What Is a Chatbot and How to Use Them For Sales and Marketing

Furthermore, companies that “excelled” at personalization generated 40% more revenue than those that didn’t. Therefore, by personalizing responses, companies can improve on customer loyalty and conversion rates. Based on user feedback and testing, refine the chatbot’s responses and conversation flow. Continuously improve the chatbot’s performance by analysing user interactions and making adjustments. Chatbots can be personalized as well, addressing leads and customers by name or mentioning how the lead found the company.

Before you build a bot, know your purpose, platform, and promotional plan. Adelyn Zhou, CMO of TOPBOTS, unpacks the top mistakes people make when they decide to build a bot. David Nelson, CEO of Motion AI, reveals how advances in technology and new business models paved the way for bots.

• Marketing chatbots are software programs built to automate marketing and customer engagement functions .
• This accelerated research process enables companies to gather insights quickly.
• Marketers can free up their time, efforts, and energies from low-impact, manual execution and supercharging their productivity.
• Social commerce is one of the hottest trends in social media today, and it looks to have an even bigger impact in 2020.
• Chatbots typically operate within SMS text, website chat windows and social messaging services—like Messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp and Instagram Direct—to receive and respond to messages.

Retailers are dealing with a large customer base and a multitude of orders. Customers often have questions about payments, order status, discounts and returns. By using conversational marketing, your team can better engage with consumers, provide personalized product recommendations and tailor the customer experience. Personalized marketing messages are more likely to grab customers’ attention. This approach leads to higher conversion rates, as clients are more likely to buy from businesses that they feel understand and care about them.

The information you gain from this data can inform other chatbot marketing strategy tactics, future campaigns and your product roadmap. Chatbots can provide a seamless and convenient customer experience by allowing customers to interact through their preferred channels and providing instant solutions to their problems. They are capable of this by collecting valuable customer data, such as customer preferences, product feedback, or purchasing behaviour. This data can be used to improve products and services, as well as to inform marketing and sales strategies. In this scenario, the bot can ask questions to instantly determine customer profile, interest, or level of qualification. Unqualified leads can be sent on a nurture path that reflects the preferences gathered during the chatbot conversations.

They utilise techniques from natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand user input and provide relevant responses. Chatbots have become an increasingly popular tool for marketers and customer service teams in recent years. These conversational agents use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to interact with customers and provide personalised assistance, information, and support. Hence, this blog aims to discuss the role of chatbots in marketing and customer service. Chatbots for marketing can maximize efficiency in your customer care strategy by increasing engagement and reducing friction in the customer journey, from customer acquisition to retention.

You control your customer experience, not AI

You can try a bot that tracks productivity and activities so even if marketers who are working remotely never feel out of the loop. This is typically when the marketing team does most of its work, enticing the lead with information and promotional materials that will hopefully convince them to buy. Chatbot sales can also occur in several ways, such as being the first point of contact between your company and the lead.

Instead of dedicating your team’s time to answering all incoming customer queries, chatbots can automate many activities, such as responses to frequently asked questions or gathering customer feedback. This automation can significantly lower time constraints while reducing customer service costs, so you can focus on optimizing your strategy. Using AI-driven marketing chatbots allows our team to qualify leads 24/7 and instantly move them to the next step with minimal manual input. You can also set up chatbots to talk with customers over social media apps like Facebook Messenger.

Ready to try our AI video platform?

Conversations facilitates personalized AI conversations with your customers anywhere, any time. Sales cycles are becoming longer as customers dedicate more time to educating themselves about brands and their competitors before deciding to make a purchase. Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019.

In this way, they streamline the process for the customer and the customer care agent by reducing the need to repeat information. By creating a unique auto-response for each reply option, your Twitter chatbot can continue the conversation and guide people to the next steps. A good example comes from Sheetz, a convenience store focused on giving customers the best quality service and products possible. Quick Replies are pre-defined replies that a user gets when they enter a message. These typically address common queries that customers usually have and guide users to a quick resolution.

