Chatbots have become an integral part of digital communication across web, social media, and mobile app interfaces. Marketers are increasingly growing fond of chatbots because of effortless, fast-paced, and customer-centric communication in different contexts. With the increasing popularity of chatbots, more and more brands are embracing them.
In 2019 and beyond, we can expect chatbots to play a mission-critical role in marketing.
Let’s dive into the increasing influence of chatbot marketing through some credible statistics:
- Consumers now prefer a conversational tone more in marketing messages than traditional one-way communication.
- Conversational commerce became popular largely due to social media and chat messaging apps that helped marketers incorporating customer feedback in marketing messages.
- More than half of consumers across the niches now access customer service through social media platforms. This made Chatbots more appropriate for customer communication.
- Chatbots by streamlining customer service and conversational commerce are supposed to save billions by 2022.
- Since Chatbots are no longer impersonal and cold in conversation, they are increasingly getting popular among customers. A whopping 69% of consumers like Chatbots for communication just because of faster answers and solutions.
- Millennials are increasingly getting fond of Chatbots. 40% of millennials have a conversation with Chatbots on a regular basis.
- Among Chatbots live chat is particularly popular. Live chat apps enjoy a whopping 73% satisfaction rate for customer interaction with business brands.
- Most people consider Chatbot important simply because of the ease of access anytime and anywhere. 64% of web users consider round the clock service is the best feature for Chatbots.
- As the latest predictions indicate, by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be taken care of by bots and without any human agent.
- It is also predicted that by 2020, 80% of businesses will use at least one type of Chatbot tool.
Let’s offer some more insights regarding the popularity of the Chatbots. The popularity of the Chatbots largely started with the scope of conversational marketing across social media and Chatbot apps. A vast majority of people stick to mainly five apps. Well, these fortunate apps for most users are now messaging and chat apps. Just now, chat and messaging apps enjoy the active footfall of a whopping 5 billion monthly active users.
This shows why marketers are all out to capitalize this power of conversation.
How Marketers Are Using Chatbots To Increase Sales
At a time when the entire marketing effort is going digital allowing more scope of streamlining and automating marketing tasks, businesses are likely to find AI-powered chatbots more useful and effective for their conversational marketing. Moreover, AI-based chatbots are able to initiate personalized conversation, get more precise customer feedback and conduct market research.
Let us explain some of the effective ways marketers use chatbots to increase sales, drive conversion, boost audience engagement, and branding efforts.
Personalized Content Automation
Intelligent chatbots based on the analysis of consumer information, customer preferences, patterns of customer behavior, market data, and variety of factors can make really informed decisions for creating contents that are more likely to gain traction.
When interacting with the customers a chatbot recommends content based on earlier customer communication, purchase history, and buying trends uniquely attributed to the individual customers, it can drive better customer engagement and traction.
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Communicating with the Website Traffic
Chatbots can play a great role in communicating and engaging the website traffic with regular and steady Chatbot conversation. First of all, by initiating a conversation with the website traffic it helps website management and back-office saving a hell lot of time. Moreover, by allowing Chatbot driven conversation you actually reduce the chance of leaving customer queries and questions unanswered.
These days, customers are more restless than ever before and this is why a study by Econsultancy says that 57% of customers like live chat. A Chatbot equipped to answer the questions of customers based on individual parameters and contexts seems to be an ideal solution.
Conduct research
Chatbots can also be conceived by businesses as great research tools. Research consumes a lot of time for any business. You need to find information and judge the credibility of the same. This is where chatbots for business brands can really play an effective role.
Chatbots by having frequent conversations with the customers on a range of aspects related to the business can actually fetch fresh information and insights about the customers.
Let’s take the example of GrowthBot.
This is a kind of bot application which is capable to do a lot of things corresponding to consumer research. The bot is capable to find prospects and analyze web traffic on several parameters.
A Chatbot Can Also Work as a Sales Funnel
Marketers also use chatbots as a sales funnel just like the websites are used as sales funnel. On top of this funnel at the opening ingredients or the app users are accommodated. In the middle of the funnel, users are sorted out as per certain parameters. At the end of the funnel, the actual outcome of the users come through.
The picture below shows how the website funnel and Chatbot funnel work.
Chatbots, by accommodating the user conversation, actually make way for producing relevant customer information. Based on the analysis of this pool of customer information, relevant customer insights are generated based. Based on these insights on the likelihood of conversion and engagement the chatbot recommends contents, products, initiate conversation, and send messages.
