Two Concepts that Make Chatbots a Perfect Marketing Channel

As a marketer, I hold chatbot technology’s connection to marketing close to my heart. I believe chatbots are a fantastic marketing tool, for many reasons.

In this post, I am going to focus on two key concepts that, to me, make chatbots a perfect marketing channel. Though there are many more reasons to love them, for now I will focus on:

• Push & pull
• Human fallback

Push, but also pull

For the longest time, marketing has been about pushing.

Even when done in a sensible, upstanding way, it is still about putting information in front of users who may not want it now/here.

Chatbots are changing the game in this space.

> Want to learn about chatbots and their impact? Grab our Chatbot Statistics Cheatsheet!

A beautiful aspect of chatbots is, they offer users an opportunity to pull information. It’s no longer about broadcasting messages (emails, Facebook messages, carrier pigeons) to your audience. It’s now about offering a tool your audience can connect to and grab what it is they need.

Let’s say you are the proud marketer of a SaaS platform.

You can (and should) inform your potential users about the amazing benefits they can get from using your platform. But, you should also now be available for them to just ask.

‘Can you send me some case studies of people using your platform for X?’

‘What ROI can I expect using your platform?’

‘Can you send me a step-by-step guide to help me achieve X?’

And so on.

Pull messaging has changed the game. The fact that you can now offer this technology conversationally and at scale through an intelligent machine is revolutionary.

If you’re not doing it, your competitors soon will.

From machines to humans

The usual rebuttal for the benefit above is, ‘well, what if the chatbot doesn’t serve the user with the right information?’.

It’s a fair question.

Chatbots wouldn’t be the ‘perfect marketing channel’ if they got it wrong all the time and didn’t offer any way out of a broken automated systems.

Thankfully, industry leaders have thought of that.

First, there is the obvious: fix the tech. Training your chatbot to understand more utterances is chatbot 101.

Not sure what an utterance is? I wrote this to help: Essential Chatbot Glossary (for Non-Geeks) .

Second, any solid chatbot should have a human fallback feature. This is how you provide the best marketing experience to your users.

The human fallback feature essentially flags up any conversation where a user seems to be stuck to an actual human. The human can then take over for the machine, help out, and dip out.

Why is this important for marketing? Because you never, ever want anyone to be stuck in an infinite loop. You always want to provide a way out.

This, too, is revolutionary.

It means your users can talk to your chatbot automatically all day long, get all the right information instantly, day or night (something channels like Facebook, PPC, SEO, whatever else, cannot offer). And, whenever they’re stuck, boom — human to help.

These two key concepts have little to do with the chatbot technology itself.

It’s not about clever artificial intelligence. It’s not about intricate machine learning algorithms. It’s about providing a seamless experience through revolutionary technology.

?? Any thoughts on this? I’d love to hear it! ??

In this post, I expand on two concepts I originally defined in this article: The Essential Chatbot Glossary (for Non-Geeks). If you are interested in learning more, please have a read ????!