Why You Need a Chatbot for Your Business
Ausi Kimmons
Co-Owner and Marketing Director at Wingfire Media ?? High-level Advertising ?? Scaling Strategist and Marketing Expert ?? We manage $300k+ in monthly ad spend ??
Your Customers Expect Engagement
If you have a Facebook page, this says something to customers and prospects: “I am willing to communicate with you through this page.”
Because why else would you have a Facebook page?
Unfortunately, though, many small businesses set up their Facebook pages and then ignore them. As a result, prospects and customers reach out to them through the Facebook page and get no response...and this rubs them the wrong way, sometimes causing long-lasting problems for the business.
A chatbot helps you to be responsive to inquiries at all hours. While it cannot completely replace a human interaction, it can help to efficiently address common concerns rather than just hanging your customers and prospects out to dry.
You Can Give Consistent Customer Service
One of the issues of having a human deal with every customer service issue is that humans tend to be inconsistent. You may have standardized answers and solutions to certain questions and concerns, but that in no way guarantees that your employees will give those standardized responses.
With a chatbot, you can eliminate the majority of these issues by creating an automated system that deals with such issues in a consistent manner, eliminating the possibility of error in most instances.
You Can Conserve Resources
If your business is small – and especially if you are a solopreneur – you will probably find that it is difficult to make yourself available to be responsive to Facebook messages all the time.
You can of course have employees or contractors take this responsibility from you, but for many, that is just not financially viable or efficient. Having a chatbot allows you to make the most of your resources by letting an automated system handle as much as possible. You can (and should) still back it up with human interaction, but the amount of human hours dedicated to this interaction is greatly diminished.
You Can Create a Strong Connection With Prospects
Most people don’t buy on the first encounter. This is a simple fact of marketing. People do not see one advertisement and then immediately fly to your business and give you money.
You have to build trust.
One way of doing that is by maintaining a strong connection with prospects through chatbots. Like email marketing, chatbots help you to continue to foster relationships with contacts long after the initial interaction. In fact, while email marketing is one of the most cost-effective types of digital marketing, chatbots are proving to be even more cost-effective. The rate at which people read your chatbot messages (over 90%) is sky-high compared to the rate at which people read your emails (about 20% if you’re doing well).
It is true that you need to carefully follow certain guidelines to market through chatbots, but so long as you follow those rules, the results can be phenomenal.