Author: Franz Malten Buemann

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Introduction

Conversations have always been at the center of sales, and the transition to the digital space hasn’t changed that. Chatbots are at the forefront of facilitating these conversations on the online front. According to stats, 55% of businesses that use chatbots generate more high-quality leads, and chatbots increase sales by 67%.

So now you know. Chatbots aren’t just a gimmick or any other tool to add to your tech stack. But instead, here to drive your conversations and demand generation. However, many businesses struggle with the ‘how’ aspect of it.

Buying a tool integrating them using chatbot templates is easy. But to be able to drive conversions and generate sales-qualified leads/appointment bookings requires a lot of research and creative content writing skills.

Not to worry, though. In this article, we’ll guide you through the learning we’ve gathered over the past four years working on thousands of chatbot projects.

The whole idea of chatbot marketing relies on chatbots helping visitors push through the marketing funnel from prospects to leads, and there are various ways to do that. Listed below are proven ways through which you can ace your chatbot marketing game.

1. Encourage Proactive Engagement with Visitors

No matter how hard you try to build an interactive website, you can only create an inclusive experience if you allow the visitors to speak. But it’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

Very few visitors will initiate a conversation with your chatbot on their own. Some may not even know there is a bot, as it is a tiny chat bubble floating around, usually at the bottom right corner of your browser window.

Your chatbot needs to be the one starting a conversation with them instead. A chatbot that can open its chat window automatically with a mere hello, or a greeting along with a sound effect, or a popup with a quirky message can grab eyeballs, make them aware of your bot, and motivate engagement from their end.

Better bot experiences with more engaged audiences can generate response rates as high as 80–90%. It also improves the reputation of your brand as being responsive.

For example, when visitors land on WotNot’s website, they’re alerted with a one-liner popup message via an intuitive sound tone to notify them of the bot. The message is crisp and summarizes the challenges a business would want to solve with WotNot.

On average, we’ve seen chatbots with this feature turned on experience a 60% increase in conversations and a 40% increase in potential leads being generated.

Chatbot Marketing doesn’t just encourage proactive engagement on websites. They are also an essential part of your social media channels. Let’s say you’ve run an ad campaign on Facebook. Instead of directing your prospects away from their preferred platform, your chatbot can have a conversation with them right there. It can help them navigate your store through conversations and complete purchases right from the social media chat that can boost your sales.

In a world that seeks instant gratification, you need to be on your toes when it comes to responding to consumers. When a visitor performs certain actions on a website, you want to reach out to them right away. You shouldn’t face limitations in terms of lack of agents or irregular timings. Chatbots make it possible for you to have an around-the-clock presence. Your prospects can reach out to you regardless of the time and place and enjoy a seamless experience on all your platforms without having a full-time team working towards the same.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

2. Provide Personalized Product Recommendations

Conversational Commerce has been doing the rounds for a while now because it is the closest online retailers have come to replicating a brick-and-mortar experience online. Chatbots have what it takes to make the online shopping experience truly a tailor-made one.

Instead of fruitlessly navigating through product pages, your chatbot can showcase your products/services as carousels on the chat window. It can recommend products within a few clicks and allow users to place orders quickly.

For example, printing giant Domino Printers leverages its website chatbot to provide product recommendations to its site visitors. They have implemented it in two approaches,

1. First, you can choose the category and sub-category of the product you are looking for, and the bot would show you the list.
2. Second, like most people if you are buying that product for the first time, you most likely do not know the category details. Here the bot would ask you some questions like which industry you belong to, what material you would be printing on etc. to understand the use-case of their product, and then the bot would smartly show a list of products matching their need in carousels.

Domino Printing had more than 50 products to showcase on the bot, and they made use of an Airtable integration to store the product catalog details and make flow design easier within WotNot.

AI chatbots take it a notch higher by providing product/service recommendations based on your profile, history, or picture.

For example, Madison Reed, the American brand of hair care and hair color products, has a text-based chatbot that aids users find the best shade for their hair. The catch? You first need to upload a selfie, and the bot will provide a color recommendation based on your face structure and hairstyle.

Considering that your chatbots assist buyers throughout their customer journey, you need to leverage this opportunity to upsell and cross-sell. Each time a visitor checks out a product on your chatbot, you can showcase a list of complementary and similar products to push your sales.

Stats say that 47% of users are open to purchasing via a bot. So if the customers are willing to buy, you need to be ready to sell. Guide them through your website, personalize their experiences, and offer 24×7 support, and you’re one step closer to your sales benchmark.

