HOW TO USE CHATBOT MARKETING TO RE-BOOT YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY?

The ulterior success of messaging apps gave rise to chatbots. A chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm that actively interacts with customers through speech, text or messaging and imitates the behavior of a human customer service representative with an objective of providing seamless customer service experience. It imitates a customer service representative in its objective, conduct and actions. Not just for brands dealing in products and services, but these Chatbots are also deployed on various social media platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.?

The astounding Chatbot Market Size and Scope

The?market size of the Chatbot Industry is expected to reach approximately €9.4 billion by the year 2024 at 29.7% at a compound annual growth rate. The fact that Chabots play an important role in reducing the operating costs for businesses, promises such kind of a growth. That is why chatbots have become a crucial part in some sectors like service industry, marketing and processing to name a few.

Resolution of customer queries 24*7 gives businesses an edge over companies which have fixed customer service division timings. Hence, more businesses are incessantly looking to develop virtual assistants and chatbots to ensure that their customer’s queries are resolved on the spot regardless of the time of day. That is why the market size is set to experience in a boom in the customer service segment between 2019 and 2026 at a 31.6% compound annual growth rate.?

A very interesting research that I conducted using Instagram Polls (pic attached below) showed that:?

• Approximately 57% of customers prefer chatbots to human agents because they can provide apt answers to simple questions.?
• Nearly, 40% of consumers would prefer to use chatbots in placing orders and reservations among other things.
• Approximately 60% of Indian consumers have used chatbots inspite of infrastructural challenges related to internet services.

VOICE RECOGNITION PRODUCTS like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri play a huge role in making customers more comfortable with chatbots and enable them to place immense trust on chatbots.?

Today, Chatbots are being used not just as customer service tools, but they are also being used for Research purposes and to generate brand awareness and lead generation to save businesses a lot of money.?

Chatbot Marketing: 5 Best Practices

There is a need for businesses to optimise chatbots and include them as an essential part of their Digital Marketing Strategy for reasons stated above. Let’s discuss a few practices that can help in this regard:?

1. Setting correct expectations from the chatbots

You have to be sure why you are need of a chatbot and the purpose the chatbot is supposed to serve in your business. The design of the Chatbot will depend upon the clarity of the objective and design is everything when creating an Artificial Intelligence based system.?

2. Little or a Lot?

The difference between a good and a bad chatbot depends upon “how much “ and “what” it talks. Not only is it necessary to have a grammatically correct chatbot but it is also important to ensure that your chatbot is user-friendly. A poorly phrased or a grammatically incorrect conversation will do you more harm than good because the immediate perception of the customer will be that you are a non-serious business which is not technically well adept as well.

3. Chatbot’s functionality

Confusing customers with questions is the reason of failure of most chatbots. List down their functionality in such a way that it gives a clear direction to the customers. Clear navigation is a must and DO NOT BOMBARD THE CUSTOMERS WITH SUGGESTIONS.?

4. Chatbot’s Personality

Use a certain tonality which gives your chatbot a distinct personality. Make sure that your chatbot’s personality matches with the objective with which it has been created and your overall Mission Statement

4. Lead management

The overall objective of the Chatbots should be to reduce the number of people waiting in the queue to get their calls answered. Let your chatbot do the bulk of the work so that by the time a call gets to you, you already know what the customer on the other end of the phone line wants to ask. This saves you a lot of time.?

5. Make your messages as human as possible

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT. Remember your chatbot is replacing a human and hence it should be able to communicate in the most human friendly manner. The best way to do it is keeping the script SHORT. That means dividing the conversation bits of the chatbot to smaller sentences rather than whole text. It is important to also add word variations like synonyms to ensure that your bot understands every direction the chat can go into. You need to craft its voice and personality.?

As a Digital Marketing Trainer/MBA Professor, I would recommend that startups should incorporate Chatbot Marketing right at the outset as it saves you time and money, it easily generates leads and more revenue since they increase conversion rates.?

Since, it helps to guide users to achieve better outcomes because they will get the information they need in detail by asking qualifying questions, it gives an impression to the customers that you are technically adept.

Even though the chatbot technology is relatively new, the future looks promising, especially with the rapid technological advances.

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