A Beginner’s Guide to Chatbot Marketing [Benefits and Tips]

In this age of automation, with technology moving ahead rapidly, it’s all about working smart. Just think of performing all your time-consuming tasks automatically the way you want them to be done. With the advanced artificial intelligence, where machine learning chatbots have taken over most of the monotonous and repetitive tasks, businesses are getting plenty of time to focus on other critical activities to help their business grow.

With chatbots, you can entrust your customer service and other repetitive tasks on to automated machines. Chatbots can help you keep your customers engaged and serve them in ways that matter the most. They can easily become a part of your marketing creativities and help you push your clients through the sales funnel.

Keep on reading to know how you can use chatbots to interact with your customers and make them happy. Yes! Chatbots created with no-code development platform can talk to your customers even when you are not there. They can serve your clients anytime, even if they try to contact you after you are done for the day. In this post, we will help you learn how to use chatbots for marketing and why exactly do you need a chatbot for your business, but before you get into all those details, first understand what chatbots are.

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are autonomous programs that help businesses connect with their customers better. These programs are the most promising and advanced expressions of interactions between machines and humans. They simulate chats in natural language through auditory methods and messaging applications. Chatbots are powered by natural language processing and artificial intelligence. AI chatbots have progressed significantly in recent times. They are also known as digital assistants that understand what the customer says and respond to them accordingly. The advanced chatbots reply to the users with text, audios, images, GIFs, videos, etc. You can experience bots in apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, and most of the websites having a button asking if you need help. Go on with the article to know how smart these chatbots are and how you can make your marketing strategy stand out by using one.

How Smart Are the Chatbots?

Chatbots can help you speak like a human and act like a machine. With chatbots, you can automate as many of your business tasks as possible. Chatbots can talk to your customers like live agents and help them with all their issues instantly.

Gather Basic Details

It feels pleasing when you are greeted at the entrance of a venue or a shop. Chatbots do the same for the businesses. With the chatbots, you can welcome your website visitors and other customers and offer them help. Chatbots help you gather basic details of the users and serve them in a professional yet delightful way.

Save Time & Money

Customer support chatbots help businesses deal with more customers with fewer efforts and resources. Creating a chatbot is a one-time investment as they need no salary and offer full-time support. With chatbots, businesses can automate repetitive tasks and allocate the saved time to other business activities.

Generate Leads & Revenue

Chatbots ask direct questions to understand what the user wants. For example, ‘How May I Help You?’. They gather the required information from the users and provide them with effective support. Chatbots store these user details in their database that you can use later to generate leads. It helps you in increasing your revenue even if a few of these leads convert into your customers.

Fastens the Payment Process

With chatbots, you can have your customers process the payments without accessing any other website. You can simply integrate your own payment gateway to your chatbot and help your users make payments in a few easy steps. Let’s say, you own an eCommerce store. Wouldn’t that be amazing if you integrate a payment platform with your chatbot? You need an automation platform to get this done. Here is the one that Appy Pie offers – Appy Pie Connect. With Appy Pie Connect, you can integrate PayPal with your chatbot and help your customers process their payments easily. If you do not consider PayPal as your preferred payment platform, there are various other payment platforms on Appy Pie Connect that you can integrate with your chatbot.

Guide Users to Better Results

Chatbots ask users about their queries and offer quick resolutions for the same. They guide the customers to go find the information they need. Sometimes, users don’t even know what they want, they just visit the website to explore your brand. Chatbots ask these users a series of qualifying questions to understand what they have come looking for and guide them accordingly.

Provide Full-time Support

Unlike humans, chatbots are available for your customers all the time. No matter what the time is, whenever you have a visitor on your website, your chatbot will welcome them. Chatbots can handle thousands of users at a time and that too with no delayed responses. Chatbots are well-known for their quick responses and instant resolutions. They help your users even when your office is closed.

Fit into Any Business

Chatbots work for both small and large-scale businesses. They have their own benefits for both kinds. You can also read our post – ‘15 Reasons Why Chatbots are Beneficial for Small Businesses’ to understand how chatbots can help your small business grow.

Now that you are familiar with all the major benefits of using chatbots for your business, let us go further and check out what chatbot marketing is and how chatbots help you boost your marketing strategy.

How Chatbots Boost Your Marketing Strategy?

Chatbot marketing is a way of promoting your products and services using chatbots. Chatbot Marketing tactics help businesses keep the users engaged either using their app or website. Businesses create chatbots using various chatbot makers available online and connect them with texting apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc. With chatbots, you can track eCommerce orders, book a restaurant, order a cab, send money, all with the required app integrations. Here are a few major things that you can do with the chatbots to boost your marketing strategy.

Connecting Socially with People

Chatbots help businesses connect with people socially. You can use chatbots as a universal marketing channel by integrating them with your social media channels. With Appy Pie Connect, you can integrate your chatbot with social media apps including, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Gathering Data for Content Marketing

Your target audience goes through three stages of their journey to figure out whether to go with your brand – Awareness, Consideration, and Decision-Making. To automate your chatbot with the right flow, you need to study the whole process closely. Chatbots can take your audience through this customer journey by asking the right questions and providing the relevant solutions instantly.

