This is the age of messaging apps and with that came the rise of chatbots. A chatbot is essentially an artificial intelligence system that actively interacts with users through speech, text or messaging.
Many of these chatbots are deployed on such social media platforms as WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, text messages and Slack among other platforms.
The rapid expansion of Facebook Messenger has given many businesses the chance to better reach the intended audience via chatbots and APIs and it has become more of a necessity especially in marketing. This wave has been brought about by the ease of accessibility to customisable chatbots.
The chatbots market size and stats
The market size for chatbots is expected to experience growth from €2.4 billion in the year 2019 to approximately €9.4 billion by the year 2024 at 29.7% at a compound annual growth rate. According to similar projections over the forecasted period indicate growth since these chatbots go a long way in reducing the operating costs for businesses.
That is why chatbots are now crucial in such segments as the service industry, marketing and processing and they take up a huge percentage of the market share.
Regardless of the service area, whether it is in finance, banking or any other field, consumers want round-the-clock service assistance. For this reason, more entreprises are tirelessly looking to develop virtual assistants and chatbots to ensure that their customer’s queries regardless of the time of day. That is why the market size is set to experience in a boom in the customer service segment between 2019 and 2026 at a 31.6% compound annual growth rate.
In a nutshell:
- Approximately 69% of customers prefer chatbots to human agents because they can provide apt answers to very simple questions.
- About 95% of consumers strongly believe that the industry that will benefit most from chatbots is the customer service segment.
- Roughly 33% of consumers would prefer to use chatbots in placing orders and reservations among other things.
- Approximately 67% of global consumers have reported using chatbots for customer support.
Chatbots trends
The industry has experienced tremendous growth and it is mostly associated with cognition and perception with the major industry players making huge leaps in voice recognition with products like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri.
Chatbots are now vital in revenue generation while serving as research bots and at the same time they are particularly useful in brand awareness and lead generation to save businesses a lot of money. That is why chatbots that are taking over can mimic human agents by driving a good conversational experience while actively addressing any requests posed by a customer.
Best 5 practices for chatbots in marketing
The world is slowly leaning towards the direction of texting rather than calling. For this reason, many consumers would rather contact customer care via messaging rather than the conventional call. Despite the fact that using chatbots as a marketing tool or a customer service agent is taking over, it is not quite enough yet.
There is a need for business entreprises to optimise chatbots to achieve the best results. These are just but of a few of the best practices to get you going.
1. Set your expectations for the chatbots
You cannot execute any task if you have no particular objective. Chats are not any different. This means that you have to be sure why you are need of a chatbot and the purpose the chatbot is supposed to serve in your business.
This understanding will enable you to create a design specific experience and at the same time, you will be able to set the right parameters for the chatbots’ analysis.
2. You chatbots greeting says a lot
You can tell the difference between a good and a bad chatbot. Even though it is necessary to have a grammatically correct chatbot, it is also important to ensure that your chatbot is user-friendly. A poorly phrased or a grammatically incorrect greeting will do you more harm than good because that is the immediate perception a customer will get from the get-go.
3. List your chatbot’s functionality upfront
Ensure that you list down the functions you expect your chatbots to perform upfront. In so doing, you will give a customer a kind of direction of how to they can engage your chatbots instead of bombarding customers with a suggestion. This will save customers a lot of disappointment by giving them instructions on how they will get to engage your chatbot further.
Consequently, give your chatbot some personality. This means trying to reflect the tone of your brand because its personality will count while engaging users.
4. Lead management and qualifying
One of the primary uses of a marketing chatbot is in qualifying leads. Chatbots should help you reduce the number of people waiting to answer calls when you can have your chatbots do the bulk of the work for you. If you’re not using your chatbots then the whole process no longer becomes cost-effective.
Let your chatbot do the bulk of the work so that by the time a call gets to you, you already know what the customer on the other end of the phone line wants to ask. This saves you a lot of time.
5. Make your messages as human as possible
Since you already know that your chatbot needs some personality, it is now necessary to pay some attention to the style of conversation of your chatbot. One important way you can do this is by breaking down your information into chunks of messages that are human-friendly.
The trick here is keeping it short. Avoid sending out lengthy paragraphs. Strike a balance between professionalism and quirkiness. It is important to also add word variations like synonyms to ensure that your bot understands every direction the chat can go. You need to craft its voice and personality.
Benefits of chatbots in marketing
Briefly, these are some of the most important benefits of using chatbots in marketing that you should be able to know as a marketer.
- It saves you time and money since they can actively undertake a bulk of duties at the same time.
- It easily generates leads and more revenue since they increase conversion rates.
- It helps guide users to achieve better outcomes because they will get the information they need in detail y asking qualifying questions.
- It helps organisations provide after-hours support. People will get immediate responses to their inquiries on a 24-hour basis.
Even though the chatbot technology is relatively new, the future looks promising, especially with the rapid technological advances.
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