People don’t like to LOSE THEIR TIME. Sometimes trying to find a piece of info is a pain in the neck for the majority of people. You want to buy some service or product but there are questions that stop you from clicking the call to action button. Most of the websites have the page of FAQ, which sheds light on the potential customers’ odd questions. But people are more impatient than you think. They don’t even like to spend several minutes on the FAQ page to find their answer, Here chatbots appear to help you. Chatbot Marketing is the trendy digital marketing strategy that we are going to read about it.
There are many reasons that may stop you from using chatbot marketing, But hopefully, today is the big day, because We are going to clarify the following questions:
- Why Successful SMBs using chatbot marketing?
- Chatbots vs live chat – what are the differences?
If you have not had the experience of using a chatbot on your small business web pages, you can not imagine the deep effects of chatbot marketing. But probably, you have got persuaded by live agents and you have got the answer by chatbots.
6 advantages of chatbot marketing
let’s analyze the six advantages of chatbot marketing.
#6 Open rate is unbelievable
If you have done Email marketing, you know what we are talking about. The email marketers are doing their best to increase the percentage of open rates. They are spending all their effort to interact with potential customers.
But thanks to the chatbot marketing, when you set up a chatbot on your website landing page, you will see how many people are massaging you. People naturally like to discover and interact, and with the immediate response feature of chatbots they will be happy and satisfied.
#5 Engage and qualify leads
Better engagement results in more sales. Never forget that you are doing business for revenue. Your online property isn’t for entertainment; of course brand awareness is also vital for SMBs but the main purpose is to experience maximum sales.
Therefore, if you pay close attention to the marketing strategies of successful businesses, they are using social media marketing, because engagement is very important. Now chatbot changed the game, webpages are not static anymore. People like to be engaged in live chatbots. Accordingly, you can do lots of creative tricks to engage and qualify leads. For instance, you can show potential customers a simple prompt such as “How can we help you?”, “If there is a question, please “contact us”, “Let us know if you have any questions”.
Note: uploading a welcome video to open up the door for interaction with your visitors are new methods of engagement in chatbots.
#4 Gather and analyze customer data
Chatbot marketing is not simply for interaction and engagement, it is a hidden weapon to understand potential customers characteristics. There is some data that is being gathered automatically, for example, the address of the landing page in which the visitors are present, which kind of device they are using, their IP address, their email address, and mobile number if they registered in your website.
Also chatbots can ask for information from visitors, if you want to build email marketing lists, persuade visitors to register on newsletters, and so on. Consequently, chatbots are effective tools for gathering valuable information. In addition when you want to respond to visitors you have a clear picture of who exactly they are.
#3 Make payments easier
Did you notice that sometimes it’s not the prices that decrease the sales, in fact the complexity of the payment page itself is the reason for the reduction in the successful purchase?
Brands can profit using chatbots to boost the payment process. Simple payment forms generate significant revenue for your small business.
#2 Send high-intent leads directly to sales
There are golden moments, that potential leads need to be clarified to pull the trigger. There must be a person or a bot that tells “Which Sunglasses Fit Your Personality?”. Bots and live agents play a significant role in guiding high-intent leads directly to sales, many research has been conducted and consequence shows that the live interaction while purchasing goods or services in an online agency makes a big deal.
Sometimes people dislike calling your number to ask about more info. Another example is the effectiveness of email interaction. Honestly, it’s not a good idea to make the customers wait for your answer, most of the people who decide to buy something may change their mind. You must act before the potential customers are discouraged.
#1 Business sounds like it’s open to the community 24/7
Most of the SMBs are offering services to other countries and continents. When you are offering services in Canada – Toronto or overseas, you need to be online to build the emotion of being available 24 hours on a day and 7 days of the week.
This is a tricky advantage of chatbots, which provides peace of mind to your potential customers. Maybe they don’t ever use your chatbot, but they believe that every time they can write to you and get the response. This is wonderful, isn’t it? What do you think?
Chatbots VS Live Chat
Now the question is what are chatbots and live chats?
On the paper, these two kinds of chat platforms are the same. We call them chatbot marketing. But they are not the same, and different functionality of them made chatbot marketing a bit complicated for beginners. Besides, we have a kind chatbot marketing practice that uses both chatbots & live chats.
If we want to describe these two tools in simple words, chatbots are being used by bots [with the commands of humans], and live chats are being controlled by people. We know that you have questions like which one is the best choice for marketing? What are the advantages and disadvantages of chatbots & live chats? Which one is suitable for my website?