Improving Your SEO Ranking

Chatbots can help you enhance your SEO ranking by delivering an excellent customer service experience. Make sure your chatbot not only helps the customers but also values them. Simply integrating a chatbot without programming it based on your business requirements will not work for you. Program your chatbot with the complete product knowledge and enable it to serve and delight your customers. Now when we are talking about marketing and SEO, here is a video to help you have a better understanding of what Search Engine Optimization is and how it works.
(Above video is a part of a more elaborate course on Academy by Appy Pie. To access the complete course, please Click Here, or continue reading below.)

Enhancing Conversion Rates

Chatbots can help you increase the number of leads and your product sales with conversational marketing. This is one of the popular chatbot strategies that help you communicate with your customers. With conversational marketing, chatbots help you improve your website engagement and conversion rates. Go through this post to understand how chatbots can help businesses improve their sales and Customer Service - How Chatbots Can Help You Improve Sales & Customer Service?

Collecting and Analyzing Customer Feedback

Chatbots can create a perfect opportunity for your business to collect feedback from your customers. Customers don’t want to share the feedback unless they get some incentives or rewards for doing that. However, chatbots soften this process and ask a regular question while they collect feedback. With the right programming, chatbots can also analyze the gathered customer feedback to give you more insights into what your customer wants.

With chatbots, you can deliver quality information to your customers and make the interactions fun for them. A well-programmed chatbot provides users with the relevant information, keeps them engaged, and leaves a long-lasting impression. After learning what all things you can do by integrating chatbots into your business, you might want to create one. Trust me, you can do it in just a few minutes using Appy Pie’s no-code Chatbot Builder. If you need help with the steps, go through this detailed article with a step-by-step tutorial - A Step-by-Step Guide to Build the Ultimate Q&A Chatbot. Let’s say you have created a chatbot for your business, but that is not all you need to do. Setting up a chatbot as per your marketing strategy is a must. Check out how you can do that!

How to Set up your Chatbot for Marketing?

After researching multiple chatbots being used for marketing purposes, we have listed a few steps that would help you get into chatbot marketing.

Humanize Your Chatbot

Make your chatbot speak like a human. Create a chatbot character that represents your brand to your audience. A simple interaction can help users recognize your business and have them buy your products. Program your chatbots the way that they understand what the user has come looking for. Your bot should have that contextual understanding that it spots the user’s intent. You can go through this post to have a better understanding of how you can humanize your chatbot - 7 Effective Tips to Humanize your Chatbot.

Find the Most Frequently Asked Questions

The very first step to setting up your bot for marketing is to find the most frequently asked questions. These questions will help you create the content that your bot will contain. Let us take an example of a customer service bot. To make this bot work for your business, you need to program the product information into the bot’s database, but before you do that, you need to create the relevant content. You can get in touch with your customer support team, social media support team, sales and marketing team, or social community team to check out what type of questions have been frequently asked by the users. Also, search your product-related questions on search engines as well. Look for the relevant Google Pages, recent searches, comments, etc., and you will be able to create effective content for your bot.

Create a Conversation Tree

When you set up your chatbot, you need to create a bot flow which means adding the set of questions your bot will ask the users. Try to begin with quick greetings and then a few product-based questions. These questions help chatbots understand what the user wants. With this unique set of questions and answers, you can create a conversation tree for your bot.

Enhance your bot with data and personalization

Fill in your bots with your product details. Start with adding the basic questions that your customers ask. Basic details like daily deals, regular working hours, your product price range, and much more can deliver an outstanding service experience. Use chatbot builders available online to personalize your chatbot. With chatbot building software, you can customize your chatbots as per your business nature and requirements.

Promote Your Chatbot

The last and most important tip is to promote your chatbot. Your bot strategy will only be beneficial if people will find it and use it. Make sure your chatbot starts interacting with the website visitors proactively. To promote your chatbot, you can add it to the list of your customer service channels, add a call-to-action to your website, or a blog, or you can advertise it on social media.

Final Thoughts

Chatbots are surely beneficial for incoming requests, but you can also use them for outgoing purposes. Firstly, try using your bot as a content delivery system. Using chatbots, you can ask your users to opt-in for the regular announcements and updates. This way, you can not only let your customers know about your bot but also you can stay in touch with them. That was almost everything that you needed to learn to set up your chatbot for marketing. However, to set up one, you need to create it first. Use Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder to build a chatbot for customer service or sales to gain all the benefits of chatbot marketing. The chatbot maker helps you with both chatbot creation and chatbot development. We have a dedicated chatbot support team to help you create and set up your chatbot. Appy Pie offers a free chatbot builder that helps you create the best customer service chatbots, conversational chatbots, live chatbots. You also get to customize these chatbots as per your business requirements. To know how to build a chatbot, visit Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder page today and try creating one for yourself.

Citations

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