Why Messaging Marketing will change customer engagement
For almost every business, a simple way to look at the consumers’ buying cycle is to break it into three stages: awareness, consideration and purchase. After awareness is created, a successful customer interaction starts by creating a lead and then working with that lead to generate the final purchase/reservation. Along the way it is inevitable to lose people and the hardest part is to figure out why are people leaving and what to do to fix it.
From consideration to purchase, marketers have been relying on tools like Email Marketing, SMS, and even customer success service. None of these solutions is optimal, being always difficult to understand why are people not buying. As chatbots increase their presence and increase traction it’s interesting to compare how they perform against the current channels used by marketers.
Indeed, with chatbots it’s easier to follow the entire customers’ journey, at what point they left the buying funnel and why. Marketers can access this information aggregated for all users, but they can also see it on an individual level. Unlike more traditional channels, it’s not necessary to make assumptions about why users churned.
Let’s take a closer look comparing chatbots with the other channels.
Email Marketing
Emails are delivered to the customer’s inbox and they can have a really appealing design. Unfortunately, that’s far away from where the purchase or reservation happens, the email must be clicked and the customer needs to navigate to some website or app.
As emails have low open rates, most of the users will not even see them. As Syd Lawrence pointed out in their last blog post, chatbots have around 99% read rates and an average of 21% click through rates, meaning that for 1000 users engaged via Messenger, it would be needed roughly 30000 users signed up to an email mailing list to get the same engagement.
Since email has become a very crowded channel, many consumers have a filter set up so that anything that’s not personal goes into spam, trash or other folders that they’re unlikely to see. Moreover, email campaigns often feel impersonal since the same email is sent to hundreds of people. With chatbots, it’s possible to send relevant and personalised messages, delivering meaningful info for each user.
Ads to Websites and Apps
Every website and mobile app are designed with a different visual interface and this way people constantly have to learn new interfaces. Since messaging apps are being more and more used (Facebook Messenger alone has 1 billion monthly active users), talking with a business through chatbots will feel like something natural and easy to do. Another advantage of chatbots is that even basic NLP capabilities give users the power to almost instantly reach the information they are looking for, instead of having to search the entire website.
Due to this natural form of communication, there’s a 10 000% increase in weekly actions performed via Messenger compared to directly in the websites, accordingly to Syd Lawrence.
SMS Marketing
SMS campaigns are sent directly to the customers’ phone and people still give lots of attention to this communication channel. Nevertheless, it’s needed to have the person’s phone number and messages sent through SMS have no design or rich elements, as chatbots are capable of offering through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger. It’s also difficult to re-engage with users through SMS.
Why engage with consumers through chatbots
If you read our last blog post, you already know we are big fans of remarketing ads driving traffic to chatbots. Indeed, these ads are super targeted and they build closer relationships with your customers. Some of the advantages of using them to send users to chatbots instead of your website or app are the following:
1. You can send a rich message with intuitive UI to start engaging with the user;
2. You have all customer interactions in one place, so you’re always aware of the context;
3. If the customer asks a question the bot can’t answer, a human agent will handle the situation.
This way, you will be able to collect more information about your customers and use that information to build a stronger relationship that will lead to in-chat orders and reservations.
Sum up
Since relevancy is what matters, the most powerful strategy is providing relevant information to your customers and in the near future every business will discover the benefits of having their own chatbot. As a marketer, you should be thinking about chatbots as an evolution of your marketing strategy. Email marketing, SMS, websites and apps are not dead, but to achieve the best ROI companies need to start giving to chatbots the same attention they give to all the other channels.