Chatbot Marketing Examples
At last, we should provide some credible examples or case studies of chatbot marketing. A whole array of successful businesses as of now has adopted chatbots for their business communication and marketing conversion. They serve as inspiring examples of how chatbots can really become critical marketing channels for businesses across all niches.
Universal Studios
Universal Studios offers a really inspiring example of chatbot marketing. Their chatbot in complete sync to the nature of their business is primarily focused on selling an experience instead of a product. On the other hand, the bot also makes it optional for the customers to choose a human representative at any point they wish.
Universal Studios chatbots come with some personality traits as well. Besides providing all practical information and allowing people to book reservations and buy tickets, the bot can also guide the users to the nearby restaurant or resting place.
The most important feature of this chatbot is the capability of providing real-time information about the wait time for the rides. Without relying on any third-party app guests can see the wait time information through the messenger of the chatbot.
Domino’s Pizza
As a company, this leading American restaurant chain needs no introduction. Domino’s Pizza allows customers to make orders through various options like voice commands over Amazon Echo or Google Home, text messaging, smartwatches and even through smart television.
The company also facilitated ordering through its messenger chatbot equipped with artificial intelligence. For every next order through this chatbot, you can make it faster by availing Easy Order option. The chatbot also allows you to track your order in real-time by clicking on a link sent by this chatbot.
Sephora
Sephora as a celebrated makeup brand has taken their service to the next level by offering a sophisticated chatbot experience equipped with Augmented Reality technology to try makeup options on the screen. It is now considered as one of the worthy examples of how chatbots can make value additions to the marketing plan of a brand.
The chatbot of Sephora works much like a digital guide allowing the customers to carry out several different actions without needing to leave the Messenger app. You can browse products right there during the chat, book an appointment with the makeup specialist and even you can try Augmented Reality technology to get an instant look and feel of your preferred makeup.
Last but not least of all advantages is, the bot allows you to book products and appointments based on the real-time availability and your current location. No doubt, this simple and feature-rich chatbot is a nice example of how brick and mortar stores can promote and boost sales of their products and services.
GoPro
GoPro is well-known to everyone having an affinity with visual contents. Well, the brand now offers a sophisticated Chatbot that meets its reputation in this regard. After the introduction the bot allows the users to take actions like browsing and shopping for cameras. The bot asks appropriate questions to determine what type of camera you are looking for and accordingly comes with suggestions.
The chatbot comes with a typical GoPro twist. The bot throughout the conversation makes use of appropriate .gif and video contents to explain various visual aspects and supplement the answers. This is not just helpful to engage the users but it also delivers solid social proof of the products. GoPro bot makes a nice fusion of personalization and visual contents to make the conversation more lively and engaging.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
KLM as one of the leading and oldest airliner brand having air presence across 225 destinations needs to introduction to the international flight catchers. KLM for customer communication has come with BlueBot which is abbreviated frequently as BB. The BB is a nice example of how a chatbot can prove to be a crucial marketing channel by its own right for international airlines.
KLM’s BB at first was only designed for the passengers to book a ticket easily without any manual help. Then, over time the bot continued to incorporate a lot more features. Now, users can use this bot to get the latest update on the booking confirmation, get reminders about check-in, available boarding passes, get updates about the flight status, and get quick replies to a whole array of queries.
KLM’s BlueBot is accessible only through Facebook Messenger and ever since the launch, it became a key efficiency booster by handling thousands of queries every day without any manual intervention. While volumes of queries and customer issues continue to grow, to give customers faster response, the BlueBot came as a really effective solution.
According to KLM, BlueBot has already recorded nearly 2 million bot messages sent from 500,000 passengers. From last December BlueBot is available on Google Home and across all devices having Google Assistant support.
Adobe
Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop and several leading products offers a simple chatbot solution with a straightforward approach. This chatbot also proves that bots don’t always need to have a complex set of features. In spite of being so simple, Adobe’s bot fairly does everything that it needs to do.
Adobe bot works as a kind of knowledge base to answer various questions of the users and troubleshoot all regular errors related to their products. When troubleshooting, the bot guides the users to the respective solution to a problem through quick screen prompts.
Apart from this approach of addressing issues with bots, Adobe also leaves the option open for the customers to speak with the human agent or go for more rigorous troubleshooting based on the issue. The chatbot of Adobe is a great example of how business brands can unleash a simple chatbot solution to address customer queries without delving into complicated features.
Conclusion
The way chatbots have penetrated digital interfaces for business brands is quite overwhelming. Within a span of the past few years, chatbots really evolved into intelligent communicators and interlocutors to make customers happy. With the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in chatbot communication, their influence will continue to loom bigger on the sales and marketing efforts of business brands.