Main benefits of using a Chatbot for your business
I’m going to tell you about the future — messenger chatbots. What is Messenger Chatbot and why it is crucial for your business? Basically, It’s a digital assistant, most of the times based on AI that has the direction of various commands which looks like a natural sound conversation with your customers.
Now you have the opportunity to engage with a customer in a one on one personalized conversation automatically. Just wondering if you could engage the person exactly the answers to the questions that they have, how much more likely are you going to make them buy?
Chatbots help customers to find information about the services a company provides, consult their products availability, store locations, make reservations or bookings, assess the customer’s experience with the service and much more different commands. You can adopt this technology in any major chat applications like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Text Messages, Hangouts, etc.
For example, Facebook messenger chatbot engagement rates are 10 to 80 times better than email marketing while an organic post on news feed has up to miserable 1 percent of visibility nowadays. What’s more, messenger ads are the most profitable and cheapest way of getting leads on the Internet!
According to Global Web Index statistics, around 75% of internet users taking over one or more messenger platforms. Although research shows that each user is using an average of 24 apps a month, where 80% of the time would be in just 5–6 apps. In this blog, we are going to cover the main benefits of developing chatbots as a tool to strengthen your relationships with the client’s booth internally and externally in spite of you are small or big business. Let‘s go!
Why you should customize it to your business
1. Support availability anytime
As we all know, customer service is the most important factor to success. Whether your business is in the global or local level, having customer service 24/7 with instant answers has a tremendous impact on your client’s satisfaction and willingness to buy. Most of the clients are always kept on hold while operators try to connect you with customers care center, while chatbots never get tired by answering to their commands.
They can be able to work and engage with audiences 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This feature helps organizations to handle more task and save time to answer FAQ’s about product and service and no customer has to wait. While a chatbot cannot replace real customer support in some cases, it can supplement it so that actual employees could provide full-fledged service without leaving customers in bad mood for waiting long periods of time.
All this can be done at scale for free to thousands of prospects at once without them ever having to go on your mobile site! If you do this right, you can get your prospects from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel all through a chatbot. You can literally replace website experience with all the implementations into messenger chatbot. How cool is that?
2.Managing possibilities
You can stay in touch with customers without personally contacting them with real-time assistance like a salesperson in a real store, offering interactive communication. A well-built chatbot can simultaneously have conversations with thousands of people answering the questions that they have, offering special coupons, limited time promotions or everything that you want to be shared.
Companies are able to offer products and services directly using established technology on social media platforms such as Facebook. Small but important things like planned appointments; check your emails, pull data for you and most importantly give conversational updates to your family, friends, and customers are done precisely with very least chance of any mistake by it. It will entirely integrate your whole digital life in one place where you can easily access and automatically handle various tasks with no time.
They maintain constant and friendly customer contact, eliminating customer annoyance from cold calls. This forms a favorable basis for pushing notifications and showcasing new products and services. Companies like Taco Bell and Dominos are already using chatbots to arrange delivery of parcels.
3. Low maintenance costs
Implementing a full functioning chatbot is way cheaper and faster than creating a cross-platform app or hiring employees for each task. A single person can only handle one or two people at the same time, more than that — really tough challenge for the employee. Hiring agents for 365 days per year and adding resources to give support to the customers about basic things can be too expensive for the company. It will not only save on employee costs but you will also avoid the problems caused by human errors. According to Chatbots Magazine, implementing virtual agents can help businesses to save up to 30%.
Chatbots allow companies to save money and are easily changeable to meet different needs, it depends on the user application. At the time they have been built the costs of keeping them updated are relatively low. According to industry research, Chatbots are predicted to deal with 90% of all clients inquiries within 5 years. This means that by 2022, it’s expected that they will cut business costs by $8 billion.
4. Higher engagement and sales
It is important to keep your customers engaged with your brand and this is why companies are starting to use chatbots for social media marketing. Engaging customers through social media could help you increase sales by up to 40% while Facebook has the highest success rate for asking present customers to share their positive experiences (According to research, even 29% do that and bring new prospects to your business).
