Tired of all the hype about chatbots? Yep, we are too. There are too many "Chatbots are the future" statements banding around the interwebs with very little on the detail side of things.
But here's the thing: chatbots can make your customers love you.
And they're all things you do can do today.
Not tomorrow, not “sometime soon”, we’re talking right NOW!
Ready to find out how? Cool. Onward....
#1: Customer FAQ Chatbot
Let’s say you run a business. It’s hard isn’t it.
Any business owner will agree that time is their most valuable asset. Ok, maybe weapons grade plutonium is more valuable if you’re an arms dealer, but for the majority of us those 12 hours a day need to be guarded like gold bullion at Fort Knox.
But the thing is there are ways to save time, and here’s precisely where a chatbot can help.
Ponder this: over the course of a year how many times have you answered the same question? A customer gets you on the phone, texts you, emails or asks you a question through your website. Imagine for a second if everytime a question was asked you could have an automated reply.
Think of it a bit like an out of office auto responder. You know, those things you switch on when you’re on your hols…”I’m out the office until”. But for every question imaginable.
Do you accept Visa? Do you ship internationally? Where is you office?
These questions and hundreds more.
Chatbots can help you field commonly asked customer questions that you’ve answered dozens of times already. Tell the bot what to say when customer asks Y, and next time the question is asked, the bot answers on your behalf.
We created this video about Fred to help illustrate this use case:
#2: Newsletter Chatbot
If you have an email newsletter, you’ll no doubt have a love hate relationship with it. It’s a lot of work to get them out, but when you do you get a little bump in web traffic and email.
Here's an example I found from the RSPCA.
The magazine-style newsletter looks great. But I bet it's a lot of work to put together. I obviously have no idea how good the open rates are, but if it's anything like the average newsletter, it's around 15 to 20%.
Pretty low, eh? For all that work, only 1 in 5 bother to open it.
A few years ago newsletters worked like gangbusters. With super high open rates, people lapped them up.
Then this happened:
When email overload happens, you have to get very selective about the ones you open.
Newsletters are often the ones that get ignored. Why? Because the way we consume content has changed. The two main reasons for this are:
- we live in an age of interruption. With smart phones more powerful than the tech used for the Apollo missions, we carry round with us mini distraction machines that bombard us 24/7 with demands on our attention. And the little red dot of a Facebook message gives us a hit of endorphin every time we click it.
- as a result our attention span has dropped dramatically. Where once we'd have kicked back to read a long form email, it has to be really good to grab our attention.
The sad truth is: newsletters don’t work that well anymore.
So how can chatbots help?
Chatbots can be used for mass outreach too just like you’d use an email marketing platform.
And the best bit? Open rates to Messenger messages have an incredible open rate, partly due to novelty - i.e. we aren’t used to receiving messages from companies via messenger, so we tend to open them.
Check out these stats the people over at Manychat recently shared:
I rest my case.
Just like email, once you have them opted in you can broadcast to your audience, but rather than it being an email they receive, they get a messenger alert.
#3: Lead Generation Chatbot
Business development (aka generating leads) is another must-do activity for most businesses. But the same goes for lead generation as it goes for newsletters: lead gen emails get ignored.
As CMO at Chatamo I get dozens of cold outreach email. 99% get ignored. The sender has built no rapport with me already, and suddenly out of nowhere wants a '10am breakfast meeting to discuss synergies between our two companies'.
Ahem, thanks but no thanks.
Contrast that with a company that has already given me value in some shape of form. Like this free video course (below) on copywriting that the guys at Kopywriting Kourse have put together. If they were to reach out to me I'd have definitely picked up the phone.
How could a chatbot help?
Now. What's the best way to build an audience quickly that doesn't entail the super saturated email channel.
Yup you got it: messenger.
Delivering content via messenger is a novelty. The majority of businesses don’t even know you can do it. We’re accustomed to opening messages from friends on messaging apps, but businesses are yet to use this channel.
How would you get people to engage on Messenger in the first place?
That's the easy bit. You could run Facebook Ads to get people to engage with one of Facebook's new 'click to messenger' ads - then once they're on messenger you can build your audience there.
Let's wrap this up
We've covered three ways that chatbots can help your customers love you. There are many other use cases I'm sure, but these are three that are relatively straight forward to get up and running with in no time at all. Of course, the messages you send, like the content of a newsletter, needs to 'pop'.
Now go spread that customer love! ♥♥♥
