What is chatbot marketing?
Simple answer: a way of leveraging chatbots to strengthen the customer-brand relationship.
What can you do with (just) a chatbot? Have an automated conversation.
Now, if that isn’t what you’re looking for then I’m going to give you some more information to munch on.
First, I’ll explain what chatbot marketing is and why it is influential in the marketing-world. Then, I’ll hand you some incredible statistics to show you their potential. To sum it all up, I’ll give you a couple of examples that will hopefully inspire you to make your own chatbots.
It’s an upcoming trend.
In the past few years, the interest in chatbot marketing has taken off, with more people asking what it is and what you can do with it.
This, in great part, is due to the importance of modern messaging in our daily lives.
Just think of the apps you used this week: Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and maybe even Telegram or Instagram. Now think of the many ways you expressed yourself through text. Did you send a few of the 5 billion emojis sent every day? Did you send your friend a GIF of encouragement? 👇🏼
Trending Articles on Chatbot Marketing:
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You, I and everybody around us is changing the landscape of messaging. Unlimited phone plans, faster internet, smarter phones and the increasing amount tech-savvy users (those grown up with phones in their hands) are all propelling new ways for brands to interact with their customers.
There’s so much evidence that customers are ready to talk with brands. The problem is the lack of tools and agencies to effectively implement bot strategies. In order to get that fixed for chatbot marketing, we need to understand what it is first.
It’s a data-driven marketers dream.
The Game of Thrones chatbots (GoTBot) managed to have more than 20,000 conversations with an incredible average conversation duration of 4 minutes and 59 seconds.
The chatbot was primarily geared towards being useful for Game of Thrones fans, create awareness and get press coverage. This worked: 135 articles were written in 12 languages.
Snickers’ campaign drove 92,000 users to send 4.5 million message in the span of a month. In each conversation session, about 97 messages were sent. The average conversation time was 4.7 minutes! 🤯
The chatbot was designed to increase the likelihood that a user would buy a Snickers bar at a gas station while on a road trip. So, the chatbot was set up as a game you could play with friends when you were on a road trip.
Western Union’s chatbot reached 280 million people with video completion rates around 92%. Most impressively, the bot increased their total user count by 560% over an 8 month period.
Inevitably, Western Union’s main goal was for users to use the bot to efficiently transfer money. With this bot, they wanted to target a much younger and modern audience.
These kinds of statistics will stick around for a while. Why?
It’s a unique way to do marketing.
By unique I mean this sort of stuff hasn’t been done before.
Chatbots are being used to order pizza, suggest products, answer customer questions, schedule meetings, search flights and find restaurants. They’re all making it easier for your customers to find what they’re looking for.
But 🤔
These solutions are all still text based and don’t jump into the trends that were mentioned earlier.
Now 😁
Think of the marketing possibilities of integrating detection software, like image recognition, into chatbots. If you need some help on this, let me give you an example of something we proposed to Coca-Cola (you can see this example on the front page).
Back in 1979, Coca-Cola came up with “Have a Coke and a Smile”. This slogan has been remembered and rephrased countless times over the years.
We wanted to bring it to 2019.
So, we decided to build a chatbot that would ask for a selfie of a customer with their coke. The wider the smile, the better their reward would be (for participating in the campaign).
Not only will you be able to directly reward your customer, you will always be able to get into direct contact with them and you get to collect and analyse the data.
So let’s say that when this campaign goes live, over 100,000 people engage with the chatbot we designed. Then I’d highly recommend time to do some analyses on the data that came through your bot.
What is the average age?
What is the gender ratio?
Are there any significant statistics when it comes to hair or pupil color?
Based on the data you want to collect, you can hyper analyse campaigns.
Its possibilities are yet to be discovered.
Since we’re only at the dawn of chatbot marketing (especially with our integration of detection software), there is an endless amount of opportunity that comes with marketing chatbots.
Ready for some inspiration?
Here’s the couple of examples I promised.
A pioneer in the retail industry.
First up, Sephora’s bot. They were a pioneer when it came to using chatbots in the retail industry. The bot was dubbed Sephora Color Match and it would essentially let you send a picture of something you came across, then the shade would be identified and the bot would recommend you a lipstick color based on that shade!
The first promotional campaign on Whatsapp.
Mexican consumers could find unique codes in their Ruffles chips bag and would be able to send them through Whatsapp. The campaign resulted in over 4.5 million messages sent within a month with an average of 19 minutes spent talking to the bot.
Now, if someone where to ask you what chatbot marketing is. What would you answer?
Hopefully something along the lines of ‘a way of letting your customers interact with your brand the way they would with their friends’.
Are you looking for inspiration or ready to develop these marketing chatbots for your brand?
Are you searching for a chatbot marketing agency? Please feel free to take a look at our website, www.rcpts.io, or email me directly: marc [-at-] rcpts.io
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
