ChatBot The New Email?

The chatbot is here!

Do you remember the days when people used to underestimate social media?

Most people thought there is no correlation between success in business and social media, but now business owners spend thousands of dollars on Facebook ads.

They hire social media coordinators whose only job is to take care of the business’s social media profiles.

Well, the same thing is most likely to happen with Chatbots for Facebook Messenger.

“Messaging is going to impact your business like social media did”

Let’s have a look at the statistics.

The statistics say it all, more and more people are getting inclined towards using messengers to message the businesses directly.

According to statista.com, Facebook Messenger had 1.2 billion users in April 2017.

As a business owner, you need to be where your customers are and you should contact them the way they want to be contacted.

(Related: You can now PayPal friends in Messenger and get help via chat)

Remember those days in the 90s when people used to be excited when they got an email?

Well, these days, emails don’t excite us that much; but people are certainly excited when they hear the pop-ding sound when they get a message on Facebook Messenger.

Email vs Messenger

Not only this, Messenger has 4 times average open rate and 8 times average click-through rate as compared to emails.

But hold on a second, this doesn’t mean you should stop your email campaigns. You have got to do both.

“The reason for mentioning that Messenger is more popular is to let you know that Messenger is the new email!”

Emails don’t excite people as much as Messenger does. Maybe one day, when Messenger marketing is saturated, some other technology will take it over.

But before that happens, you as a business owner should take full advantage of Messenger.

Having said that, let’s jump into the benefits of chatbots!

1. Always There For Your Customers, Immediately!

All of us have experienced those long boring customer service calls. Your call is kept on hold and they play boring music and try to sell you something.

That’s not the case with Chatbots though. They’re there for you 24/7 instantly. If you install chatbots for your business, you can be on a vacation and your customers can still receive instant customer service.

Chatbots are extremely useful if you have a large customer base. Instead of employing customer service representatives, employ chatbots. Chatbots can deal with hundreds of customers at the same time, instantly!

Not to mention, the amount of money it saves to not employ extra employees!
“Chatbots are one-time investment”

Although, there are some limitations, you can use Chatbots to create automated responses for frequently asked questions.

2. Human Touch Without Actual Human Involved.

In the above chat, you can see the interaction between a user and a weather app called Poncho.

There is actually only one human involved in this interaction, the one is who enquiring about the weather.

No kidding!!

Look at how the bot is responding, like an actual human being!

Astounding isn’t it?

Some people who are not used to Chatbots have limiting beliefs about them.

They think that you cannot put that human touch using bots.

Well, feel free to show them the above example.

3. Understand Your Customers Better With Surveys

Not only you can use chatbots for offering instant customer service, but you can also use them for knowing your customers better.

Use Chatbots to get customer feedback and improve your products or services.

Chatbots are also useful in sales funnels.

When you’re running a sales funnel, your landing page generates some traffic and if that traffic doesn’t convert, you can send a survey to those people using Chatbots to know why they didn’t proceed.

Use you can collect and analyze consumer behavior by tracking purchasing patterns.

This might help you to understand your products and services better; which products/services to market better and which products/services to redevelop.

4. Reach The Right Customers

No doubt you can generate a large number of leads using Chatbots, but conversion is important too right?

We all hate spending time and energy on the wrong prospects who ultimately don’t convert, which leads to disappointment.

Thanks to Chatbots, we can have a bunch of automated questions to qualify the leads.

You can send automated messages to the leads and make them qualify themselves by asking questions like:

  1. How long have you been in business?
  2. How many employees do you have?
  3. Where are you based?
  4. What is your target market?
  5. Is your business service based or product based or both?

And the list goes on.

If you have criteria that you don’t work with product based businesses who have been in business for less than 3 years, you can instantly disqualify a prospect using a Chatbot survey.

In Conclusion, Chatbots are undoubtedly the future and there are a lot of business owners who still don’t use them.

So hop in the bandwagon now before it gets saturated.

Need help with installing Chatbots?

Let us know!

We’d be happy to help.

By the way did you know today 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say webinar is the best way to generate high-quality leads.

About the Author

Mike Doughty

Mike is an award-winning entrepreneur who is obsessed with helping business owners learn, leverage and liberate themselves from their business. He’s a creative and lateral thinker with a strong mind for numbers.