Tag: chatbots

How Chatbots Can Help Marketing and Sales

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

Chatbots have significantly developed in the last few years, owing to the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that controls them. They now serve as sophisticated tools and can assist you in automating several business processes.

Apart from being efficient at handling customer care queries, chatbots can help to boost marketing initiatives and drive the customer smoothly through the sales funnel. Given below are some of the ways in which chatbots fit into your marketing strategy:

1. A Personalized Experience for your Target Audience

Interacting with someone who identifies you by name impacts the nature of the conversation greatly. Chatbots align with social media and gather information about every individual they come across. Chatbots respond to queries accurately and further provide shopping advice based on users’ interest and behaviour.

2. Keeps the User Engaged

Chatbots are successful in engaging as well as retaining your customer. This is because, unlike other marketing efforts, chatbots have the capacity to entertain your audience for long. For instance, a video has the ability to engage the target audience  but once it is over, the users’ interest in you is also over. On the other hand, a chatbot grabs the users’ attention, captures more information while interacting with them and sends personalized as well as engaging content relevant to your brand, product, and services.

3. Enhances Your Audience Network

Chatbots mostly exist on social media platforms. This means that they are able to reach vaster audiences and can tap larger demographics for your brand. They can be integrated with different messaging applications giving the customer more avenues to connect with you. As a result, you are in a better position to enhance sales with newer opportunities and prospects.

4. Capture Customer Feedback

A chatbot makes it easier for you to collect feedback from your customers. Generally, people do not like to answer questions or complete a survey if there is no incentive involved in it. However, a chatbot subtly approaches the customer gathering feedback in the form of questions through conversations.

Furthermore, by installing the right machine learning tools, chatbots can analyze the data that has been received, giving you more insight into how you can improve your marketing strategies. You can focus more on your customers’ needs and develop an inbound marketing plan which helps to generate leads and sales.

5. Develop Relevant Messaging

A brand’s messaging is crucial to make or break its image. If customers constantly receive emails, newsletters, and other notifications, they tend to get irritated. Chatbots analyze the data that has been collected and send out customized and relevant communication to users through social media. This way, consumers only receive the information they are interested in and seek to know more about the brand.

6. Make Brand Interactions Fun

We all know that chatbots deliver quality information to customers but what they also do is make communication fun. This means that your marketing efforts make a lasting impact on your consumer and increase the number of users visiting your website. Links to relevant blog posts and other content pieces can be shared for consumers to interact with the brand.

7. Proactively Reach Out to Customers

Brands generally like to adopt a passive approach. They only communicate with a user when they have been contacted. A chatbot, on the other hand, welcomes the user when they visit your website or social media page and inform them of their availability. You appear to be more proactive this way and therefore enhance your brand’s reputation, increase interactions and sales numbers.

8. Make the Sales Process Smoother

Leads must be nurtured to help buyers successfully complete their sales journey. However, this can be a time-consuming process. Chatbots enable you to collect important information and accordingly send personalized messages to the users.

A chatbot-based lead-nurturing campaign can be made extremely successful by capturing user data and performing split testing on the messages you create for the target audience. This approach helps you to understand the right marketing strategy and really nurture every lead that comes your way through the website or social media profiles.

Conclusion

Two-way communication via messaging applications has become the ideal way of interacting with customers and reaching out to them. This is exactly why chatbots are becoming the need of the hour. A chatbot integrated into your marketing strategy can help you gather information about prospects, personalize marketing efforts, improve target audience reach, and generate more sales and revenue through social media.

Rising Popularity of Chat Bots in Marketing

Posted on by NextJSjointviews

A chatbot is a computer program that imitates real humans to communicate with users via audio or text. The main reason for using chatbots is to drive customer engagement. Customers find it easy to interact with chatbots to find answers to their queries than taking the pain of searching for information in the websites.

Chatbots were considered ineffective during the beginning stages of researches on Artificial Intelligence. However, nowadays, chatbots seem to revolutionize communication. Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana are all examples of popular chatbots.

Chatbots are normally used to answer simple customer queries or to provide product/company information. Some apps even use chatbots to answer more complex questions. In future, chatbots are expected to be smarter.

It may learn from previous conversations to give more effective answers. This expectation is the main reason to chatbots’ rising popularity. They started as experimental projects and now, chatbots are taking over the world!

It’s said that 2017 will see more of chatbots in marketing, where it will be used by businesses to communicate and engage with their customers.

The following features of chatbots are making it immensely popular among marketers:

  • Automated customer service

At present, chatbots are serving only first line customer assistance by answering to simple queries.  Tougher questions are passed on to humans in the customer service department to handle. Weighing the capabilities of chatbots, it’s not too far from them actually handling the entire customer service department, thus reducing the workload for the employees and saving time, money and other resources for the company.

  • Tracking of user data

Even one interaction with the customers can give away loads of valuable data to collect. For a human to do it can be a herculean task especially when the main aim is to provide good customer service.  However, with chatbots, it is easy to collect the data while satisfying the customers by answering to their queries.

The analytics and data collected gives an insight of the customer needs and therefore, helps the company to provide with what is demanded. Though the data tracked by chatbots are put to temporary use as of now, it’ll be entirely used for the same in the years to come.

  • 24/7 availability

The chatbots are capable of answering the customers’ query at any time of the day. Also, the instant response by the chatbots will leave the customers satisfied. This will help improve brand awareness and your customers may even promote your brand through positive word-of-mouth.

  • Versatility

Chatbots offer more than what you think. Apart from customer service, it can be put in any branch of marketing to improve customer experience, steer customer loyalty and to reduce workload. Also, even if it’s to collect customer data or to answer to customer’s queries, chatbots are capable of using their own behavioural data to estimate the best approach to be taken while interacting with customers.

  • Mobile-optimization

These days, people prefer mobile phones over other gadgets. Therefore, if anything your business offers digitally isn’t compatible in their phones, you are in trouble. The chatbots come mobile-optimized, making it easy for you, saving you from additional expenses and work.

Now, how can this rising popularity of chatbots put to use in various aspects of marketing? Well, here’s how:

  • Ecommerce

Chatbots mimic human behaviour and hence can be used to provide customer support for e-commerce apps. It can be used to communicate with the customers and inspire them to purchase the products. Since chatbots come with defined rules set for them to intelligently answer to customer queries, there is no doubt of providing relevant answers to the customers and rightly guiding them to what they need.

Also, since the chatbots answer instantly, customers will feel that they can actually trust the brand. Remember, the chatbots’ role in e- commerce doesn’t end with customer support. They can also be used to automate the order process, sell the products and build customer loyalty.

  • Customer service

By customer service, we don’t mean just responding to the customer queries. It’s much more than that. Chatbots can be used to provide customer service 24/7. It saves you from the additional expense of appointing a customer service staff and providing them with monthly salary.

Chatbots can also be used to introduce a new product to the customers, offer promo codes, obtain customer feedback and provide notifications regarding shipping of products.

  • Customer acquisition

Chatbots can be used to instantly connect to the customers. When the customers see that they are being supported, they’ll start trusting the brand. Also, they may recommend the brand to the people they know, thus widening the brand’s customer base.

Conclusion

It’s true that chatbots are going to impact the future of marketing. However, it is necessary for businesses to familiarize themselves with chatbots to put them to good use.