What is Chatbot Marketing? Everything you should know about Chatbots 2023

We are all used to the fact that automation is the way forward, therefore, it’s not surprising to see chatbots everywhere in the marketing world. While there are still some parts where human involvements are necessary, bots and automation play an important role in the management process. Chatbot marketing is a great digital marketing strategy to help facilitate customer communication via the Internet. In this article today, we are going to cover the definition of Chabot marketing and how to make good use of it to better serve your customers. 

What is Chatbot Marketing?

What Are Chatbots?

A chatbot is software or a computer program that will automate conversation with your customers online. They are programmed with various responses depending on what a user requests or chooses. For instance, a chatbot can automatically ask a customer what service they want to get more information about and response to their answer based on the customer’s choice.

What Is Chatbot Marketing?

Chatbot marketing is a popular marketing strategy nowadays, and basically, it’s about using a chatbot to market the business. This method really gained its popularity when Facebook provided chatbots integrated with its Messenger feature. Thanks to this feature, customers can now submit their questions and concerns effortlessly to get quick responses from businesses.

A chatbot is used in marketing strategy to make sure that your customers' questions are not ignored or unanswered. In fact, it can even lead to more sales and customer loyalty for your brand.

Benefits of using Chatbot Marketing

To thrive in this highly competitive modern technology market today, it’s essential to automate as many parts of your process as possible. In fact, businesses have started to use self-checkout stalls at grocery stores and ordering machines at restaurants. 

For example, Amazon opened a store working without human management. There would be no need for any cashiers because people can go to self-checkouts and pay their bills with their smartphones. We can see that the key to evolution is to limit human interactions to only absolutely necessary situations.

Chatbot in marketing can bring greater benefits than you can imagine. Here are the key advantages of using chatbots in business:

1. Save a great deal of time and money

Since chatbots can automate conversations, organizations don’t need to hire employees to answer their customers. This way helps them save a significant amount of time and money and allocate resources to other important sections. 

With chatbots, businesses can serve more clients with less effort and resources. Unlike human beings, chatbots don’t need a salary and can work 24/7 without being tired, which means generating a chatbot is a one-time investment. 

When chatbots are connected with money transfer services like Paypal, they can speed up the paying process because orders can be completed without making users move to a website. As a result, the process of making orders and payments would be less time-consuming for both customers and businesses.

2. Provide quick and clear guidance for customers 

Chatbots help to segment traffic and diversify your audience by leading conversations in various directions. For instance, the chatbot may suggest making an order after knowing that the customer has shown interest in pricing. In case people need more details of the product, the chatbot also can give all the necessary information about your product or service.

An instant reply can make a good impression when it comes to the shopping experience. Customers love fast and effective results in communication and if the chatbots perform correctly, they can improve your brand image as well as grow the feeling of trust from customers towards your company.

3. Keep customers engaged in a unique way

Traditionally, businesses often respond to questions via email or telephone, which is a fairly standard and non-customized shopping experience for customers. However, today chatbots have offered much more fun and interactive way for people to engage with brands.

Take Domino’s Pizza’s Twitter as an example, this store enables customers to order pizzas by sharing an emoji. After that, the Domino’s bots will chat with those who want to buy pizzas and ask additional questions if necessary.

Another great example of chatbot marketing is Fandango. Back in the day, people had to spend time sorting out to choose a movie on Moviefone via options from 1-800 numbers. But now you can go to Fandango's social profiles and talk to its chatbots and book a ticket at a cinema near you in a second.

4. Take advantage of chatbots as a universal marketing channel

Chatbot marketing is a great tool that fits any business. Regardless of what kind of business you own, whether it’s small or big, you can create a chatbot to help cover multiple processes. With an enormous audience of more than 5 billion users in messaging apps like Messenger, Wechat, WhatsApp, etc where conversations are held, the market that chatbots can serve is almost unlimited and will only increase more and more in the future. This means that you have many opportunities to communicate to audiences on a global scale and expand your business to a whole new level. 

Chatbot marketing can help bring a seamless and memorable experience to users and that kind of good impression can make people think of your chatbots the next time they’re planning for dinner for a movie.

5. Collect data for analysis

With the help of your chatbots, you can easily collect customer data and gain more insights into your audience’s needs and preferences. You can use this data to adapt and adjust your chatbot marketing strategy to achieve better results in communication and finance.

What tasks can chatbot marketing help you with?

Now, you know that chatbots play an important role in your marketing activity, let’s take a look at some highlight functions that they can handle to smooth your store management process.

Enable orders to be made online

If you manage to run an eCommerce store online that sells clothes, accessories, or food,..a chatbot can be a lifesaver for your business because it will allow customers to order directly in the chat message. In case a user is not ready to buy your products, a chatbot still can narrow their search before people need to contact a shop assistant to handle the problem. For example, imagine you run an organic good store, a chatbot can help customers quickly find out what kind of vegetables they need and address them to the sales representative late if requested.

