Marketers in the past broadcasted advertisements and hoped people would see them. The business would also have to be minting money to afford that sort of budget. Marketing today can be done through a computer screen, with the help of skilled marketers, social media managers, content specialists, and a few analytics tools you can find on the internet for free.
But businesses are still talking at the customers, not talking to them, always overlooking the fraction of customers who might have something to say back or ask. How often does a sale SMS or a website pop-up bring a decent number of conversions?
The Need for Chatbot Marketing
While these marketing means are widely successful, brands are faced with the limitations of one-way communication channels to instill urgency and the dwindling attention span of customers. Sometimes customers want to buy but are held back by questions. But these are customers who paid attention to your marketing messages. Most marketing posts fall in the blind spot of customers, either because the message is too verbose or because the customers are used to seeing such posts daily.
Businesses are still talking at the customers, not talking to them.
Conversational marketing becomes the solution, leading to purpose-filled customer interactions that encourage customers to clarify their doubts or choose a different product offering as per their needs. Conversational marketing is carried out with AI-powered chatbots which have the ability to meet the demands of today’s tech-savvy, cognizant, and impatient customers.
How to Transform Marketing with Chatbots?
1. Add Chatbots on Every High-traffic Page
Every one of your web pages has a unique value. A blog page educates customers about your products, a knowledge base solves simple problems, and a pricing page helps you close sales. Naturally, a customer on the pricing page is more likely to convert than the one reading a blog. Chatbots are versatile marketing tools that can help you craft individualized messaging to engage customers, help with what they are looking for, and initiate empathetic conversations. Your marketing team can send an event-based message on the blog page whereas jump right in to pitch products on the pricing page.
Similarly, a customer on a support forum page is unlikely to convert and would rather skim quietly than be bombarded with marketing messages. You may want to retract your chatbot efforts there. When you start to see marketing as both experience-oriented and conversion-oriented, chatbots open a stream of marketing opportunities, direct and indirect.
2. Send Contextual Notifications to Target Customers
Customers will not be on your website forever — give them an afterthought for when they leave. With chatbots, you can send contextual notifications to target customers at the right moments. Whether you have a flash sale or a product expo coming up, send updates to customers on chatbot. The primary goal of a marketing chatbot is to keep the conversation going. When you welcome them to know more about your business, you make them an active participant in your endeavors. Any other form of proactive engagement is time-consuming and requires too much manpower.
A massive advantage virtual marketers have over in-store marketers is that they have information at their fingertips. With chatbots, you are inviting potential customers for a conversation about what they want to buy rather than what you want to sell. Your sales team can this opportunity to turn information into personalized recommendations, gain clarity about their requirements, and help them find a product or service that benefits them the most. With chatbot’s flair for easy notifications, you can announce new product launches, send e-commerce coupons as rewards, send purchase follow-up messages to your customers, and do a host of other marketing campaigns. The key is to be unintrusive, as customers are inherently wary of promotional messages.
3. Deliver Content to Engage Window Shoppers
Content marketing is an underrated and underutilized form of marketing. 72% of marketers saying content marketing increases the number of leads. The good news is, you can easily combine content marketing with chatbot marketing. Most companies create content but have a hard time making it reach the customers. How many blogs or social media posts customers are going to click in a day anyway? Do they even click on Facebook Messenger ads? But chatbots can cut to the chase and greet customers with content relevant to their current activity.
Many lead generation attempts in chatbots end at “Thanks, I’m just browsing”. There is no way to keep the conversation going — except if you have a few quality posts about the subject you can share. Customers will read if the material is intriguing enough and maybe learn a thing or two about your business. Now you have gone from a window shopper to an eventual customer. More so, cross-channel marketing is a great way to drive traffic from high-performing pages to low-performing pages.
4. Nurture New Customers for Upselling Opportunities
Chatbots have an upper hand with converted customers because you have already established trust with them. Chatbot platforms enable you to communicate with customers in a way that’s more individualized and conversational. You can address them by their names, ask how their last purchase is serving them, and ask what can you do to maximize their purchase benefits and user experience.
When you learn whom to market to and how to market, you can encourage customers to try different products, upgrade to a better plan, or boost their current order value. From lead nurturing to qualifying to closing, your sales reps can easily streamline the customer journey across the sales funnel.
5. Leverage Multilingual Chatbots to Attract Overseas Customers
Any company can go global today with the right combination of market research, shipping potential, and most importantly, translation tools. Hiring regional language speakers can be expensive and unnecessary for starters. Driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots have the ability to understand hundreds of languages and not merely translate but converse in each language. With chatbots on your global websites, your international customers can cross the language barrier easily to connect with you and clarify their doubts.
Many businesses tend to falter and see their growth plateauing at some point in time. Expanding your customer base and tapping into new markets is the solution, and chatbots can help you connect with your overseas customers and establish trust by speaking in their native language.
6. Add Payment Options to Speed Up Purchase Decisions
Customer drop-offs are more common in between the cart and the payment landing page or the payment page and the phone payment app. Customers doubt their buying decisions particularly when they are about to make the payment. They get questions. They may want reassurance about the product. That’s where your chatbots step in.
Chatbots can meet customers on the payments page and help them with any queries they have. Plus customers can pay quickly while on the same page. This is the primary advantage of chatbots — they can go places where no channel can and at the right time.
Chatbot Marketing is the New Direct Marketing
Chatbots are all-inclusive digital marketing channels that can help you nurture leads, close sales, engage international customers, run campaigns, send promotions, and distribute content. Use the above tips to accelerate your own chatbot marketing strategy and cash in on actual monetary results.
Check out HappyFox Chatbot purpose-built for customer engagement and customer support use cases. Ask our product experts about any doubt you have about chatbots and check out HappyFox for more ideas!
