National Geographic — one of the world’s most iconic media companies — was looking for an innovative way to engage their 45 million Facebook fans and sell their new 2019 Almanac. Their idea was to create a daily trivia Messenger bot that was powered with content from their new almanac.
National Geographic chose Smartloop to create a Messenger chatbot that could automatically onboard users and sends them daily trivia questions. In the onboarding, the user selects a trivia topic that interests him most, then receives a set of trivia questions based on that topic. Once the user completes the quiz, his results are calculated and he is given a score:
After this, the user is asked if he’d like to opt-in to receive daily trivia questions. The Smartloop platform would then automate the full process of delivering the trivia questions to the users based on their preferred topic. In case people are not completing the quiz, the bot would automatically follow up with them to bring them back to the flow:
The call to action to buy the Almanac was presented in two ways in the bot. First, as a user progressed through the daily trivia questions, National Geographic sent him more content to their website which contained ads to buy the Almanac. Secondly, the chatbot took multiple opportunities to send a discount code with a link to purchase the Almanac:
As a result of using the Smartloop conversational platform, the fans of National Geographic were happy to engage with the chatbot. The National Geographic chatbot accomplished these results:
- 65% of users came back daily to answer trivia questions.
- 29% click-through rates out of the chatbot to additional content and the Almanac product page. (compared to email industry rates of 5%)
- 43% open rate on promotional broadcast messages. (compared to email industry open rates of 20%)
Smartloop is a conversational bot platform that helps brands engage with their users, promote new products, share content and promotions. The solution blends chatbot building tools, cross deployment, message broadcasting, analytics and cloud infrastructure in one complete package.
Create your own conversational bot or contact our team to learn more about a solution for your brand.
How National Geographic Engaged its Facebook Subscribers with a Conversational Bot was originally published in Smartloop on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.