3. Automate Scheduling of Meetings

If we speak about B2B sales, booking meetings and demos are crucial to taking the sales process forward. It is a significant indication of the genuineness of the prospect and shows a high desire to purchase.

However, scheduling meetings is also an administrative task that requires numerous back and forth emails and multiple phone calls. Research says that sales reps generate one appointment from every 209 calls. The window of opportunity here is very small, and you cannot afford to miss it because of, say, a manual error or a delayed response.

To automate this process, companies leverage appointment scheduling tools like Calendly and Chillipiper that allow businesses to define their availability and fields to be captured, such as name, email, phone, and embed it on your website or share it as a URL. Using it, visitors/customers will quickly see the available time slots to book a meeting.

You can entirely replicate this process on chatbots by integrating tools like Calendly, or Google Calendar where your prospects can pick a time from your availability and quickly schedule a meeting while conversing. You can also set reminders and notifications without any human involvement. This helps you generate Sales Qualified Leads without you having to spend hours to do so.

4. Ask Sales-Oriented Questions to Qualify Leads

Lead quality is probably one of the topmost reasons for a constant war between marketing and sales. Marketing makes considerable efforts to generate leads through ads, content, and social media, but determining how many are genuine and have an actual interest in buying your product requires intense efforts from the sales team. Sales teams need answers to four main parameters to qualify a lead: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline or BANT as it’s popularly called.

Getting this information is not as straightforward as you might think. It requires creating a rapport with the prospect and getting answers in the flow of a conversation. While you can do this via a phone call, chatbots help you speed up and scale the process. Customers are also more comfortable revealing these details over a chat as compared to an agent.

Some of the top questions you can include in your screening process on your chatbot are:

• What brings you here today?
• How heavily will price factor into your decision?
• What is the budget you have in mind?
• What is the value of the outcome the bot generates?
• Who will be involved in the decision-making process?
• When are you looking to get started with this project?

These questions don’t need to be very upfront. Imagine conversing with a person. Every time the visitor answers, acknowledge their answers and subtly move forward with the next question. It also becomes easy for the visitor to answer since the bot would suggest the possible answers in the form of buttons. It keeps the conversational feel intact and helps you narrow down your prospects.

Protip: You can integrate your chatbot with B2B contact database apps like Zoominfo or Clearbit that give you a comprehensive look at your prospects — from their company name, role, location, and contact information. So that you only need to ask the most important questions (Like the BANT ones) and leave the rest of the information to be automatically derived from these tools.

5. Always Strive for Personalization

Personalization is a key aspect of chatbot marketing. Just because you are having conversations with a bot does not mean they have to sound bland. There’s something very warm about addressing someone by their name, and you can very much leverage this tactic and retain the friendly vibe of a chat. There’s a difference between making the bot sound like a human and making it sound humane. Our goal is to achieve the latter.

Research says that 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe personalized marketing experiences improve customer relationships. To get an overview of the prospect profile, you can again use database profiles like Zoominfo and Clearbit to create personalized messages based on prospect background.

Multi-lingual chatbots are another gem in offering personalized conversational experiences to visitors. For a company with a global presence, you think having a bot in English would be enough. But, according to Forbes, 60% of consumers rarely or never make purchases from English-only sites, and 75% want to make purchases in their language.

Personalization means you go the extra mile and understand your customers’ needs. Chatbots are the simplest and fastest way to address these localization challenges.

For example, Eat Easy, a food delivery company in the Middle East, built multi-lingual bots in English and Arabic to cater to their target market and make it convenient for customers to place orders via their app chatbot.

You have to take personalization up a notch by making it proactive, i.e., depending on which location a person is speaking with the bot, the bot could talk with the visitor in that region’s language. We have seen a lot of local companies in India, like Lava Mobiles, do this as their target audience is sparsely populated in rural areas.

WotNot allows you to build multilingual AI chatbots on top of NLP (Natural Language Processing) engines like IBM Watson and Dialogflow by Google that help you cater to international markets and bridge language gaps with potential customers.

6. Reach Out to Prospects with an Outbound Approach

Outbound leads are often called ‘cold leads’ as they haven’t voluntarily opted to communicate with you. To this day, the age-old practice of email and SMS marketing is still thriving as it allows businesses without any inbound traffic to be able to reach a broader audience with a respective CTA.

