In this article, we’ll dive into the world of messaging bots and provide you with detailed information on how to develop a best-in-class chatbot strategy. We’ll answer your questions about best practices for a near-human chatbot experience and how to get the most out of chatbots like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more.
Here we go!
What is a chatbot?
A bot is simply a computer program that automates specific tasks.
In the case of chatbots, the automated task is to have a 1-to-1 conversation with a human.
These bots can use complex technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. They can be as simple as a series of IF-THEN operators.
Today’s chatbots respond with text, and yes, also with audio, video, images, GIFs, you name it. Even the tools for chatbots are growing exponentially – you’ve probably encountered bots in chat apps like Messenger and WhatsApp, and there are little buttons in the corner on many, many websites asking if you need help.
In this article, we will concentrate specifically on chatbots in social media channels.
10 Tips for Your Chatbot Marketing Strategy
We ended up studying the experiences of several different world-class chatbots to learn from them. Here’s a list of 10 lessons for those about to embark on Chatbot Marketing – like us.
1. Research your most frequently asked questions by asking your team
The first thing to consider with a chatbot is the content it contains.
Let’s take among our favorite chatbot use cases as an example: customer service bots. If the bot’s goal is to help customers and provide a quick response, we recommend looking at the questions your brand asks most often to see what content makes sense.
To find these common questions, there are a few good places to look.
- Your customer service team. They may have a lot of questions in their heads that customers are asking them all day long.
- Your social media support team, community team, or social media manager. The people who handle engagement on your social profiles should have a good understanding of the common questions that come through @mentions and DMs.
- Your sales and marketing team will understand the types of questions customers are asked when they come through the funnel. These may be common sales questions that sales reps face or questions your content marketers want to answer.
Of course, you can also get questions from places other than your immediate team. The search suggestions at the bottom of relevant Google pages are excellent to start, as are crowdsourcing communities like Quora and Reddit.
Suppose you choose to build a bot for sales, lead generation, or any other service. In that case, we strongly recommend that you research common questions and customer journeys to make your bot as fully valuable as possible.
2. Build your bot its very own conversation tree
Chatbots work best when given a specific set of questions that need to be answered. Without some degree of specificity and pre-planning, it becomes infinitely more complicated for a chatbot to deliver a reliable experience, let alone the correct answer.
This is why conversation trees work so well.
3. Avoid entirely open-ended conversations
Open-ended conversations can lead to confusion for your bot and a bad experience for the user. If you don’t have very advanced language processing technology, open-ended questions like “How can we help you today?” can go either way.
One of our favorite chatbots is Hello in Facebook Messenger. the bot’s first message to the user is to offer a drop-down menu: “Here are some common questions I can answer.” The options include the following:
- How does it work?
- What does it cost?
- Are you gluten-free?
- Are you vegan?
- Give me a discount!
The user can tap on any of these statements by tapping on the Messenger interface. The bot will then respond with an auto-reply.
This takes the guesswork out of the bot’s responses, as it knows exactly what to say and which message to receive.
4. Let people know that a human is just a step away
One of the most interesting statistics we’ve seen about chatbots is that they’re not as repellent to people as you might think. 69% of users prefer to communicate with a chatbot over in-app support. People like to have their questions answered quickly.
That still leaves 31% of users who may prefer the old-fashioned way – email or social support.
This can also be incorporated into your bot experience.
As part of the bot welcome message, let people know that the user is invited to contact a human at any time.
5. Give your bot a voice and a warm welcome message
Similar to the way you write about your brand on social media, you should consider the voice and tone of your chatbot. Maybe it’s just a natural extension of your brand’s voice and tone.
Other companies prefer to get closer to “bot-ness” by making the voice more robotic.
Whatever you choose is entirely up to you. Just be consistent in the dialogue tree.
One of the important places to master that voice and tone is the opening lines of your bot. In the previous tip, we mentioned that you want to let users know that they can contact a human at any time, and this is excellent information to include in your bot’s welcome message.
Additionally, the following items can be included:
- An attractive greeting.
- Create expectations. Let people know they are talking to a bot.
- There’s also a solid first question with lots of options to capture as much of the possible user journey as possible.
6. Track the effectiveness of your bot with special UTMs and discount codes
One of the most important questions you might have about your chatbot is… Does this thing work?
And “working” can mean many different things. If you are using chatbots to reduce the amount of customer support you provide, this is an easy metric to review. If you want to measure the effectiveness of your training, marketing, or sales, tracking the success of your bot with measurable links and codes is invaluable.
Hello does this with their bots – they include the word “bot” in their coupon codes (for example, ENGAGERBOT34).
You can also do this with your UTM code for the content your bot links to. Give it a chatbot UTM feed, and you can measure clicks and traffic from the bot and track the UTM through your customer journey.
You could even measure the ROI of your bot, which would be incredible!
7. Replace your email newsletters with chatbot newsletters
We often talk about how valuable chatbots can be for inbound requests. But what about requests that are sent out? There is a lot of room for experimentation here. One of the best ways to do this is to use your bot as a content delivery system.
Using Facebook Messenger as an example, everyone who talks to you via Messenger is added to your contact list. You can set up a chatbot and ask them to sign up for your regular updates and announcements so that you build a list of subscribers for your Messenger bot – and voila! That’s a Messenger bot.
8. Send simple surveys to your contacts
As bots have a high engagement rate, you also have a good chance of getting your message noticed in a survey. While it is notoriously difficult to get many responses to a survey via email or on a website or app, it is easier to use a bot.
Like the email newsletter tips above, with a survey, you first ask people to sign up to hear from you, and then you can send them occasional messages with short and simple surveys.
Many of the tools mentioned earlier offer the option of a two-click reply, which is ideal for a mobile experience with social media bots.
9. Enrich your bot with data and personalization
Check out this list of powerful chatbot superpowers:
- Universal Studios tells you the wait time for rides
- Marriott can tell you room availability
- CheapFlights tells you the best options for your dates and your price range
- Domino’s lets you order pizza!
It’s all thanks to the big data these brands are putting into their bots. Let’s assume you haven’t reached this scale yet; don’t worry. You can wade through the water by anticipating your customers’ most common questions and doing your best to fill your bot with details. Simple things like opening hours and daily deals can make the experience more enjoyable.
If you have a customer base that needs data-rich answers, use the example above to inspire your chatbot dreams.
There is also the issue of personalization. And in this case, we’ll make it up to your best judgment. Several tools allow you to personalize the chat environment with variables such as name or location, and if it comes from a bot, it can veer between helpful and annoying. Use with caution.
10. Make sure to promote your chatbot, so people know you have one
It might seem obvious, but it’s probably one of the most important tips we’ve covered so far. Your robot will only be successful if people find it and use it. To learn about it!
This can happen organically when people visit your Facebook page and are redirected to you via Messenger. Or you can be proactive.
A couple of our favorite ways of promotion are:
- Mention your bot in the list of all your customer support channels
- Add a call to action to your blog or website to get in touch
- Advertise your bot on social media for those who want to sign up for it. This could work well for the messenger newsletter we talked about.
Have you checked out our Media Chatbot yet?
It helps you keep your website is in tip-top shape. Check it out now here: Media Chatbot
Read More: What Chatbot Marketing Is and How to Use It In Digital Marketing
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