The flexible structure of chatbots means that it’s really simple to integrate them with other channels to improve engagement. A simple example of this would be a conversation with a customer who’s made an online reservation. The bot can lead the customer to an online purchasing page and close the sale with the satisfied customer.
They can be programmed with natural sound humor which can make them seem more humanlike. This puts customers at comfort and makes their experience with your business more pleasant.
No fake e-mail, fake names or fake last names when interacting, through messenger chatbot you are getting all actual information about the customer. Companies use chatbots to gain customer insights to proactively engage with the person. Email marketing has just 3% messages open rate, while chatbots score with more than 80%! And they keep existing customers engaged with interested brands and products with push notifications or new offers as I wrote previously.
Mobile engagement Importance
Another thing that is really important is thinking about mobile phones in particular. This type of marketing has the ability to change the game entirely for you when it comes to mobile engagement rates. Take a look at these metrics. This is extremely important because this trend is continuing, more and more people are engaging with brands on mobile devices than they are on the desktop.
The Facebook Messenger bot experience is completely mobile optimized. Prime users are given essential information they need before they visit your mobile site, this is VERY important. You can take all the not very mobile friendly experience related to your website with kinda poor conversion rates and reconfigure/redesign it for FB messenger platform through a chatbot and have it work so much better.
Increasing numbers of Facebook messaging users
This is the chart of most popular mobile messaging apps in the USA by monthly users (millions). Number of monthly active users of Facebook Messenger worldwide as of September 2017 reached 1.3 billion and expected number of all messaging app users worldwide by 2021 is 2.48 billion. Just imagine how big this opportunity is to reach these potential clients.
14 Times Higher CTR
The 2016 E-mail Marketing Benchmark Study shows that 49% of the mail is read via mobile, which indicates the user’s tendency to read communications while doing something. We decided personally to test and verify this statement by reaching users with Facebook Messenger‘s push notification, and the opening rate was stunning.
We sent the same campaign to our clients using both Messenger Chatbot and email. The results of chatbot were better than we expected: the CTR (click-through rate) was 14 times higher than the one received by e-mail, which has resulted in an increase in overall campaign performances. And the opening rate was 84%. There is no other marketing channel that exists today that has these sorts of engagement rates.
So we believe that in the near future Messenger chatbots will become more important than email marketing and maybe one day completely replace it. Facebook Messenger chatbots will be the future of brand communication. The changes will not only affect email platform, but also all forms of communication.
Messengers Ad + chatbot = cheapest and most efficient combination
You can run Facebook Messenger Ad campaigns linked with smart chatbots to get reach the maximum goal of any social media campaign. The bot can automatically send the sequence of text messages photos or videos to promote your product or service.
By opening direct, one-on-one chat conversations with your audience, you can create ultra-personalized brand experiences at the individual level. Businesses use ads to start conversations right through the Messenger by targeting potential customers that are relevant to their business. Whether the goal is to generate leads, raise awareness of brands or products, or drive sales, businesses can tailor conversations in Messenger to meet customers specific needs — when they tap on the ad, they will be sent to the chat with your bot.
Source: https://developers.facebook.com
Users can ask questions about your location or business hours, get more information about your products or services, offer feedback, make appointments and much more — just like making a frustrating cold call, that most of them don‘t want to do. Facebook Messengers ads also have one of the cheapest prices per click, hence you have the opportunity to connect two most cost-effective and efficient advertising channels in one digital lead killer!
Conclusion
Chatbots are changing online user experiences, moving users away from complex websites and apps with structured menus to a simplified command-line interface that are adjustable for everyone. This is more effective to engage if you have a tight small budget than Google Adwords, it is easy enough to build, take very little maintenance and will allow you to test different marketing messages for less money than any other channel. There is literally no niche that this type of advertising and marketing would not work. You have to try it!
