Do you use email and messaging to communicate with your consumers? You have probably heard it, “Everyone is on Facebook.” And it’s true! Facebook has bridged a gap between messaging and solving problems with the people who are constantly on the platform by using chatbots. Now you can solve problems in real time without doing anything! Chatbots are just starting to get popular, so you should be an early adopter. This will help you get loyal fans from the start before chatbots become the norm for every business.
If you’re scared of trying out new, fancy software, don’t be. It’s fancy, but so easy to use. You will be addicted because of how easy it is to reach your customers without manually doing any work!
Try out a simple bot here: https://m.me/rahulalimdigital?ref=w5845860
Today, businesses are bringing business to their daily messaging apps. As a consumer, how convenient is it that businesses are reaching out to you on the apps you spend the most time checking? It’s not creepy, it’s actually going to be your new edge.
See this graph by Digital Marketer, as it shows that messaging app users are surpassing the amount or people on social network sites.
There are different purposes of chatbots. Some include support, transactional, and informational chatbots. Support chatbots can help answer FAQs or lead people to the resources that they are looking for. This is your customer service replacement. Transactional bots help customers to do, you guessed it, transactions! This could be useful if you are a restaurant or you sell products/services that can be easily ordered. Informational chatbots gather the information that you may need in the future. This includes address, phone number, and email addresses. When this information becomes stored into your CRM, it will help you will future marketing efforts. There are other types of bots and these are just a few of them that will be beneficial to your business.
The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over. We are now using Siri, Alexa, and driverless cars to navigate through life on a daily basis. Chatbots should be the least of your worries! Almost 30% of consumers are interested in tools that use AI, and that number will only rise.
Chatbots are extremely beneficial for businesses because consumers have the ability to buy through them. Almost 50% of consumers say they would buy something from a chatbot. With simple clicks saying what the consumer wants, it can quickly and easily direct them to a purchase that is the best fit for them, leading to a faster checkout. There is not a lot of time for contemplation.
When a consumer has time to think about if they should buy something online, it may lead to them thinking too much about a purchase. This results in procrastination and forgetting all together that they wanted something in the first place.
Another way businesses can use chatbots is for customer service. People are so used to text messaging, that they don’t care to talk on the phone anymore. Since we don’t text people for customer service, chatbots fulfill that service. Almost 50% of consumers say they would rather use live chat than another means of communication with a business. This number will increase as it’s fast and the person on the other end receives an immediate response. 95% of people think that chatbots will be very beneficial for customer service. How many of you have used the “live chat” feature on a website?
Every business has their own voice, themes, and brand image. The great feature of chatbots is that you can customize what you say in the bot. You can add your own flare in the messages so that people know it’s your business talking. A company like Forever 21 would talk differently than a company like Bass Pro Shops. If you don’t know these two types of people, here is an example:
Chatbots do not suffer from the limitations of a human agent. Where live agents can handle only 2 to 3 conversations at a time, chatbots can operate without an upper limit. By employing chatbot solutions to complement your human task force, your business can get the boost it needs to enter new markets. You can jump in at any time into the conversation because you can see all of the replies, but the bot initially does everything for you.
If your business receives a lot of inquiries, chatbots can take the load off your customer support team. By acting as the first point of contact, chatbots can screen calls from customers and redirect them to human agents only when required. Instead of having to sift through different people to end up at the right one (which may happen on the telephone with transfers), you will get to the human agent you wanted from the beginning. How annoying are automated telephone prompters that tell you to press numbers to only lead you to a place you never wanted to go!
Millennials are not impulsive buyers. They like to inquire and compare products before they buy. Also, millennials prefer live chat over phone calls. So, if your product lines are aimed at Millennials, introducing chatbots in your customer service will be a prudent investment. Text message use is surpassing the number of phone calls people make, and people respond to their texts just as fast today. Chatbots are on an app that the user already has and is just another way to text!
The more you interact with your customers, the more business you get from them. If you are using online channels to communicate with your customers, then chatbots can be useful in simplifying certain tasks for you. Chatbots are another way to build a relationship with your consumers. If people see you as one of the first companies to use chatbots, they will be your fan from the start. They also can trust that you will be there to communicate with them and tend to their needs 24/7.
Conversational marketing works! While social media sites engage with their consumers by posting relatable content, chatbots directly reach out to its consumers to make sure that their message is being seen and understood. There is no gray area when it comes to chatbots and building relationships.
