Holiday Marketing Series Part 3: Nurture Your Chatbot

In this third part of our series on how to get a 20x return on your holiday marketing spend, we’re focusing on nurturing your chatbot.

Now that you’ve begun to build an audience far in advance of the holiday season, the onus is on your brand to ensure your audience stays engaged not only through the holidays, but through their entire lifecycle as customers. After all, that engagement is what keeps your brand top of mind come holiday shopping time, and ultimately what inspires long-term customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Here at Chatkit, we’ve seen the brands we work with enjoy the most success when they took time to nurture their chatbots. That means they took the time to amass and learn from the smart data chatbots provide them (more on that soon!), and they used that data to build significant, intimate customer relationships through their chatbot. That intimacy and data-based feedback is what makes for the most effective and powerful chatbots, and ultimately what helps those brands sell more. While those brands don’t always see the benefits of their hard work immediately while they’re busy nurturing and learning, the return on their investment comes in folds during the holiday season and beyond. (With a 20x ROI!)

So how do brands nurture their chatbot and begin to sell smarter?

Collect, learn from, and utilize smart data.

You might be wondering what smart data is and why on earth you should care. Well, we’re here to give you the lowdown on smart data and why it’s so crucial for your brand’s success over the holiday season.

Smart data is first-party data that brands collect and own themselves. It’s the most valuable information a brand can learn about its audience, because the brand collects the data directly from people, just by talking to them. Since chatbots are direct, and since they enable brands to connect directly with any number of customers through conversations they design and control, chatbots are the best way for brands to procure smart data on a large scale.

The beauty of smart data is that, as the customer interacts more with the brand and the brand learns more about the customers’ habits, the brand can offer an increasingly hyper-personalized purchasing experience. That way, by the time the holidays roll around, the customer feels an intimate connection to the brand, and the brand is able to make optimal purchasing suggestions at the right time.

Say you’re a sports performance-wear brand. You’ve been engaging with a customer for a few months, so your chatbot has identified that the customer lives in a temperate climate and likes to climb, run, and bike. You also know they’re planning on completing a triathlon in six months, that they prefer certain fabrics, and that they’re a woman in their thirties.

Soon before the holidays, your chatbot tells this customer you’re going to have a 50% off Black Friday sale on cycle shoes, all women’s active wear, and sunglasses. You can follow up with a couple well-timed reminders, and then you can notify your customer on the day of Black Friday, with a link to the sale they can access directly from Messenger. With a chatbot, accessing your Black Friday sale is as easy as clicking a link in a chat conversation.

With a chatbot, accessing your Black Friday sale is as easy as clicking a link in a chat conversation.

But nurturing your chatbot means that engaging your customers doesn’t end when you make a sale. It’s important to keep those customers engaged beyond the holiday season. That entails following up with shipping information, product guides, post-purchase surveys, and upselling/cross-selling those customers at the opportune times. That means you’re not just selling more, but you’re also selling smarter.

Check out part 4 of the series: See Your Return!

Learn more about how Chat Marketing can help your brand at Chatkit.com.

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