How National Geographic Engaged its Facebook Audience with a Trivia Chatbot

National Geographic is one of the world’s most iconic media companies. They are consistently at the cutting edge of media—from offering one of the world’s leading print magazines, multiple TV channels, and now the world’s largest (non-celebrity) brand social media community.

National Geographic currently has 46 million fans on Facebook. So for them, this is a major channel to share content and engage with their audience. Most pages are seeing a decline in organic reach and engagement via the Facebook Feed. Messenger chatbots offer high engagement rates, personalized content distribution, and the ability to automate many aspects of marketing and sales.

National Geographic wanted a new way to engage their Facebook fans and promote their 2019 Almanac. So they created a daily trivia chatbot powered by content from their Almanac with the goal of promoting and selling the book to passionate fans.

How Did the Trivia Bot Work

National Geographic chose Smartloop to create their Messenger chatbot because the platform offered an easy way to build the chatbot, automate conversations and daily questions, and improve with analytics and AI.

For the onboarding, the bot asked the user what trivia topic they liked most. A user could pick between geography, history, science, space or wildlife. Based on the user's response the onboarding and daily trivia questions would be on that topic. 

A user was then given three trivia questions. This was done to demonstrate how the bot would work and to invite the user to the daily trivia game. Once a user finished the first set of questions they were given their score based on the amount of correct or incorrect answers. The bot has a little fun here and shows different messages and gifs based on the score.

After this, the user is asked if they’d like to opt-in to receive daily trivia questions. At this point, the bot is seeing very high conversion rates to opt-ins for daily trivia. This is because the chatbot demonstrated how it would work and was personalized based on the user’s topic preferences. Smartloop would then automate the full process of delivering daily trivia questions. Each day the user would receive a notification from Messenger which contained their daily trivia question.

Selling Books

Now it was time to sell books. The call to action to buy the Almanac was presented in two ways. First, as a user progressed through the daily trivia questions, National Geographic sent users to more content on their website which contained advertisements to purchase the Almanac. Secondly, the chatbot had multiple touchpoints during the daily questions to offer a discount code and direct link to purchase the Almanac.

The Results

• 65% of users came back daily to answer trivia questions.
• 29% click-through rates out of the chatbot to additional content and the Almanac product page. (compared to email industry rates of 5%)
• 43% open rate on promotional broadcast messages. (compared to email industry open rates of 20%)

National Geographic’s trivia chatbot has received great response from their users. It is a very innovative way to engage with their audience at scale and market their products. This will be the year that more and more brands start to use Facebook Messenger chatbots in their marketing and sales strategy. We’re excited to see how National Geographic evolves their chatbot in 2019. 

About Smartloop

Smartloop is a conversational bot platform to automate your marketing. Create your own bot or email me to work with our team of bot experts.