Articles:What Are the Best AI Marketing Tools?

The copy is great, but it’s static — you can’t directly engage with the people consuming your content. Having visitors self-select their experience is one of the easiest ways to deliver personalization at scale. Businesses that nail this conversational approach see higher engagement, better retention, and let’s not forget, a healthier bottom line. Conversational marketing isn’t a magic wand, but if done right, it’s the next best thing. Just remember, this is a dynamic field; staying stagnant isn’t an option.

Continue to innovate, adapt, and most importantly, listen to your customers. Are you getting the conversions, leads, or customer satisfaction scores you aimed for? They can even help customers navigate through your services, and they’re always up-to-date with your latest offerings. Let’s dig into some of the specific ways these bots are changing the game for both businesses and consumers.

You can also utilize this phase and process to define your brand’s tone and voice when engaging in a discussion. If you want to have a dialogue with your users, you need to know what language and dialect they use, what they’re trying to accomplish and how you can meet their needs. Imagine giving your customers a virtual personal shopper https://chat.openai.com/ who understands their style down to the last detail. Dubai Properties is a leading real estate master developer based in the United Arab Emirates. Your business can be as close to your customers as Sephora or Domino’s. The beauty of this approach is that it’s incredibly versatile and can be tailored to fit any brand or business need.

68 percent of EX professionals believe that artificial intelligence and chatbots will drive cost savings over the coming years. Bots can also engage with employees by offering feedback opportunities and internal surveys. This allows your business to capture satisfaction ratings and understand employee sentiment. Additionally, it helps you understand where you’re excelling with the employee experience and where you need to make changes. For example, an e-commerce company might use a chatbot to greet a returning website visitor and notify them about a low stock on merchandise in their cart. Or, a financial services company could use a bot to get ahead of common questions on applying for a loan with tailored information to help them complete their applications.

This segmentation can be used to deliver personalised marketing messages and offers. Chatbots can use data to identify needs and deliver solutions, automatically upsell product recommendations, and provide instant answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Chatbots can also adapt their tone of voice to meet the customer’s demands, and their conversations emulate human interaction while providing high-performing responses. This gives response teams more context if the customer reaches out again.

This also reduces the rate of human error when automating workflows and other tasks, ensuring accuracy is always at the forefront. Instead, they’re in the office a set number of hours and then they come back the next day unless it’s a weekend. Your sales representatives are very busy people, and even that feels like an understatement. Alexa and Siri are often referred to as virtual or digital assistants because they can do a lot of the same things people in a receptionist role can.

Hence, training the chatbots to learn the common intent is necessary. Companies like Drift and Intercom offer chatbots to help companies automate and improve lead generation, help with email marketing, and other things. Larry built MobileMonkey to help entrepreneurs, business owners, and marketers looking to maximize their leads from Facebook. His team has lots of experience with marketing and using Facebook messenger to optimize lead generation.

ChatGPT is the chatbot that started the AI race with its public release on November 30, 2022, and by hitting the 1 million-user milestone five days later. For brands and consumers alike, we have a chance to redeem communication and commerce. Research would be convenient, purchases streamlined, and service personalized. Creating a comprehensive conversational flow chart will feel like the greatest hurdle of the process, but know it’s just the beginning. It’s the commitment to tweaking and improving in the months and years following that makes a great bot. Research from Forrester showed 5% of companies worldwide said they were using chatbots regularly in 2016, 20% were piloting them, and 32% were planning to use or test them in 2017.

Once you integrate these bots into your company protocol, you’ll see that your business changes in a myriad of ways. For example, maybe you use an airline chatbot that tells you when flights are booked or canceled, how much a light costs, and if your flight is leaving on time. With a service/action chatbot, the bot needs contextual information (the service) to do something for you (the action). That’s not to say a standalone bot can’t ever have a role in your company, but it’s better to use a messenger app first and then switch over. A chatbot is trained to analyze and identify the user’s intent of their request and once the analysis is done, the right response is delivered to the user. In fact, for all their quick advancements over the years, chatbot technology is far from perfect.