Not just outbound marketing, you may also already have a huge list of closed lost leads (Leads that did not become customers) that haven’t been contacted again for the same or another product/service. They may have become lost for reasons like no budget; a project is delayed, they found a competitor, etc.

But this doesn’t mean that they still do not need your service two months or six months down the line. It is always a good sales practice to nudge these lost prospects at least once in a while to keep engaged and learn more about their current state of business.

And chatbots are becoming the hottest way of scaling this outbound outreach to closed customers and reaching out to new audiences through cold conversations.

How?

On WotNot, you can build an outbound campaign cadence structure to send messages to cold leads on WhatsApp and SMS. As per your cadence structure, the bot will keep reaching out to the contacts that you defined (Could be old leads, new audiences, subscribers, etc.) with a message that is creatively drafted with the sole aim of making them respond to that message — either positively or negatively.

And obviously, once someone does respond to the initial message, you will have your usual inbound bots to process these messages and take the prospect down the funnel.

This way, you are not just spraying and praying for a lead to come through. Instead, you’re interacting with them and understanding more about their needs before you make them schedule a call with your team.

Finishing Thoughts

Whether you opt for one of these chatbot marketing techniques or all, you need to remember that, at the end of the day, no matter your use case or your industry, a chatbot is a marketing tool. It can perform numerous functions; at its core, its motive should always be business growth via higher engagement. And our job as marketers should constantly be iterating on the conversation flow for better conversions. Because higher conversions mean more leads, and more leads mean more revenue.

Originally published at https://wotnot.io.

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Top Chatbot Marketing Techniques that will Drives your Sales was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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https://preview.redd.it/xcfu24q24ef81.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14dceb4a753566a2e2801620a289f787dfe37493 Technology advancement is proffering reinvigorated opportunity windows for growth-seeking businesses. While each technology offering has the potential to enhance the impact factor of a business and make things better than before, the difference made by RPA and chatbot is commendable. Read more – Use Cases for RPA plus Chatbots Implementation: 10+ Industries Are Benefiting submitted by /u/stridelysolutions [link] [comments]

Based on our own experience implementing Yed.ai at Advanced Programming Solutions, some insights from our customers and research papers (Corea et al., 2020; Lewandowski et al., 2021), we dare to share here some tips to make your chatbot implementation journey smoother.

1. Decide early on what your main goal is:

Is it a task oriented bot? Or is it a bot to promote conversation and engagement? Clarify your vision. If task oriented: what are the KPIs? How will you measure success? Think about the conversational agent as a collaborator in the company. In most cases, organisations expect a single person to fulfill different roles. Make a list: what exactly will be the responsibilities of your bot? What are the most important to prioritize? Let’s follow an example: we want our bot to help fully remote employees to find information quicker within our company knowledge base. We have lots of information all over the place, in different repositories (Confluence, Drive, the ERP system…), and whenever new people join another project or a different team, we wish to provide them access, explain ways of working and adopt learnings. At the same time we do not want them to feel they are judged. We wish to ensure people are able to find this information and reduce the time they need to be ready for the role. We can measure it through the time new to roles take on average to get ready and time invested by senior members in the onboarding of new team members.

Once you have the goal clear, name a Content Coordinator for your bot, the person in the organisation who should be committed to serve this goal. If you agree for this role to be external, be sure to assign the right contact person internally, someone who knows who is who and is senior enough to look for the right answers to be provided and right people to be involved.

2. Identify your “sources of truth” and cooperate with them

This is probably the most relevant tip in order not to waste time and avoid rework… And here we are not referring to formal documentation only. Each organisation has knowledge keepers in different areas. These are the people that everyone recognizes as reference whenever they have a doubt, “ask Fran” or “let’s ask Dani” will be the answer… so you need to identify and involve them in the bot implementation process. They may give you all the key answers but they can also be part of the answer the bot will provide (hand-over to a human!): “I don’t know this yet, but I recommend you to contact Dani”. This might take a while, and might lead to discovering that there was old information being given, or something not working correctly. The Content Coordinator shall take time to agree on the right answers with these people. They may or may not hold a formal position of responsibility that is not relevant. They are prescribers and you need them to help you get to the truth. To continue with our example: We identify the people within the team that are recognized as the best by peers in order to solve a specific area of doubt before referring to documentation and manuals. We ask them to be our advisory team in case something comes up around their area of expertise and handle the question directly. We create a subject matter experts group email account, so all of them receive the queries at the same time and they can decide what to answer as SMEs. Call it “Domain Board”, “SMEs Committee” or “Wise Council”, just make sure they are recognized by the existing governance structures in the organization to empower their decisions.

