Who doesn't love automation? The marketing world sure does. That is why Chatbots and Marketing make a stellar combination.  Lately, businesses have been going gaga over the amount of difference a Chatbot can make to their Marketing Strategy.

A chatbot is a computer application that can carry out certain actions on its own. These actions mostly revolve around making personalised conversations with users. That’s the reason why they’re called “Chat” Bots.

Most of these bots get this ability to interact with users and engage them in meaningful conversations, powered by AI.

Why Use Chatbots?

Before we dive into understanding how you can start incorporating chatbots into your digital marketing strategy, you need to understand why you should use them in the first place.

1) They Save A Lot Of Time

As entrepreneurs, you and your team will have a lot of important business decisions to make. But tasks like sending out emails campaigns, addressing customer queries or reaching out individually to prospects on social media can slow you down and divert your focus from where it needs to be. That’s where bots can help. Bots can carry out all these repetitive tasks for you efficiently, enabling you to focus all your time and energy on making key decisions.

2) They Can Fit Businesses Of All Sizes

Chatbots are universal. They are one of those rare marketing tools that fit into the strategies of all kinds of businesses. Be it Start-Ups or SMEs, Bots can serve all of them with great efficiency. From using them as a replacement of lead magnates to providing customer support, from product explanation to pricing breakdown, different companies have used Chatbots in different ways.

3) They Help Bring Warmth To Your Brand

Unanswered queries and long waiting time can put off even the most patient of users. Chatbots do not let this happen.  AI powering lets these Chatbots to connect to viewers at an emotional level. With chatbots, you can welcome each of your visitors, answer every single query and not let anyone wait for more than a second.

How To Incorporate Chatbots In Your Marketing Strategy?

Chatbots are indeed great for marketing. But the real challenge is understanding the stages of the marketing funnel where you can implement such conversational marketing for the best results.

Here are six great ways of implementing chatbots in your marketing strategy. Read on...

1) Build Email Lists

Lead magnets are certainly a great way to collect Email IDs of your visitors and generate leads.

However, you do need to plan them out a lot more. You need to create lead magnets that are actually tantalising enough to convince website visitors to give you their contact information in return for your offer.

Chatbots make this process a lot more fun and engaging for the lead.

You can design chatbots, to start meaningful conversations with the visitor, understand their needs and then ask for their information to help them out accordingly.

This way the chances of a visitor submitting his details and you generating leads would be much greater.

2) Generate Qualified Leads

Attracting prospects and generation leads aren’t the only things that a chatbot can help you do.

You can even build your Chatbot to qualify leads on its own.

This can be done through a lead qualification bot that asks Case-specific questions to the leads, while engaging users and maintaining a meaningful conversation with them.

3) They Can Speak For You

You can have the most engaging website content there is online. But sometimes, that isn’t enough to impress an impatient visitor.

Chatbots have got your back here too.

You can create chatbots that start up a conversation and introduce your brand and products naturally to website visitors.

What makes chatbot a better business representative because they do give the user information in bits and pieces rather overloading them with details. This way the user gets enough buffer time to consume the information.

4) Recommend Products

Remember that one store you’ve been to where the staff was so friendly that whenever you need to buy something, you end up going there again and again?

That’s what friendly conversations can do.

You can imbibe your chatbot with a friendly nature and get it to guide visitors through your products and services, answer simple queries and recommend the best options for them.

In fact, Amazon recently generated 35% of its revenue through bot recommendations.

5) Ask for Reviews

Testimonials and recommendations are pretty much all a business needs to grow.

However, asking your client to go an extra mile to say good stuff about you or even fill a form, might not be so easy. That little effort can feel like a lot for clients.

Here too, Chatbots are a great option.  Build a chatbot to represent you, and encourage your clients personally to give quick reviews.

This could be as simple as the client typing it out directly in a chat box or on Facebook or WhatsApp, rather than having to fill an entire form to tell you what they feel.

6) Take Surveys

Surveys help you get a really in-depth view of your consumer base, better understanding their reactions to your products, and what they expect from you in the future.