Schedule meetings

Chatbots will be extremely useful for small brands in any industry, especially if there are not many staff available to respond to sales messages quickly, from hair salons, DJ services to fitness trainers. Those stores can just connect a chatbot to the Google Calendar, and it can be your virtual assistant who takes care of the arrangements and appointments while you give a haircut, play loud music, or move your body.

Tracking orders, feedback, and other data

When customers hassle you with shipping service, you may be bombarded with unwanted messages. A sophisticated chatbot can give your clients chances to check their shipping and delivery any time they want to avoid such hassling situations. A chatbot could also automatically ask customers for a review a couple of weeks later. Isn’t it great that you don’t have to do it all alone?

Deliver customer support

A chatbot acts like a great assistant for answering FAQs from clients. Additionally, chatbot marketing helps solve the problem of communicating from different time zones. For example, a financial consultation agency is located in America but they can give customers 24/7 support thanks to its customer service based in India. This way can help the company save money to hire employees on a double-shift basis.

Sharing updates and news

Once people become your customers, you can provide them with more news in the future on the chatbox with your bot. Basically, chatbot marketing is a wonderful way to keep in touch with your audience and generate more sales.

Best Tips for Chatbot Marketing

#1 Find out what the FAQs are

To create a successful chatbot, first, you have to examine what kinds of trouble your customers may go through and what may confuse them when using your product or service. Only by predicting the questions your clients may ask in advance, you can create a useful chatbot for them. 

#2 Build a conversation tunnel

Your chatbot should be very specific to be helpful for customers. Determine specific concerns and create a conversation tunnel, each tunnel is supposed to tasks like answering FAQs, scheduling meetings, and confirming orders. If there’s a chance that your chatbot cannot understand an inquiry, make sure your client can contact a person any time if they need to do so. 

#3 Test your chatbots 

Before releasing the official version of your chatbot to customers, try it yourself first or show it to your colleagues and friends. Even after launching the chatbot, it’s advisable to analyze the way your chatbot interacts with people so that you know what should be improved. 

#4 Make your chatbot special in your own way

Since a chatbot aims to encourage communication among people, it’s a good idea to give the chatbot a personality and it should start with creating an attractive and suitable name depending on your field. If your work’s related to teaching code, Cody would sound very relevant. If you provide car rental services, let it be Moto. As long as you can ensure your conversational style makes sense with your brand image and your niche market. For example, formal style for medical care, insurance, finance, and informal manner for other entertainment services. 

#5 Respect your customers’ privacy

You can send customers news and updates in a schedule but never think you can do that in an intrusive way without their permission. Never bombard people with notifications on chat boxes. Always ask if the person is willing to receive messages from you on a regular basis.

If your users want to unsubscribe, let them do so. There are tons of reasons why they want to quit and stop hearing from you, but provide an easy way to do that. Ensure the “unsubscribe” button is visible and respect customers’ reasons.

Best Magento 2 Chatbot Extensions 2022

If you currently have too many customer queries to deal with and cannot respond properly in time due to a lack of support resources? If that’s the case, then you may want to adopt a Magento 2 extension to help speed up the process and interact with your clients better. Below we would introduce the top 3 best extensions for chatbots on Facebook because undoubtedly Facebook is the most popular social media platform nowadays, which we believe any business should build their chatbots on if they want to gain significant success. 

Magento 2 Chatbot extension for Facebook - Magenest

Magento 2 Chatbot for Facebook allows businesses to build an effective and automated communication system in the eCommerce industry.

Using our Magento 2 Facebook Chatbot extension, merchants can easily generate a Chatbot for a Magento 2 store within Facebook Messenger to keep customers engaged through efficient and fast automated messages.

Highlight features:

-Directly receive and respond to customer’s concerns on Messenger

-CTA buttons to be added anytime

-Set up follow-up questions based on main keywords by the admin

-Customers can add items to their cart from Messenger

Compatible: CE, EE 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x

Price: $139.00

Magento 2 Facebook Chatbot Extension - Webkul Store

Developed by Webkul Store, Magento 2 Chatbot extension is an amazing tool to help attract customers’ attention and enhance customers’ shopping experience. 

Highlight features:

-Admin can choose to enable or disable Facebook Chatbot status

-Smooth navigations and simple conversations

-User can see product alternatives and pictures of the product

-Support multiple languages

-Easy to customize

Compatible: Magento, 2.0.x , 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x

Price: $99.00

Magento 2 Chatbot extension - Botgento 

Magento 2 Chatbot is a great innovation by Botgento to bring success to your eCommerce business. This extension helps merchant retailers to target their customers in a quick and efficient way. Although this extension is free, it requires a subscription with Botgento.

Highlight features:

-Abandoned Carts

-Revenue Report to analyze your business performance

-Order updates regularly 

-Unlimited Broadcasts

-Enhanced user acquisition

Compatible: Open Source (CE): 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Prices: FREE