Why every Nigerian Business should consider building a Marketing Bot! — 1
How can a Lagos travel agency respond to customer inquiries at 3:am in the morning, when personnel are unavailable to answer calls or respond to chats?
In today’s world, where most communication occurs on social networks, it is surprising that many Nigerian businesses do not use simple tools that address the question above.
An online — jewellery store, perfume shop, or gadget retailer in Lagos, Abuja, Kano etc. can practically engage customers at the wee hours of the night and every moment of the day with a conversational bot on Facebook Messenger and on their website. In fact, the bot can start a conversation and pass it on to a human agent if any intervention is required.
From recent surveys, over 92% of Nigerian businesses online are looking for a system to actively engage leads and existing / return customers on their website and Facebook page. However, less than 8% actually implement any tools that can help drive prospects down their sales funnel.
What exactly is a Chatbot?
Let’s dig into the definition — a Marketing Bot or Chatbot; is a form of marketing automation that smart businesses use to acquire more customers and proactively engage or support existing customers with time–saving automation.
Why should I build a Chatbot?
Marketing messages shared by Chatbots have an unbeatable open rate of 60–80% in the first 60–minutes alone; and a click-through rate of over 20%. No other marketing medium comes close.
What can a Chatbot do for me?
In a recent project — a travel agency recorded 15% more monthly sales by deploying a Chatbot that conversed with customers who requested visa information, booked tour packages and sent other travel queries between the hours of 12:00 am to 6:30 am.
Another way your Chatbot can help is by engaging customers and leads who have questions — even though the answers to product and service FAQ’s might be available on your website, experience indicates that Nigerian customers prefer to share a conversation with businesses before buying a product or service. Therefore, it is wise to engage customers at the moment when they are asking these questions.
Who can my Chatbot reach?
Chat widgets present a big opportunity to reach over 70% of Nigerian social media users (~27 million active users).
Where can I set up my Chatbot?
- Website / Facebook Messenger Chatbots — you can automate chat conversations on your Facebook ‘business’ page and integrate a Facebook messenger chat widget on your website.
- WhatsApp for Business can integrate chatbots, but this is fairly difficult to implement and requires the help of a chatbot developer.
- Telegram Chatbots — Telegram just like Whatsapp can integrate Chatbots and requires a chatbot developer.
How to Build a Chatbot
Now that you understand why you may need a Chatbot, watch out for Part 2 of this series where I will show you How to create a Chatbot for your Facebook page/Messenger App.
