Imagine a situation where you want to understand what all the services of a company are without having to go through all their website pages and read through all the content. Or one where you want a solution instantly and don’t want to go through the manual labor of finding out the solution from a company’s website. This is where the integration of a chatbot with a company’s website plays a key role. Chatbot marketing is essential for improving the customer experience, but it plays a key role in the digital marketing spectrum.
What is a Chatbot, and What is Chatbot Marketing?
Before we get into the details of chatbot marketing, the first aspect that we have to understand is what is a chatbot. A chatbot is a program or software that is designed to have an automatic conversation with a user. Chatbots are usually placed on the homepage of a website and come pre-programmed with a set of information and data that it has to convey to the user.
As mentioned before, chatbots play a key role in digital marketing. If you have interacted with a chatbot, then you may know that any chatbot assists you after you have given it your name, phone number, email address, or any two of these fields. What the chatbot is doing, essentially, is collecting the lead information. You are giving the company your data which it will then use to rope you into its customer journey.
Here’s a flowchart example of the type of questions that are pre-fed into a chatbot.
Using chatbots to rope in your customers in an organic way through two-way communication is known as chatbot marketing. This is an essential tool for the conversion of potential customers.
Chatbot Marketing is Your Website’s Most Powerful Tool
Statistically, chatbots can be the deciding factor for the conversion of a customer on your website. Research shows that when a website is integrated with chatbot marketing in action pages, there is a higher chance of the conversion of a customer compared to a website that does not have chatbot marketing integration.
The reasons for this high rate of conversion through chatbots include:
- Customers get a personalized assistant to help them in the buying process
- All information that is relevant to the product can be found by communicating with a chatbot
- Having a conversation with the chatbot is easier as compared to reading blogs about a product/service
- Chatbots have a different call to action that understands the requirement of a customer and then suggests the ideal product as per the algorithm
- Some chatbots come are integrated with AI that interprets the data received from customers to better enhance itself to make decisions on behalf of customers
Benefits of Chatbot Marketing for Businesses
Chatbots are known to be there to assist customers from the front end, but they are powerful tools for a business’s digital marketing strategy. Some of the ways in which chatbots are helping businesses include:
- Lead Capturing
When a customer comes to your website organically, the only way of capturing the details of the information of the lead is through the chatbot or through an inquiry form that will be on your website. Chatbots are made essentially to pop up whenever the website is refreshed and someone is viewing the site, and it is designed such that a customer is bound to interact with the bot. This is the reason why, more than lead capturing through the inquiry page, lead capturing through chatbots is more frequent.
For a business, lead capturing is the stepping stone for the business to place a customer within its customer journey. All leads that are gotten through the website or any other source are potential customers who purchase from you. Following this, chatbot marketing integration with your website is imperative.
- More Customer Engagement
There is no denying that as per human psychology, customers who have a conversation with a brand about a product or service that they want are more convinced to purchase as compared to customers who do not have a conversation. Chatbot marketing with customers is the base of establishing a relationship with a brand.
In fact, since the introduction of AI-powered, most chatbots learn and interpret data to have conversations by themselves. Some chatbots are omnichannel and page-specific i.e. these chatbots are more niched as compared to a normal website chatbot.
- Streamlined Customer Journey
The moment when a customer interacts with the chatbot that is on your website, they are meant to put in their details for a more personalized conversation with the chatbot. This sharing of information like name, email, and phone number forms the base for the entire customer journey. Through your website’s chatbot the following details about a customer apart from their personal information are received:
- The reason for coming to your website
- The type of product/service that the customer is looking for
- The price range that best suits them
- The reason why the product/service is being bought/availed for
- For communication with the brand
- The experience that they have had with your website so far (for first-time customers)
- The experience that they have had from your business (for repeat customers)
All the information that is collected during the chatbot marketing process from your customer assists in placing your customer in a specific stage of the buying process. For example, if there is a customer who is new to your website and unaware of your products/services then he/she will be introduced to the products/services first and then convinced to make a purchase later. Similarly, in a situation where there is a person who has come to your website multiple times, then the customer will be given discounts or coupons to highlight the buying process.
- Lead Nurturing
In chatbot marketing, lead nurturing is the process of identifying the stage that a lead is in the customer journey and then taking appropriate steps to convince them to make a purchase. Depending on whether a lead is a hot lead or a cold lead, they can be nurtured differently. Hot leads are usually sent directly to the sales funnel of an organization while cold leads are put in the awareness stage of the digital marketing funnel.
Through an interactive conversation within the chatbot, the chatbot identifies the stage that a customer is in and then decides to place that customer in the appropriate lead nurturing stage.
- Cost Effective
Compared to a marketing plan for brand awareness and lead generation, the best organic way of getting the information from your lead is through the collection of their data via chatbot. Apart from the initial setup of the chatbot on the website and feeding it with the correct information and data that is required for response, there are virtually no other expenses that are associated with chatbot marketing. The chatbot is the beginning point for your customer’s journey with your brand and helps to kickstart it.
Companies can initiate several actions that they need to perform automatically through email marketing or calling based on the way that a customer reacts to the stage of the customer journey that they have set up. Chatbot integration with getting started on email marketing is the ideal pair to start the customer journey on through your website.
What We Do
When it comes to digital marketing and optimizing your brand’s awareness and customer journey awareness, we at Digikore Digital are here to assist. Our marketing and business development services are notorious for being relevant, timely, and beyond expectations. If you have a business that you want to scale, we are here to assist. Check out our brand and services today at www.digikoredigital.com
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