Chatbot Marketing: What it is & How to Implement it

If you see a chatbot widget showing product recommendations as you browse the website, it’s called a marketing strategy.

If you see a chatbot encouraging you to sign up for an event or newsletter, that too is a marketing strategy.

Chatbot marketing isn’t new, yet it still lacks wider acceptance among businesses. That’s because businesses believe that:

• Customers show reluctance to engage a bot (64%)
• Fail to save customer chat history (51%)
• Fail to understand human inputs (47%)

Even amidst the increasing doubts, chatbots haven’t failed to amaze us.

Marketing chatbots have become more capable of showing the right product recommendations. They answer frequently asked questions faster, giving your operators a breather and time to focus on complex questions. They even help buyers add recommendations to their carts from their widget, therefore reducing their journey hassle-free.

But these benefits only come to those who master the art of setting up a chatbot for marketing from scratch. If you’d like to master this art, then we’re here to help!

What is Chatbot Marketing?

Chatbot marketing is a process that helps you market your products and services during an automated interaction with prospects. You can identify these prospects as qualified leads with the help of this virtual assistant. The best part is, it is available 24×7 and can tackle incoming product-related queries even in the absence of your sales team.

Key benefits of Chatbot Marketing Strategy:

• You engage prospects faster and encourage them to browse products that were shared during the conversation with the chatbot.
• You get efficient at responding to customer queries faster and help operators avoid frequent burnouts.
• You reduce support and marketing costs with a marketing chatbot onboard.
• You get to collect and access visitor data that can help you modify your chatbot’s marketing performance.
• You can identify opportunities for modifying customers’ purchasing experience at each stage of the sales funnel.

When you use a marketing bot, you get the option to initiate a conversation and even encourage buyers to purchase from your business. Many eCommerce businesses are seen using a chatbot to suggest and promote their latest products to website visitors. However, the use of an AI-marketing bot isn’t limited to one industry.

Top Chatbot Marketing Examples One Needs to Look Out

Other industries are considering chatbots for marketing and have successfully implemented them in their business process. Here are a few examples that’ll help you understand their possible use.

1. Hospitality

Chatbots aren’t new to the hospitality sector, and Marriott is one of the finest examples in this case. Marriott offers its chatbot to help customers manage their reward points, find the best resort deals, and make reservations to their properties in seconds. 

Besides booking, it even updates customers about the latest room deals and how they can be availed. People can also update their memberships and gain better discounts on their stays at Marriott hotels.

2. Restaurant

From booking reservations to taking orders for takeaway, chatbots have helped restaurants manage customer requests. A chatbot by Nitro Cafe Coffee & Tea helps them manage their customers and reservation requests hassle-free.

People can order their takeaways, ask for directions for dining, and do much more with the help of their chatbot. It even promotes the latest additions to their menu and offers special discounts to market them among their buyers.

3. eCommerce

Multiple brands use chatbots for marketing their products and selling them at the same time. Burberry is one of them.

This clothing brand first took to online shopping and later on added a chatbot to help their customers find the perfect look for them. It recommends popular clothing lineups from its collection. The chatbot will show more options in case the customer wishes to see more options.

4. Human Resources 

Help your HR identify better candidates for your business with a marketing chatbot. They can assist your human resource team in connecting with candidates and gathering more information without getting involved. However, that’s not the only use case for an HR bot.

Some chatbots can be used for internal purposes as well. Many businesses might have an internal system to manage and track leaves or holidays for a month. Chatbots can very well replace them and help your employees keep track of their leaves in no time. These chatbots will also help your employees apply for leaves and send notifications to other team members who can look after their work.

5. Airlines

From offering flight information to booking one with your favorite seats, chatbots today handle flight management activities. There was a time when we went to the airport to book the tickets. Later, the agents came in who used to book the tickets for us. Then came the websites for each airline that helped people book tickets without having any middle man in the process. 

Let’s not forget travel sites like Skyscanner that offer competitive flight rates for you. However, chatbots have become the latest addition to the list of platforms that help you book a flight for your journey.

KLM is one of the finest examples in this case.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has a chatbot that assists its customers in getting in-depth details on a flight and helps them book one in seconds. It even allows customers to track flight status and updates them automatically in case the flight is delayed.

These chatbot marketing examples shed light on how various industries have integrated this automated virtual assistant into their support and overall business process. However, to build a marketing chatbot just like them, you need to have access to the right tips as well. Well, don’t worry. We’ve listed a few for you below.

10 Helpful Tips to Build the Perfect Chatbot for Marketing 

This section aims to explore actionable chatbot development tips that’ll help you keep customers engaged with your brand and bring them one step closer to the bottom of the sales funnel.

1. A Warm Welcome Message to Capture Your Prospect’s Attention

One of the first practices that we’d recommend you follow is curating an engaging yet warm welcome message that pulls your customers right into a conversation with your chatbot.

Here’re a few examples to get started in the same direction:

Quick Note: Try addressing your prospects or existing customers by their name. It will help you get their attention faster.

2. Find the Tone that Returning Visitors Could Relate to

You may find this to be a continuation of our first point, but it’s not in a way. 

Your chatbot’s welcome message and its tone in the conversation should be similar. This way, you can maintain consistency and keep your customers engaged in the conversation. 

While you work towards building a warm and welcoming tone for your customers, make sure to keep the conversation professional. Don’t stray away from the professional aspect of the customer service process. 

Quick Note: Avoid using too many emojis to create a friendly tone for your chatbot. Also, try to write a chatbot script that sounds empathetic and helps the customer explain their challenges further.

3. Promote Your Webinars, Newsletters & Events

Have you heard of chatbots helping you sign up people for upcoming webinars or newsletters? If not, it is time to get familiarized with such functionality now. 

