The Importance of Chatbots for Your Marketing Strategy
By Georgi Todorov
Chatbots have become an integral part of the web, social media, and mobile app interfaces for marketing growth over the years. The audience is growing fond of chatbots because of their effortlessness, fast speed, 24/7 availability, and customer-centric communication in different contexts. With the increasing popularity of chatbots and their various advantages, more and more businesses are starting to embrace them.
- According to Mindbrowser, 96% of businesses believe that chatbots are here to stay.
- According to Opus Research, by 2021 an amount of $4.5 Billion is expected to be invested in enterprise intelligent assistants.
- According to Marketsandmarkets, the chatbot market is expected to grow at a compound rate of 35.2 between 2016 to 2022.
What Is A Chatbot?
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence-powered conversational piece of software designed to carry out conversations, answer questions and provide assistance without the need of a human operator. They enable you to automate a large part of the customer communication process by allowing customized programming. They are integrated with various online platforms to provide a better user experience.
69% of consumers prefer to communicate with chatbots because of the fast replies and solutions.
With the increasing popularity of conversational commerce, chatbots are used to help marketers incorporate customer feedback in marketing messages.
What Makes Chatbots An Important Part of Marketing strategy?
- Chatbots Ensure 24/7 Customer Service
Customers are the king of every business and for the success of any business, a good customer experience is necessary.
Proper customer support needs a good amount of time and effort. Sometimes, it can become overwhelming with the number of calls your support team may be handling at once. This is where chatbots really come in handy and also provide the chance to increase your customer loyalty.
Chatbots don’t get tired, and they are available on a 24/7 basis. The customers can think of looking for a service or product at any time of the day even after your working hours. Having a chatbot will allow your company to respond to most of the basic queries made by a customer or potential customer regardless of the time. This leads to the increased satisfaction of your customers and sales.
- Real-time Communication is Facilitated Seamlessly
Real-time communication with humans can be difficult and time-consuming. Only a few people tend to wait that long for a problem to be solved. Also, the customers may lose their patience with the brand if the issue faced by them is not corrected promptly. With artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, the way people interact with brands has changed.
A chatbot integrated customer support system can help you engage more customers without any need for a learning curve or training. The chatbots are well-programmed to be able to analyze the responses and questions made by the people with appropriate answers. Chatbots can also assist by offering customers additional services and answers they may have, based on their searches on your website and questions they are asked.
- Saves Time and Money
Many businesses are of the view that chatbots are costly. Although it might be a bit costly, investing in chatbots is completely worth the investment and it adds a lot of value to your business. Since the chatbots can operate on a 24/7 basis they save time and money. People who log onto your website after your working hours, still have the opportunity to find the assistance and answers they’re looking for instead of looking somewhere else. Hence, chatbots help in keeping your retention rate high benefiting your company financially.
- Chatbots Ensure a Smooth Customer Experience especially for E-commerce Businesses
Using chatbots ensures that the customer journey is smooth. E-commerce Businesses understand the pain of losing some of their potential customers as they are halfway through the marketing funnel due to online purchases of hidden costs, a confusing check-out system, or the frustration of being on hold for a long time to get an answer to a simple question.
Chatbots help to streamline the purchasing process and assist the customers throughout their purchasing journey till the time of checkout. They usually provide additional information about the shipping process, products, and discount codes. Hence chatbots help to reduce cart abandonment rates. And with the use of chatbots, the chance of other human errors is also reduced which saves frustration from the customer’s side and a good customer experience.
- Eliminates Time-Consuming Tasks
Chatbots can help to manage some of the repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming tasks performed by the staff within your company. Some of these tasks are draining, and many people may also find them dull. Whereas the chatbots can effectively handle such tasks as usual, without any issues or complaints even when customers express discontentment or frustration.
By integrating chatbots into your site, you will allow your staff to focus on other important tasks increasing their productivity. This technology is also adopted by various websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, factoHR, etc. Hence the use of this technology will help you to enhance your organization’s work efficiency by reducing time consumption and increasing productivity.
The time you lose switching from one tool to another is equally important for productivity. This is not multitasking, but rather context switching, which also reduces productivity. The Dragg survey asked 180 people about their work routines and calculated the average productivity lost by switching between multiple tools and platforms, which turned out to be 794 hours.
- Chatbots are a great source to acquire customer information
The chatbots used for marketing or sales purposes are great for acquiring customer information.
These kinds of chatbots are used to help visitors sign up for newsletters, webinars, schedule appointments, and even guide customers to a landing page or e-commerce site to finalize transactions.
But to avail such benefits from the chatbots the visitors are required to provide some of their basic information like name, email address, and sometimes phone number and location. This valuable information is then automatically stored in your internal database, which can be used to approach these customers in the future.
All this can be done easily by the bots without any human intervention in the process, or errors.
- A Chatbot Can Also Work as a Sales Funnel
Just like you can use your website as a sales funnel, chatbots can also be used as a sales funnel. On top of this funnel, the users are accommodated. In the middle of the funnel, users are sorted based on certain parameters. At the end of the funnel, the actual outcome after sorting the users comes through.
Chatbots can accumulate the conversation initiated with the users and produce relevant information about the customers out of it. Relevant insights can be generated by analyzing the pool of user data accumulated. Based on these insights, the chatbot recommends what might interest the user, such recommendations can be any content, services, and products. The chatbots also initiate conversation and send messages to engage better with the users based on these insights. This also helps you in increasing the conversion rate on your page.
- Enhance your Email Campaigns
Chatbots have become a great part of digital communication in today’s world, with email marketing being no exception. Email marketing is one of the key sources of directing traffic to your website. Email marketing and chatbot technology can go hand in hand to drive even better results. Relevant data collected by Chatbots can be used to fuel your email marketing.
The various benefits of using chatbots for enhancing your email marketing campaign includes lead generation and qualification, assistance in building a rich email subscription list, etc
Final Thoughts
The artificial intelligence-powered chatbots have proven to be limitless, and they are beneficial to businesses of all scales and types, and the way they have penetrated the digital interfaces of organizations is quite overwhelming. Chatbots reduce the burden of Customer service on your shoulder which is one of the most important aspects of a business.
With the advancement of technology and the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) in chatbots communication, the influence of chatbots on the sales and marketing of businesses will continue to loom bigger.
What does our team do?
The team at Social Hire never just do social media management.
What the Social Hire gang loves is making a difference for our clients, and we don't want to waste your, or our resources on campaigns that aren't right for your organisation, if it doesn't get your organisation the difference you need - we prefer a better approach. When your business utilises social media management, Social Hire get your brand the exposure it needs and offer your business the lift it needs to improve.
The social media marketers in our company are the best in the business at helping our partners enhance their online marketing. We outline and implement cutting-edge social media marketing plans that help our customers realise their organisational objectives and further their social media presence. Our experienced team of digital experts do your social media strategy creation and management in an uncomplicated monthly plan that is cost-effective and is genuinely useful, whatever results you demand from your marketing team.
Our group of specialists are an organisation that helps our clients boost their online marketing by offering social media management services on a monthly basis.
You might like these blog posts 3 Things You Need To Add To Your Christmas Campaigns, How to Leverage Visuals When Selling on Instagram + Tools to Use, Creative Millennial Office Designs, and The Impact Of Social Media Strategy On Branding.