Unlike apps and websites, chatbots do not present a passive user experience. You can use chatbots for a highly interactive marketing campaign. The availability of chatbots on platforms like Facebook Messenger means you can reach out to more people at once. Another plus about using Messenger is that you can see when the person read your message. If you feel like your message was something they should’ve replied to or acted on (and might have forgotten), you can send a reminder like, “Just want to check in that you saw my message! I don’t want you to miss out on this sale that ends TODAY!”
Using the different growth tools that are featured, you can grow your subscribers! Some of the growth tools include a bar widget, a page takeover, customer chat, comment growth tool, and Ref URL. Our favorite right now is the comment growth tool. Connected to a regular Facebook post, advise your followers to comment something. “If you want 40% off your next purchase, comment ‘YES’ below.” All of the comments that relate to “YES” will then trigger a conversation in Messenger. Now these people are tagged and become your subscribers! These subscribers will be useful in another feature of chatbots…read on!
Once you have an audience, you can then send out announcements, called broadcasts. If you are launching a new product, you can send out a broadcast to all of the people who ever interacted with your bot (aka your subscribers). There is a very high open rate for messages–88% open rate and 56% click-through rate. Broadcasts are just another way to interact and communicate with your customers.
Broadcasts are also very useful for reminders. If you are a company that has products that sell out at launch, you may want to remind your list that something is happening: “REMINDER: Product launch in 10 min! Get yours before it runs out! (Our products usually sell out in the first 20 minutes!)”
People are even using Messenger apps more than they are using social platforms. Whatsapp downloads comes in at 41.2 million, Messenger is 39.3 million, Facebook is 36 million, and Instagram is 25.6 million. Facebook messenger alone has 800 million users and you can reach all of them with chatbots!
Making a new app can cost a lot of money and you will have to pay a lot of people involved in the process. Consider also the time it takes to build your app, test it, launch it, etc.
Because chatbots trigger automatically, it is available 24/7, unlike your customer service representatives. You want your customers to see you as someone dependable and who is always there to help. Chatbots make it so that it is convenient for the consumer as well as the people who work for the company. If the issue is something that an agent needs to attend to, the bot can give a temporary solution and then a human agent can pick up when they are available.
Apps are great, but they aren’t as good as using chatbots. For one thing, everyone already has the Messenger app or the Facebook app! If you are going to use a new app, think about this statistic: Less than 25% of people revisit an app after the first day they used it!
People already spend their time on Facebook, so how about being where the people are instead of trying to convince people to try something new. It’s just like how it’s easier to keep your existing customers than get new ones. More steps for the consumer means more points where they can drop off. If they haven’t interacted with a chatbot before, they will likely be surprised that something like it exists. As mentioned before, they are now a loyal fan of yours and they see you as one of the first people to start using chatbots.
Facebook Messenger is launching new features later this year! These features are for lead generation and appointment booking.
For lead generation, if someone clicks on your news feed ad, they will be taken to Messenger for a Question and Answer flow. For appointment booking, Messenger will connect to calendar systems so that a customer can see when the business is available. Appointment booking was found to be useful for Sephora who uses does makeup bookings. They saw a 50% increase in in-store bookings! Can you find a way to integrate this into your business? How about reservations, appointments, and/or consultations?
Again, chatbots are finding ways to bridge the gap of communication between business and consumer. This April, it was found that 20 billion messages were exchanged with their consumers! Seems like people are starting to like this chatbot life! Time for businesses to hop on the bandwagon!
Don’t wait to use chatbots. Soon, every business will be using chatbots, just like the rise in businesses using social media. In today’s world of business, if you don’t have a social presence, people don’t trust you. You want to make sure that people see you as one of the firsts and they remember you for it.
Let’s take a look at the know, like, trust model. Social media allows people to know and like who you are, while chatbots found a way to get people to trust you!
To establish better communication and a relationship with your customers, chatbots also fulfill that need. The greatest part of it all is that you don’t actually have to be manually messaging people.
There are so many different directions that chatbots can go in (called the flow). You can ask a question and have different answer options, each leading into another flow.
Try out bot here and see where each answer goes! https://m.me/rahulalimdigital?ref=w5845860
If you need help with making chatbots or you want to learn more about how it works, schedule a call with us at https://calendly.com/customcreatives/30min.
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