Chatbot with over 100k users with no marketing spend
Case study: Facebook Messenger chatbot for Suchar Codzienny (August 2016)
Few words about my client
Suchar Codzienny is a now top social media-based entertainment platform in Poland with Instagram followers of over 1,1 million, 0,5 million Facebook fans and a top spot among brands on Polish Snapchat. But couple years ago it started as a simple Facebook fan page to share the funny and lame Internet jokes. Back in summer of 2016, its founders were slowly considering turning what was still a hobby into a social media business. They already started to create branded content on their social media channels, but intuitively they knew that their brand needed something unique that would allow it to stand out among similar profiles. At that time they reach out to me to help them with their first marketing efforts due to my previous background in advertising. Instead of helping them with marketing I offered to help by creating a new way to communicate with their already impressive audience.
Problem
Suchar Codzienny popularity on Facebook was being negatively affected by EdgeRank. The entertainment platform wannabe, still had no marketing budget spend on Facebook or Instagram relying instead on their viral content. This strategy made their organic reach stats impressive, but far below their 400k fanbase potential. Was there a way to reach their fans on a daily basis without promoting their posts? How could checking Suchar Codzienny jokes become part of more of their fans’ daily routines?
User research — analysis
I started by trying to understand the role Suchar Codzienny product already played in their users’ life. My analysis included the following elements:
1. Analysis of social media statistics
Thanks to it I was able to understand the time of the day that product was most popular. Suchar Codzienny target group consists mostly of kids and students between the age of 13 to 25. They all have a tendency to use the product either in mid-morning circa 10 am or mid-afternoon circa 3 pm. That allowed me to create a hypothesis that product is already an important part of a “break” either during recess at school or down-time after school.
2. Content analysis — users’ comments on social media
The hypothesis was further confirmed by analysis of users’ comments on Facebook and Instagram. Here the biggest help and kudos have to go to the founders: Rafał Myśliński and Kamil Natil — both have an impressive knowledge and understanding of their target group. Conversations with Rafał and Kamil were an valuable source of insights as they both maintained an active social media presence on Snapchat via sucharcodzienny profile. There they had dozens if not hundred interactions with their users every day. Many users were openly admitting that checking out Suchar Codzienny jokes as a way to pass the time during school hours or relax straight after school.
3. Context — search for the perfect joke
Content shared on Suchar Codzienny profile are mostly simple, even a bit lame, viral jokes — it comes in the form of videos, memes, GIFs, photoshopped photos or classic text jokes. Interacting with each joke usually takes less than a 20 seconds to a minute.
The idea of lame, embarrassingly funny joke even has a separate name in Polish: “suchar”, which also means dry biscuit. The brand name actually translates to Everyday Lame Joke.
What can be a challenge is that intentionally not all the jokes are funny and some of them can be a bit niche. For light users that means time-consuming and not always satisfying search process of scrolling through the brand social feed to find a funny joke. If the hard users would be coming back to Suchar Codzienny fan page anyways, it is the light users that we needed to attract on a daily basis. Solution? Provide them with a curated product experience that would minimize the search process..
3. Product concept: Facebook Messenger chatbot
I started by creating product scenario that would focus on the problem light users were experiencing with finding the joke. The goal of the product was defined as “deliver a perfect set of jokes every day to enjoy during your break.” Having in mind that the business goal was to activate Facebook fans I recommended to use newly launched Facebook Messenger platform to create a chatbot experience for brand fans.
4. How to build a functional product without a line of code?
At the time when I started working on the Suchar Codzienny project I have been interested in conversational interfaces for quite a while. I was great fun of Kik and Telegram early efforts in that area and was excited to start creating products for currently the biggest messaging app — Facebook Messenger. Being up-to-date with possible solutions including using 3rd party platforms to build chatbots came in handy as the project had no developer involved. At the time Messenger platform was still in early beta, and in Poland, it was even difficult to find somebody familiar with it enough to create a chatbot. That is why after careful considerations Chatfuel platform was used to launch the Sucharbot product.
5. Product design
Problems with understanding the difference and need for both UX and UI is, unfortunately, still common trait in all product design. It is no different or even more visible when it comes to conversational interfaces like Facebook Messenger chatbot. Many argue that being able to create a product inside constraints of messaging platform means no designer is needed. I would say that it is the opposite. Limited space and simple linear user scenarios defined by platform guidelines mean user feedback is immediate — product flow that is too complex or time-consuming is rejected. In the case of Suchar Codzienny chatbot the main design challenges involved:
1. Creating universal user scenario that would allow the brand to share with users a daily curated set of jokes. The scenario had to be simple enough for the content creation to be easy for content moderators, but engaging for users not to get bored with it.
2. Maintaining brand’s tone of voice in new chatbot medium.
Chatbot became another way to interact with the brand. Its unique communication style with its tongue-in-cheek tone of voice had to be executed within the limitations of the new medium.
So the product had to be easy to use and functional while remaining typically “funny” in line with brand tone of voice.
After series of tests and discussions with Suchar Codzienny team,
I proposed the user scenario built around the following principles:
1. daily push notification to Facebook Messenger would provide users
with a a curated content containing a set of jokes
2. each set would consist of 5 jokes centered around a daily theme
and should include both GIFs, text jokes, and images — this specific number and combination was a result of series of beta tests.
3. use GIF as part of daily push notification to boost user engagement and hint the theme of day — higher engagement rate on GIF-based joke was increasing the probability of user conversion
4. users could react to a joke by rating it as either “😆 funny” or “😕 lame”
by pressing an appropriate button after each joke
5. edge cases would also be included in the final product like the “submit your own joke” functionality for heavy users or a contact form for marketers interested in cooperation with the brand
6. apart from daily push scenario chatbot contained predefined responses to most likely users’ attempts to interact with the bot (including but not limited to greetings, random small talk questions and curse words).
Those predefined responses allowed the product to maintain its tone of voice. As the brand build its popularity on sharing Internet memes, it seemed fit to design the automated responses to all contain a popular meme. Here are some of the examples of those responses:
6. Results
The chatbot was successfully launched in September 2016. In first 4 days after launch it already had 15k users — all acquired without any marketing budget spend. (To learn more how Suchar Codzienny team was able to successfully explain a new product to its target group and attract them consider reading their marketing case study). Six months after the launch the product had over 100k users all acquired without marketing spend. From the business perspective being one of the first brands in Poland with a popular Facebook Messenger chatbot allowed Suchar Codzienny team to stand out among other social media competitors and gain valuable cooperations with brands. Here you can learn more about how Suchar Codzienny team is developing the product. On a personal note it was a pleasure to work with Rafał and Kamil on the project. I am still impressed by how they were able to make the most of “first mover” advantage in Polish Messenger chatbots space — not only by maintaining high level of content through the product (daily content curation!) but also leveraging it to build business relationships with marketers.
