Rise of Chatbot Marketing: How a Digital Entity Can Promote Your Brand
Customer happiness is the key to running a successful eCommerce business.
Businesses are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to engage with their customers and elevate their marketing strategies. One of the most exciting and impactful advancements in this area is the rise of chatbot marketing.
84% of businesses believe AI chatbots will be increasingly important in customer communication.
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Picture a friendly, helpful chatbot guiding your customers through their shopping journey, answering questions instantly, and making personalized recommendations.
It's like having a personal assistant for each of your customers, available 24/7.
To find out more about chatbots and how you can use them for digital marketing, read our short primer on the topic below.
What is Chatbot Marketing?
Chatbot marketing is a strategy where businesses use AI-powered chatbots to communicate with customers. These chatbots can answer questions, provide information, offer personalized recommendations, and help with tasks like booking appointments or making purchases.
Benefits of Using Chatbots in Marketing
The global chatbot market is expected to hold around USD 4.9 billion by 2032, with a noteworthy CAGR of 19.29% from 2023 to 2032.
The integration of chatbots into marketing strategies has unlocked many benefits for businesses of all sizes and industries.
Here are some of the key advantages of leveraging chatbots in your marketing efforts:
- Enhanced Customer Engagement: Chatbots provide a 24/7 communication channel, so customers can receive immediate responses regardless of the time of day.
- Personalized Marketing: Modern consumers expect personalized experiences. Chatbots excel in this area by utilizing customer data to offer customized product suggestions, promotions, and content.
- Increased Engagement and Conversions: Chatbots can engage customers in interactive conversations and guide them through the sales funnel to drive higher conversion rates.
- Enhanced Lead Generation: Chatbots can gather valuable customer data and insights to identify and nurture qualified leads more effectively.
- Cost Savings: Implementing chatbot technology can be more cost-effective than maintaining large customer service teams.
Another important thing is that chatbots can learn and adapt over time. These tools will continuously improve their responses and performance based on customer interactions and feedback.
How Chatbots Revolutionize Customer Engagement
The popularity of instant messaging services is at an all-time high. Apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat have more than a billion active users each. Other contenders such as Viber, Telegram, and QQ are not lagging far behind either.
These numbers alone were enough to prompt businesses from all areas of commerce to start exploring instant messaging as a platform for chatbot marketing.
The main challenge of marketing through instant messaging services is the fact that it requires you to hold 1-on-1 conversations with prospects, leads, and customers. And managing individual chat sessions with millions of users is practically impossible. That is, if you assume that humans are the ones handling the conversation.
But there is another option, which is to use chatbots.
Chatbots have redefined the way businesses interact with their customers, breaking down traditional barriers and creating a more personalized, efficient, and accessible customer experience.
Moreover, chatbots can handle a high volume of customer interactions simultaneously. It ensures that no inquiry goes unanswered. This not only improves response times but also frees up your human customer service representatives to focus on more complex or sensitive issues.
How Does Chatbot Actually Work?
The concept of a program that can “speak” dates back to Alan Turing’s seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he described a computational system that could produce output in the form of sentences that correspond to our everyday language.
The modern chatbot is an implementation of this concept. It is a program that takes sentences phrased in natural language as input. Then it parses and interprets them. After that, it either produces meaningful output sentences or performs some action.
A chatbots program needs access to a language database containing sentences and sentence elements, as well as a set of instructions for how to use this data.
Chatbots can be made in a variety of programming languages, with Python being the most popular choice. Chatbot libraries and frameworks, such as Microsoft Bot Framework, can be used to streamline the process as well. It can also be assembled from pre-existing components using a chatbot creation platform such as Botsify.
Finally, chatbot creation can be outsourced to third-party web development agencies, which are increasingly offering these kinds of services.
Chatbots can be hosted on websites, but as we have mentioned in our introduction, instant messaging apps are taking over as their hosting platform of choice.
Chatbot Marketing Strategies
Chatbots can be utilized for a variety of purposes, many of which are related to digital marketing. Examples include, but are not limited to:
- Conversational commerce: Chatbots act as digital salesmen. It gives users the option to place orders on items, book event reservations, or subscribe to services.
- Customer support: Chatbots can support customer service departments thanks to their ability to handle multiple customers at once.
- Virtual shopping assistants: Chatbots can combine existing customer data with their input to provide meaningful product and service suggestions.
- Brand ambassadors: chatbots have a history of being used as video game characters. And businesses are now seizing upon this idea by having them act as mouthpieces for their brand.
- Data gathering: Chatbots can collect conversation data from customers. This data can later be used for tracking and retargeting or other marketing-related purposes, or even for improving their conversational capabilities.
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Chatbot Marketing Usage Examples
Chatbots are no longer a novelty; they were only a few years ago. Today, companies of all sizes, from small businesses to leaders in the tech field, use chatbots. Below, you can find a list of brands that found great success in incorporating chatbots into their digital strategy.
Spotify
The music streaming service Spotify uses a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It gives its customers the option to search for, listen to, and share music. Once a customer starts using the chatbot, they will start receiving playlist suggestions based on their mood, current activity, or genre preferences.
Mastercard
Mastercard’s own Facebook Messenger chatbot. It enables customers to check their account transactions by asking a simple question such as “How much did I spend in December?”. The bot also facilitates the use of the Masterpass digital wallet within chats. This allows consumers to pay merchants without having to leave the chat window.
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal chatbot can notify readers about trending news stories, stock quotes, and other news items within Facebook Messenger. The readers can customize the kinds of notifications they receive by typing basic commands in the chat.
Whole Foods
Whole Foods uses a Facebook Messenger bot. It provides its followers with dish suggestions, cooking tutorials, and other kinds of food-related assistance. The chatbot can even parse emojis, a feature which millennials and gen-z youths will appreciate.
Closing Notes to Chatbot Marketing
We have only begun to scratch the surface of what chatbots are currently capable of, to say nothing of their potential uses in the future. And the sooner your company adapts to the notion of using chatbots for digital marketing and promotion, the better prepared it will be for the future.
A guest post from Angelina Harper, a content writer over at Design Rush.