Chatbots can be equipped with NLP models that handle multiple languages, to serve a diverse, global customer base regardless of the time zone. Moreover, by utilizing users’ geographical data and ML features, chatbots offer localized content and adapt interactions to respect cultural nuances. Your marketing/sales team can delegate time-consuming tasks, like product recommendations, FAQ handling, and order status to chatbots. This frees up human agents’ time, allowing them to focus on value-adding initiatives, like creating a marketing strategy that takes ESG into consideration. Proactive outbound messages from chatbots informing customers of order updates or personalized offers can create upsell opportunities.

Voice search is also important for SEO optimization as people turn to asking devices for information and expect accurate information from brands. Social commerce is one of the hottest trends in social media today, and it looks to have an even bigger impact in 2020. Other companies choose to lean into the “bot-ness” by making the voice a bit more obviously robotic.

Using marketing chatbots can help provide better assistance to visitors on your website. With the help of direct prompts like ‘Feel free to ask any questions’ or initiating conversations, an introduction video, etc. The bot can even be trained to ask further questions about the user to get basic details like email id or qualifications. Once these details are obtained and then further stored on sheets and segmented according to the user’s data. Conversational marketing is an effective way to gather quick and valuable customer feedback. One of its main advantages is the speed at which feedback is obtained.

You can use these insights to target specific audience segments with personalized marketing campaigns and offers, maximizing relevance and driving higher conversion rates. Generative AI empowers marketers to dynamically adjust marketing campaigns in real time based on changing market conditions, customer feedback, and performance metrics. This agility enables you to stay ahead of the competition, respond quickly to emerging trends, and capitalize on new opportunities. Lyro is an example of a conversational AI that talks to customers and answers questions.

This gamified marketing strategy helped to engage customers and increase brand interaction. Though customer service chatbots may require an investment upfront, they can help you save money over time. Chatbots can handle simple tasks, deflect tickets, and intelligently route and triage conversations to the right place quickly.

AI chatbots are programmed to provide human-like conversations to customers. They have quickly become a cornerstone for businesses, helping to engage and assist customers around the clock. Designed to do almost anything a customer service agent can, they help businesses automate tasks, qualify leads and provide compelling customer experiences. Watsonx Assistant enables AI-powered, conversational chatbots that can transform your digital marketing strategy and automate efforts at every step of the buying journey. As seen, chatbots have been beneficial to modern marketing and customer service strategies. They provide a cost-effective and efficient way to engage with customers, provide personalised assistance, and improve the overall customer experience.

This can add additional complexity and cost to the set up and maintenance of chatbot solutions. As automation revolutionizes business operations, Chatbots have become a powerful marketing tool. Chatbots are artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistants that simulate human conversations with customers through messaging apps.

The welcome message is incredibly important to engage users and get them to respond to your bot. The best opening messages are those that are compelling, set expectations and ask questions. Chatbot marketing enables you to engage with customers in an interactive way. For a full video course on how to build bots with Landbot, chatbot in marketing visit our Academy. As opposed to AI-powered chatbots, which require a lot of coding knowledge, no-code chatbots and chatbot platforms such as Landbot’s make the job very easy. They have the potential to make digital marketing truly practical as well as translate its effects and benefits into tangible reality.

Improve your customer experience within minutes!

Both types of chatbots, however, can help businesses provide great support interactions. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 72 percent of business leaders said expanding AI and chatbots across the customer experience is their priority over the next 12 months. Bots and chatbots have been around for decades—but with the recent advancements in AI, the benefits of AI chatbots have become more apparent to businesses and customers alike. Chatbots can engage customers through personalised conversations and keep them notified about new products, promotions, and other marketing initiatives. Chatbots can keep customers interested through different methods of customer engagement, such as sending engaging videos and images related to the products and coming up with quick solutions. Discover the benefits of using chatbots for lead generation, customer segmentation, improved response times, lower costs, and improved customer experience.