3. Agree the process to follow for the conversational agent to learn

This is not about checking the quality of the neural network accuracy. Your tech solution should have that covered. You should worry about establishing who will ensure the chatbot learns the right stuff (training data availability and quality). We already know of big failures with chatbots learning just from user interaction… your organisation might not want to let trolls teach the AI what is correct. So, to whom should we go to when a doubt the organisation has no answer for comes up? Who decides which questions are out of scope of our bot? Be aware that learning what we don’t know is as important as providing answers.

You might think this issue should be solved by technology: partly right. Knowledge Management experts are in the tech field that can help orchestrate the effort and define the right information structure to start with, nevertheless, if you wish the bot to learn, say the truth and be accurate, you better agree how you will get answers and where the data will be stored, how it will be managed and who will feed it into the bot.

In our example: Once we have identified the advisors, this includes setting up a procedure that works for them and the bot development team. Keep it realistic. We assign the advisory team of SMEs an hour per week to resolve new doubts coming from the bot, facilitated by the bot Content Coordinator. This time guarantees a high level of quality in the answers. Plus, we have the Content Coordinator conducting the review of the bot answers once per month, with a minimum of 30% of conversations being supervised by humans during the first six months. You need to be able to manage big amounts of data of course, have them correctly stored, protected, cleaned and available. This is where your tech partner comes into play: to make the Knowledge Management job easier.

Trending Bot Articles:

1. How Conversational AI can Automate Customer Service

2. Automated vs Live Chats: What will the Future of Customer Service Look Like?

3. Chatbots As Medical Assistants In COVID-19 Pandemic

4. Chatbot Vs. Intelligent Virtual Assistant — What’s the difference & Why Care?

4. Be ready to learn bottom-up and commit to continuous improvement

As per research papers, a group oriented perspective and voluntary participation are the best way to kick off your efforts of implementation.

A top-down enforcement to use the bot does not work. Plus, you need to be aware of your own organisation learning curves. The bot will learn as quickly as your organisation does: the pace to teach the bot a new answer is the pace in which you create new knowledge that is agreed by the right people and therefore can be taken seriously.

This is why one of our conclusions is that the chatbot implementation is the best way to conduct digital transformation in organizations: it makes the information gaps evident and gets the missing elements to the surface. Chatbots also make you reflect on stuff you did not expect to come up in the first place.

5. Make sure your implementation team is diverse and interdisciplinary

As you are designing conversations, you need to recognize that people make questions in different ways, and perceive information differently. Therefore, a chatbot development team composed of great scientists alone will not be useful. Neither a team of senior engineers on their own. In order to move the needle implementing chatbots you require not just great technical skills (programming, data scientists and NLP experts) but also marketing people and communication related skills, preferably with knowledge of your organisation’s main domain area. These people have to interact with the chatbot and each other. Going beyond disciplines, you will benefit from having generation-Z and baby-boomers working together on the organisational knowledge corpus development… as well as minorities representatives and people with disabilities. They will not only help to avoid biases, but will also be able to discuss ethical issues that may arise. For example: you might face questions such as “how much does the CEO earn? or “How do I report bullying in my team?”. In this case you need to make a decision on whether to get them on your scope, or you wish the bot to say it does not know. In any case, it is up to the organisation to make a choice. Some conversations will be required to be held that were not expected. Getting different perspectives heard is a must. Research papers confirm that AI projects cannot be simply outsourced or developed in isolation by any internal team. Get the right people to facilitate your journey, it is not about tech only.

If you wish to exchange best practices or collaborate in any way please contact support@yed.ai

References:

Corea, C., Delfmann, P., & Nagel, S. (2020). Towards intelligent chatbots for customer care: Practice-based requirements for a research agenda. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Lewandowski, T., Delling, J., Grotherr, C., & Böhmann, T. (2021). State-of-the-Art Analysis of Adopting AI-based Conversational Agents in Organizations: A Systematic Literature Review. PACIS 2021 Proceedings, 167.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !

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5 keys to boost chatbots adoption in the organisation was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Best Chatbots for your shop website, you must add on your website to enhance visitors, attract more customer, enhance your revenue and do much more tasks!! #techdevilzone u/techdevilzone https://preview.redd.it/7phk038up1f81.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=993d6d1993dd0a411e5781e2da078fd06ad8aa0f submitted by /u/TechDevilZone [link] [comments]