger. This gives customers a more practical and effective approach to get in touch with your company. An example of this is the Lemonade chatbot.
The friendly sales funnel guide from Lemonade
This example of an insurance chatbot has personality thanks to Lemonade’s Maya. She addresses people in a kind voice from a happy avatar, keeping with Lemonade’s identity. There’s a warm, feminine vibe to it.
While assisting users in completing the required documents to receive a quote for an insurance policy, Maya upsells them. An example of a website chatbot that guides users through the sales funnel is provided by this one.
3. Marketing chatbots
Chatbots are gaining popularity as a marketing tool quite quickly. It makes sense why: chatbots provide a distinctive, practical, and intimate means of communicating with customers. Chatbots, for instance, can be used to:
- Advertise exclusive deals or experiences
- Respond to questions on goods or services
- Provide customer support
Your customers seek a sense of connection with your brand during the purchasing and discovery process. Customers’ emotional connection to your brand is vital. When they are, you can count on them to buy your items, refer you to their friends, and show less aversion to pricing. Example of this include:
The promotional engagement effort of Mountain Dew
Using chatbots, Mountain Dew advanced their marketing approach. The self-described “unofficial fuel of gamers” engaged and advocated with its customer base to build relationships.
For their “Rig Up” promotion, the energy drink company partnered with Origin PC and Twitch, the largest live streaming platform in the world. Fans were first introduced to DEWBot through Twitch throughout the eight-week series.
Videos of professional gamers and prominent gaming hosts playing games were aired live by the Mountain Dew Twitch Studio during the series. In order to get feedback from viewers on what parts, such as an input device or graphics card (GPU), make a suitable rig for them, DEWbot sent out polls. It also provided real-time updates from the show, including the crowning of the champions.
Due to their high engagement rate, Dewbot was ultimately awarded a Shorty Award. It’s hardly surprising that they won with metrics like a 550% increase in in-stream discourse.
4. Conversational AI chatbots
Not every chatbot is made equally. Scripted language chatbots adhere to a preset flow of dialog guidelines. They become confused by speech differences since they are unable to stray.
Conversely, other chatbots generate AI that facilitates conversational commerce through the use of natural language processing. These chatbots are able to have human-like conversations. Because of their machine learning capabilities, they are always improving their communication to establish stronger connections with others.
Babylon Health
The symptom checker offered by Babylon Health is an extremely creative application of AI chatbots in the healthcare industry. The AI was created by scientists, engineers, and doctors. It communicates naturally by utilizing natural language processing and machine learning.
Your symptoms are interpreted by the chatbot. Determines associated risk variables, probable causes, and potential courses of action after that.
This might potentially reduce the amount of time that patients and healthcare professionals spend waiting or diagnosing. What excites us the most, though, is how this can prevent us from using WebMD for self-diagnosis.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Chatbot Marketing
Advantages
1. They assist you in getting to know your customers
Chatbots that can have conversations with you can help you learn even more about your customers. They let you learn about their most frequently asked questions and requirements as well as the goods and services that pique their attention. They support you in making calculated choices that will enhance the encounter and provide more individualized care at every turn.
2. They are machines for making sales
When it comes to promoting new items and anticipating client demands through proactive notifications, your chatbot might be the ideal companion. Additionally, they can expedite the decision-making process for potential customers by providing prompt support.
3. They aid in cost optimization
Keeping with the previous idea, wouldn’t it be wonderful if your agents dedicated more time to responding to the questions that really needed a human? In the medium run, cost optimization is also achieved by implementing a chatbot with conversational AI to enhance agent service and automate customer support.
4. They provide a personalized experience
Every person is unique, and this includes the way they communicate. As a result, providing a sufficient and sympathetic answer to every inquiry is crucial. With the help of plugins like photos, carousels, and documents, you may enhance chats, comprehend colloquial language and regional accents, and ascertain the purpose of each exchange.
Disadvantages
1. Chatbot is a human agent
it might appear apparent. But you must keep that in mind. Because it is not a human agent, a conversational chatbot is not always able to comprehend a question. Depending on the data it has supplied, its choice of responses can be restricted. There could be moments when everything you do seems “robotic.”
2. There is a time of implementation
This is not a drawback, but it is important to keep in mind that, like to any corporate enhancement, it will take some time for everything to be fully functional and produce tangible results. The chatbot’s deployment, configuration, and learning processes may take some time.
3. They occasionally require maintenance
Chatbots require ongoing updates, upkeep, and optimization in terms of their knowledge base and communication with customer’s strategies. The chatbot must be supplied with fresh, insightful material (i.e., data) that can respond to inquiries from customers.
How AI is used in Chatbot Marketing
The digital and AI era has changed the expectations of customers. Customers want fast service and individualized, precise responses that are easier to understand and faster than ever. They demand real-time responses and action; they don’t want to wait for easy responses, fill out forms to seek quotes, or send emails to inquire about prices.
Live agents have historically been in charge of customer service; but, with smaller marketing resources, digital marketers are having to adjust to consumers’ modern expectations.
Creating excellent conversational marketing tactics can be facilitated by the application of artificial intelligence. Customers can access AI chatbots around-the-clock, and they can provide insights into your customers’ interaction, and purchasing habits to facilitate more engaging discussions, and customized digital experiences across your messaging and website platforms.
With the help of Large Language Models (LLMs) and new generative AI capabilities, chatbot marketing has the ability to completely transform digital user experiences, push the envelope in terms of efficiency for digital marketing, and engage more prospects, which opens up more sales chances.
Conclusion on chatbot marketing
Increasing qualifying leads and optimizing sales are the general objectives of marketing in order to increase revenue. Any industry can benefit greatly from chatbot marketing, which is one of the most dependable E-commerce trends for increasing sales for companies implementing it.
It’s simple to build up chatbots to interact with your existing marketing platforms, whether your goal is to streamline orders or draw in new customers. After that, you can use the pre-made templates you had prepared beforehand to allow it operate. To enhance your chatbot and future marketing efforts, all you have to do is capitalize on the data findings.
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FAQs
Which technique is used in chatbots?
Chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI), automated rules, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) to process data and respond to various types of requests.
What are the two main types of chatbots?
Rule-based chatbots and AI bots are the two categories of chatbots that can be distinguished. Rule-based chatbots (sometimes called click bots) are widely used chatbots that follow established conversational paths. For example, they present users with prepared question and answer alternatives.
While artificially intelligent chatbots are capable of having thoughtful interactions with customers. Their AI capabilities serves as the foundation for this, with so-called machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) following closely after.
Are chatbots the future of marketing?
Chatbots are being utilized more frequently and are getting increasingly sophisticated. In the future, their application will only increase, and for marketing purposes, they will be more widely apparent across many industries. However, chatbots will complement traditional marketing rather than take its place.
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