You can build surveys using 12 different question types, advanced conversational logic, answer piping and rules for re-engagement. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Users can cluster answers to understand the correlation between individual open ended answers, implement audience segmentations by demographic or by answers, and visually prioritise key themes. You can also use the platform for iterative insights, building knowledge over time. Additionally, due to the responsive nature of messaging, data can be collected fast and in-the-moment. If you’d like to understand more about how chatbots work, then I would recommend checking out this article.

If you’d like to stop spending most of your day on minor marketing tasks, AI can help free yourself up to focus on the bigger picture. Tools like Botsify (for website and Facebook Messenger bots), Collect.chat (for websites – also has a WordPress plugin) or Chatfuel (for Messenger) are surprisingly simple to play with. You’ve already read about some of the positive results many different businesses have been able to achieve through Conversational Marketing. With Conversational Marketing, when a visitor clicks download, contact sales, or book a demo, you want to immediately jumpstart the conversation.

Ten trends every CX leader needs to know in the era of intelligent CX, a seismic shift that will be powered by AI, automation, and data analytics. Nucleus Research found that users prefer Zendesk vs. Freshworks due to our ease of use, adaptability and scalability, stronger analytics, and support and partnership. AI can pass these details to the agent, giving them additional context that helps them determine how to handle an interaction after handoff.

Chatbots play a significant role in facilitating and automating these conversations. Powered by LLMs and machine learning capabilities, watsonx Assistant understands natural language and provides customers with fast and accurate answers and actions to queries. Generative AI can facilitate conversational marketing initiatives by automating two-way customer interactions through chatbots, virtual assistants, and messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

By automating responses to common customer queries that don’t require human support, you save time and resources that can be utilized in more meaningful ways. Chatbot surveys take this marketing strategy to a whole new level (without making you pay extra for single-use survey software). Also, turning a survey into a conversation creates a more interactive experience and allows for more personalization. Plus, a fun chatbot personality alone can increase survey completion. Your marketing chatbot can not only provide your potential customers with trusted reviews (or links to trusted reviews) but also be the friendly face that prompts existing customers to share their opinions. Others use them as a dedicated marketing strategy to provide customers with demos of their service or product.

Your bots, as they communicate with more and more leads, can also generate data that could be of major use to the sales team. But in case the chatbot wasn’t able to answer the customer’s query, it transfers the conversation over to the available customer support agent. Chatbots have no such restrictions, so customers can get their queries answered even if it’s at a weird time of day or night. Another way to improve customer satisfaction through bots is in the availability of chatbots.

For example, a customer might want to learn more about products and services, find answers to commonly asked questions or find assistance for their shopping experience. Chatbots can process these incoming questions and deliver relevant responses, or route the customer to a human customer service agent if required. Now it’s even more vital for businesses to provide fast and accurate answers for wherever they are in the customer journey.

Chatbots can offer multilingual support to customers who speak different languages. Customers understand that bots collect personal data but want them to use it to create a better customer experience. According to our CX Trends Report, 59 percent of consumers who interact with chatbots expect their data will be used to personalize future interactions with a brand. It is very important for brands to be able to respond to customer inquiries quickly, seeing as 78% of customers are more likely to buy products from a brand which responds to their inquiries at a fast pace. With that, chatbots can handle a large volume of customer inquiries at the same time, which makes them highly efficient. They can respond to customers instantly, without any delay or wait time, which saves time and effort for both customers and agents.

And, of course, users can also use Messenger to connect with a live agent. HelloFresh manages to show off their brand voice by playfully introducing the bot as Brie. The more often customers come back to the chatbot, the more you have the chance to retain your customers.