Chatbots can help you get more sign-ups for your webinars, newsletters, and upcoming events. This is one of the perfect ways to know your prospects more closely and capture more information on them in real-time.

Quick Note: When introducing courses, webinars, or newsletter sign-ups to prospects, make sure you offer more information related to the same subject. More information will encourage your prospects to attend your events and look forward to updates around them.

4. Don’t Let Your Bot Manage All Open-Ended Questions

Chatbots can ask both multiple-choice and open-ended questions to customers. However, multiple-choice questions help them identify a customer’s pain points faster. The same isn’t true in the case of open-ended questions. 

Open-ended questions can leave the chatbots in a bind, therefore hampering their performance to offer a solution faster. That’s why we see many chatbots apologizing to customers during the conversation and informing them that they didn’t understand what the customer was trying to say.

In this case, we’d recommend identifying all possible open-ended questions that a customer might ask. This will help you feed the correct answers that chatbots can show during a conversation. 

Quick Note: If your chatbot can’t understand your customer’s question, ensure to offer them the option to switch to a human agent. This way, you can help customers avoid repeating themselves.

5. Convert Complexities into Tickets

Complex questions are an inevitable part of the support process, and your chatbots will come across them often. We know that chatbots can’t handle tough questions, but that doesn’t mean your customers leave without a solution.

Here’s what you can do.

Build a ticketing bot that helps you create support tickets in case they can’t handle complex questions. This will help you avoid missing out on support opportunities and increase customer retention.

Quick Note: When building a ticketing bot, avoid adding questions like “Sorry, I didn’t get you. Can you repeat?”. That’s because it is a ticketing bot that will create a ticket if it doesn’t understand the question. However, do give the option between creating a ticket and answering it via FAQs to help customers save time.

6. Let Your Army of Operators be on Standby

Chatbots are quick to respond to your customer’s incoming messages. However, they can’t answer all the questions. Still, chatbots can be great at helping customers meet the right operator who can answer their questions faster.

In addition to routing, chatbots also give online operators the freedom to intercept the conversation and assist the customer. This is a great way to reduce the response and resolution time.

Quick Note: To make routing a successful process, don’t forget to add phrases like “which department would you like to connect with?”. This will help your chatbot route the chat to the right department and reduce the resolution time significantly.

7. Build a Repository of Well-Researched Frequently Asked Questions

It doesn’t matter if your customers are planning to purchase or are already using your product; they will have questions from time to time. Some of these questions are going to be quite common for your support operators as well. But why take away their productive time when they can focus on answering complex questions.

Let your chatbot take the lead.

You can create a separate knowledge repository for some frequently asked questions and integrate it with your chatbot. This way, the chatbot can show possible answers to common questions in the form of self-help articles.

Quick Note: To build a knowledge repository, you can sit with your operators to ask what type of questions customers frequently ask. You can also visit the knowledge base’s report section to identify the standard terms people search for when finding the correct answer. This way, you can create a detailed repository that helps your chatbot to answer questions faster.

8. Keep Your Chatbot Updated by Tracking its Performance Regularly

To improve your chatbot’s performance, you need to identify as many loopholes as possible so you can fix them regularly. That’s why keeping track of your chatbot reports is a must. 

With reports, you can identify how successful your chatbot was at engaging visitors to the website. You can check when did the visitors leave the conversation or did they leave after receiving a solution. These chatbot reports equip you with a clear picture of how they perform and help you plan how to modify them further for better output.

Quick Note: Filter out your reports to understand bot performance during a specific time. By filter we mean, understanding how many chats were valid. Identify the average amount of chats your chatbot manages daily and filter valuable conversations to identify the right pain points of your customers against the chatbot and its performance.

9. From Scheduling Meetings to Tracking Orders Engage in Every Way Possible

Your chatbot needs to multi-task. Don’t let your chatbot simply answer common questions or track orders for your customers. It needs to be an allrounder. That’s the only way you can generate more engagement with prospects and existing customers.

The more diverse your chatbot becomes in its functionalities, the easier it becomes to capture vital information on your customers. This will help you create personalized engagement experiences for your customers and encourage them to return to your brand more frequently.

Quick Note: When building a multi-purpose chatbot, make sure to have more multiple-choice questions. They will help you define a conversation path for customers and help them reach a solution faster. For example, if you run an eCommerce store, your chatbot should provide options like track order, place an order, view pricing, and so on to direct customers in the right direction and gather the correct information.

10. Ask Where Your Chatbot Can Improve

Capturing feedback is an important aspect that helps you improve the performance of your chatbot. Build a conversation flow that asks prospects and customers for their feedback and whether they found the necessary information after chatting with the bot.

You can ask open-ended questions here to get more detailed information. You can also request them to rate your chatbot’s performance between 1-5 to understand how satisfied they are with its services.

Quick Note: You can also integrate a survey maker to display detailed feedback questions. This will enable your business to identify where your chatbot lacks and how to improve a chatbot for future conversations.

Boost Your Marketing Conversations with Chatbot

Want to offer fast service? Are you missing out on customers because you can’t respond to them faster? If the answer is yes, bringing in a chatbot would be the ideal solution. Chatbots can help you speed up your services and make sure that no customer leaves without an answer.

That’s not all. They even help you boost your marketing and sales efforts. In a nutshell, they can benefit your business in multiple ways. But these benefits are only possible if you implement your chatbot for marketing the right way. 

To help you get started, our team came up with some essential yet powerful tips that help you set up your marketing chatbot the right way. Some of these tips encourage you to ask for feedback, build a personalized experience, add on more chatbot functionalities, and the list goes on. We hope that our ten tips help you build a solid marketing chatbot efficiently.