We are starting with the final question, there is not a good or bad practice, so the thing is, you need to decide which one works best for you. To do this, list some of the expectations of your business and customers of the paper and consider the following factors:
- Response time
- Cost-effectiveness
- Availability
- Scalability
- Accuracy
- Human touch
- Customer satisfaction
This helps you to find a great way of using this trendy and super effective method of marketing. Keep on reading to know what exactly chatbots & live chats can do.
What are the advantages of chatbots?
All of these infractions between bots and customers are the result of artificial intelligence (AI), as we already mentioned, conversational relationships are better than a transactional one.
- Always-on to engage customers: 24-hour sales & support assistance is the strong feature of chatbots. Of Course you can hire more people to cover 24 horses of the day, but it costs an arm and a leg for startups and small businesses.
- Instant responding: chatbots are fast and ready to answer the queries that are being sorted and commanded beforehand.
- Detailed export answers in no time: visitors may have questions that have big answers, in this case a detailed answer can make sense. Actually, writing a detailed answer for the visitors is a time-consuming thing, furthermore, you have a short time to answer the customer, if you delay they may leave the page.
- Chatbots are less prone to errors: the answers which are provided by bots, are clear and exactly the texts that are being stored in the database. But live agents can make mistakes when writing to users.
- Bots are on the mission when the support team is not available or busy: there are times that your team isn’t available. There should be someone to answer the questions to increase brand credibility. By automating sales and customer support you can do this.
- Easy scalability during peak hours: There are special days and hours that you have a tremendous number of visitors to your web page. In this situation, nothing can handle the charts except a simple chatbot that is able to meet endless requests with great ease and effectiveness.
- Automating repetitive tasks and simple questions: every business has FAQs and on-demand requests which are being asked repetitively. You can use chatbots to handle these requests.
- Cost-effective: It helps your business to reduce customer service costs and in comparison with live chats there is no need for hiring agents. As well you will save in the cost of training agents & providing infrastructures.
What are the advantages of live chats?
If the visitors to your web page needs to interact with sales & support reps and importantly your business size is big enough to allow you to use human resources as live chat support you can win the game by applying a live chat platform on your website.
- Live chat handles complex conversations better: undoubtedly, every person has its unique tone and style when communicating. The only way to answer customers special questions is hiring live agents, live chat is a knockout solution when it comes to accuracy – Even with Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), it is difficult for a bot to handle complex queries.
- Live chat allows multitasking: live agents can interact with several users while responding they can access CRM and check the process of the orders. This is just one example when agents are managing your business chatbots they can do many tasks that bots can not do.
- Emotional intelligence: psychology and understanding potential customers’ feelings can help you sell them your service or product, however, bots don’t have feelings and they can’t empathize, moreover at times customers expect empathy during the problematic situation they are ineffective, while an agent clearly knows what to do.
- Live support and brand interactivity: relying only on chatbots may create an impression that your brand is cold and impersonal. Real agents can cover live support of your business.
- Live chat is conversational: there are agents that are professional in selling. They can use their special strategies to persuade customers to buy. If your business needs some preservation, you can use live chat methods.
- Live chat has a personal touch: as we earlier said, chatbots can greet and answer the simple questions. In the cases that you think your potential customers hate automated conversation, use live chat, and talk with the people in the way that works. Personalization of conversations and greetings make a big difference, that builds customer loyalty.
What all of this means to you:
Chat marketing is a necessary marketing strategy for your business. But choosing the appropriate alternative depends on your needs. We mentioned and described both chatbots & live chat.
- If you are looking for a quick response method, chatbots can respond to your visitors within 30 seconds.
- If the number of the people who like to interact with you is huge, we think that live chat is not cost-effective, because you need to hire more agents, train more agents and finally pay for extra infrastructure & salaries costs, in this case, it’s better to use chatbots.
- If you are sure that visitors to your website or web application are not very time-sensitive and they prefer to talk to a real agent, it’s better to use live chat platforms.
- In the case of repetitive FAQs, it’s ideal to use bots, and when the conversation gets complicated leave it to the professional live support team.
- If your budget is not sufficient to hire agents, don’t worry about it bots can automate your business operations without hiring resources.
- Live chat is suitable for the conditions in which customers need to rely on a person or an answer to complete their order.
- Always complex questions exist, in these critical times live chat can be the best solution for your business. Live agents can comprehensively discuss and resolve the issue. However, we highly recommend you having both solutions.
Your turn
There is never too late to install a chatbot or live chat platform on your website. They’re easy to set up but if you have some difficulty feel free to ask for help [Contact us]. With the help of Webmint try to activate your business chatbot marketing, and don’t lose the opportunity to promote products and services on chat.