IBM (US), Microsoft (US), Google (US), Meta (US), and AWS (US) are the top 5 vendors that offer chatbot solutions to enterprises to improve customer service, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. Customers could ask a question like “What are the symptoms of COVID-19? ”, to which the chatbot would reply with the most up-to-date information available. Once deployed, the chatbot answered over 2.6 million questions and took part in more than 400,000 conversations, helping users around the world find answers to their pressing COVID-19-related questions.

While AI can perform many tasks well, it does have its disadvantages so it requires human intervention to review, tweak or even optimize its outputs. However, when it comes to marketing, we believe that AI should be a tool that you leverage to plan, inform and optimize your marketing activities. Walmart, the largest retailer in the United States, has rolled out internally ‘My Assistant’ to its employees. This app feature uses generative AI to serve its 1.6 million workers to answer questions like “Do I have dental coverage?

Change is coming, and companies on the sidelines risk being left behind. One area where AI will play a big role in the short-term is search marketing. As competition for the eyes of consumers is fierce, you’ll need to create content that’s human and AI-friendly to get your company seen in search results. “If people are speaking and they’re revealing something more, then brands can do more through content.

Kelly is an SMB Editor specializing in starting and marketing new ventures. Before joining the team, she was a Content Producer at Fit Small Business where she served as an editor and strategist covering small business marketing content. She is a former Google Tech Entrepreneur and she holds an MSc in International Marketing from Edinburgh Napier University. For analysis, SurveySparrow offers a dashboard which allows you to access findings in real time, using filters and themes. Users can explore topics and themes and see which were most common with your audience.

These language processing systems can derive intention from a customer’s words through a mix of AI, information engineering, computer science, and linguistics. No two buyers are the same — and each will have their own reasons for visiting your website. That’s why it’s important that you’re proactively engaging those site visitors who are most likely to buy.

This, in turn, contributes to a significant 3-5% boost in incremental revenue. For example, Dynamic Motivation for the online cart allows Chat GPT brands to make personalized messages to every visitor. It can be in real-time and doesn’t matter whether they are anonymous or not.

We use them to craft segmented, personalized buying experiences that are fun, fast, and on brand. We all know that one person who only reaches out when they need something, right? Don’t let your brand be “that guy.” While it’s tempting to blitz your customer base with promotions and special offers, there’s a risk of fatigue and disengagement. Yellow.ai’s advanced targeting and lifecycle optimizer features can help you segment your audience so you can provide relevant and value-added content alongside promotional messages. This isn’t just numbers; this is a blueprint of your customer’s needs and behaviors.

Messenger chatbots can help you regain reach and engagement with Facebook users. Over the last 12 years, she has created and managed content for many SMEs and global brands. She’s passionate about digital marketing and the impact of technology on culture and society. Behr was able to also discover further insights and feedback from customers, allowing them to further improve their product and marketing strategy.

Sometimes referred to as contextual chatbots, context-enabled bots rely on context, as you probably guessed. These bots even know your name, creating a sense of personalization that almost makes it feel like you’re making human conversation with a real person, not a bot. Each time you ask either of these voice assistants a question or request that they schedule an appointment, play a song, or search something for you, you’re using a voice-enabled chatbot. Next, we’ve got voice-enabled chatbots, with two of the most well-known and beloved examples Siri and Alexa.

This way, you can collect customer feedback and gain insights on what your customers ask about, what they’re interested in, and how likely they are to recommend you. This can show if you’re meeting customer needs and what you should change to improve. This marketing chatbot helps the business with upselling their wine bottles and assists the customer in making an informed decision. It’s a win-win situation where clients come back to the store when they’re happy with the purchase after the recommendation. Chatbots for marketing can help you segment traffic and advertise your products to the right audience. This is important as research shows that around 77% of a company’s return on investment (ROI) comes from segmented and targeted communication.