Build a chatbot that extracts surveys from your target audience through friendly exchange of words.

The cherry on the top is that the boys can be optimised to the platform that your audience is on.

7) Provide Quick Customer Support

You could also use Chatbots to take customer complaints and other functionality related questions through Live Customer Support.

In fact, 90 % of businesses have reported faster complaint resolution through Chatbots.

If you are an ecommerce business, you can also use your chatbot for return and exchange negotiations.

Chatbots are best in doing this task. They are quick.

Just like your customers would want.

So build your chatbot up and get started with your bot strategy.

How To Build An Efficient Chatbot Marketing Strategy

With an increasing number of businesses online, the number of bots on the internet increases too. While it is okay to follow trends, it’s not okay to be one among the herd. That is why building a bot that stands out is very important.

Here are a few tips to make your bot an absolute show-stealer -

1) Give Your Bot a Personality

Just like your brand has a tone, your chatbot too must have one. That way you will be able to give your Chatbot a personality of its own. You can then go ahead and give it a name as well. People tend to connect with names and personality more than just a curt information giving Chatbot.

2) Let people know about it

Advertising your Chatbot is as important as building one. Talk about your bot on your website, on your social media or on any other platform you advertise. Make your bot popular. By being upright about having a bot representative for your brand, you get a greater opportunity to build trust among your consumers. Also, the chatbot might then be taken more seriously.

3) Don’t use them just to replace  lead magnets

Chatbots are definitely a great replacement of lead magnets but there’s more to them. Use your chatbots to make your user feel important while you understand them more intricately. Thanks to AI, Chatbots have the ability to be empathetic and connect to the consumer at an emotional level. Use this very feature to its fullest of capacity and take conversational marketing to the next level.

The Best DIY Chatbot Builders Online

Personalisation has empowered marketing strategies of businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Chatbots are a revolution in personalisation allowing brands to have great relationships with their customers.

57% of businesses agree that catboats deliver large ROI with minimal effort.

With that established, you could be worried about falling behind in the race. But fret not.

Chabot’s do not require one to learn to code. There are a lot of platforms in the market that let you build your chatbots easily.

Here are three great DIY Chatbot builders for you to check out-

1) Mobile Monkey

This Facebook Messenger chatbot platform has been widely appreciated by Marketers.

The software lets you build an unlimited number of chatbots. You will be able to build them from scratch or use templates based on your preference.

The bot builder lets you add elements like attachments, emails, gallery, videos etc to your bot.

MobileMonkey helps you build bots that make personalised conversations with leads and exchange emojis.

2) Botsify

Botsify helps you build and integrate your chatbots to several platforms like slack, Facebook, etc.

The software has a super easy-to-use interface with a drag and drops feature.

The templates are cool, customisable and plenty in number. The bot builder also allows easy human intervention.

Botsify’s popularity can be owed to its super-fast techniques of bot building.

3) Sequel

This chatbot builder is loved for let’s easy interaction and drag and drop facility to build your bot.

You can build a bot for Messenger, Kik, Telegram or Viber and many other platforms.

Sequel aimed at building bots that engage viewers rather than just generating leads.

It has plenty of meaty templates that help you build a great and interesting chatbot. You can also build them from scratch if you’d want to.

The best part is that you can build it all with zero codings whatsoever.

You can even integrate Sequelbot with other services using a web API.

Create Personal Conversations With VideoForm

With so many catboats lingering around the internet, standing out becomes a challenge. That is exactly what VideoForm tackles.

Your bot marketing strategy can now have a face- your face.

Yes, you heard it right!

VideoForm lets you combine two mighty strategies- interactive video and chatbot marketing.

Unlike the usual chatbots, build one that interacts with your prospects with videos .

All you need to do is record a video of yourself and create case-specific pathways to interact with your audience.

VideoForm lets you embed your video to your website, add them to landing pages, build email campaigns and in a nutshell, generate more leads.

The platform lets you access all the templates and 25 Videoform with the free sign up itself.