4 specific benefits businesses gain by applying chatbots to customer engagement marketing strategies in the 4.0 era.
Ben Angel is the author of best-selling books on online marketing in Australia, such as: CLICK, Sleeping Your Way to The Top in Business, and Flee9-5. Ben Angel also founded benangle.co, a website teaching entrepreneurs advanced online marketing. He has offered many simple methods and understandable plans for reaching customers.
In this article, Ben Angel analyzes how Facebook Chatbot can support a business's online marketing. If your customers primarily find you through Facebook advertisements and then choose to buy your products, this technology news offers many unique digital benefits.
Over the past 12 months, Facebook has introduced a useful new feature called Chatbot. Facebook Chatbot is a tool that enables startup founders and entrepreneurs to expand their businesses quickly. So what is Chatbot? And how can it benefit your business?
Similar to automatically replying to users through Facebook Messenger, when someone sends a message to your Chatbot, it can automatically respond and establish a connection with them. Users can subscribe to or unsubscribe from the Chatbot.
This feature works much like the process of searching for customer data across websites, email inboxes, or other software tools, then categorizing customers and finally connecting with them — things you cannot do with the Messenger app alone.
Facebook proactively introduced this application to prevent someone from repeatedly sending annoying messages (spam) to others or even using Chatbots to bother them.
In fact, chatbots work quite simply. Customers only need to leave a keyword in the comments on an advertisement you post or on a social media post you share. Once that special keyword is received, you can tell customers that you can connect through Messenger. You can then use a chatbot to engage them, for example: “Hello, thank you for your interest in our information. If you would like to learn more, please reply: YES.” When they reply “YES,” you can configure the chatbot to continue exchanging information and adapt to each individual customer.
We discovered that building subscriber lists this way is actually cheaper than building email lists. But there are several other excellent advantages, as follows.
First, Facebook Chatbot open rates—the proportion opening an email or chat window—reach 90%. Can email achieve that? I don't think so, and I don't think anyone could, unless sending to their 10 closest friends, who might produce such a rate.
In this case, you can use Chatbot to send information about your products to the entire market, but the usual approach is to send a Messenger message with a question and several possible answers.
A Facebook Chatbot might send users a question through Messenger such as, ‘Would you like to receive our latest updates?’ with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as the answers. You can let users reply with a ‘yes’ message or create buttons for them to click. When a button is clicked, an automated message appears with more information. It can contain a link to a sales page, YouTube channel, store Facebook page, or anywhere you want to direct them.
Regular guidance notices and ongoing checks help prevent users from abusing this platform, which helps Facebook Chatbot achieve a very high open rate.
The second benefit is that more than one billion users currently use Messenger, and using Chatbots can help businesses expand their online advertising market on this platform to 400% of its original size.
Third, you can increase free search visibility by using Facebook comments. Here is how:
When you publish a Facebook post with specific instructions about the keywords people should use if they want updates or more information about your post, those instructions should also tell users that you will contact them through the Messenger app and that they can unsubscribe from this communication at any time.
When users comment with the keyword you suggested, you begin by sending them 1 message, both to provide more information and to connect with them. Users then enter further keywords according to your setup. This exchange between user and Chatbot creates a highly interactive and personal conversation.
You can creatively customize each keyword and corresponding user response to understand users better, categorize them, and offer suitable products. Achieving similar results with today's common advertising tool, email, would take considerable effort.
Facebook Chatbot is truly an excellent tool for interacting with customers in a highly personal and approachable way.
Chatbots also help reduce the services and resources you need to provide customers. One of today's greatest challenges for entrepreneurs is having enough services or resources—staff, materials, and more—to manage and assist all their customers well.
Over the past few years, we have learned more about what customers want: responses as quick as a snap of the fingers. If they do not receive an immediate response, they often write asking why you have not contacted them. Not every company can provide the services and resources needed for instant customer communication, but Facebook Chatbot is different.
You can create your own customer support channel with a chatbot, providing a list of “frequently asked questions,” such as pricing advice, service guidance, or even appointment scheduling so customers can speak directly with you about special services you offer.
This way, you save considerable money compared with maintaining a customer support center. If you are just starting your business career, this feature helps conserve finances, avoid personnel management problems, and save time for other necessary tasks.
Finally, this app is highly interactive. You can transmit many kinds of data, not just text. Exchanging images and videos, especially seeing images during the conversation itself, makes communication much closer and simpler than email.
This is a core feature that helps you expand your market and spread your company's brand. Another point worth noting is that using a chatbot demonstrates your company's distinctive support capabilities. While the chatbot works, you also gain time to improve those capabilities, perhaps by becoming one of the ‘chatbots’ yourself and personally supporting your VIP customers.
In the coming years, Messenger will become an extremely useful tool for brand promotion, just as email did long ago.
Collected.
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