5 Smart Reasons to Have a Chatbot
Considerations for building a conversational chatbot
First, what is a bot? And why do we keep hearing the word bot thrown around in every 30 minute marketing meeting we have to endure?
A simple Google search reveals the following:
Bot — An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.
So they’re the things that spam me 24/7 and create all the rude accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, right?
While there are certainly classes of foul bots that exist to make our lives miserable, there are bots that only want to do good. The bots we are talking about are in a certain class known as Chatbots.
Chatbots — They’re Alive
Chatbots are little pieces of your brand personified in an automated chat or conversation interface. They can live on different platforms such as Kik, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Slack to name a few. They can serve the purpose of telling a story, playing a classic game of Zork, delivering daily news, or ordering a pizza all from the chat window.
Chatbots are somewhat utilitarian. A chatbot might exist to deliver a daily joke or to bring a user through a choose your own adventure story depending on your specific brand’s objectives. The possibilities are only now beginning to be explored (and improved) and will continue to evolve, but there are immediate opportunities to capitalize on right now. Many of the opportunities are directly relevant to your brand and your company regardless of which vertical you call home (because we all have to do marketing right?).
“Bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them,”
- David Marcus, VP of Facebook Messaging Products.
Just the Facts
To get the lay of the land, let’s get some facts straight. We all know messaging apps are huge. But just how big are their userbases and the activity associated?
As of Summer 2016, Facebook Messenger claimed about 1 billion users. WhatsApp claims similar numbers with 1 billion users. Facebook owns both of them, bringing its collective user total on messaging apps to about 2 billion.
In 2015, WhatsApp was handling 30 billion messages per day at a time when they had 700 million users — that’s about 42 messages per user per day. If we use the conservative estimate of 30 messages per user per day, that’s approximately 60,000,000,000 (billion) messages transmitted per day…and that’s only on two of the numerous messaging applications out there.
The thing about those billions of messages is that they get opened and read. At an extremely high rate. Like above 90% of the time…are you seeing where this is going? Your brand has the opportunity to talk one-on-one with billions of users and you will actually know whether or not you’re reaching them. This sure beats the heck out of the 3–8% organic reach of a Facebook post.
I think it’s safe to say Facebook is making a bet that there is a ton of value to be extracted out of those tiny little chat windows. Part of the strategy to do so is to get brands into chat by allowing them to create automated chatbots as of the April 2016 Developer Conference.
The 5 Reasons
All of that setup brings us to this — five solid reasons why your brand should build a chatbot right now:
1. Reach and Scale
This one is pretty self explanatory for the above mentioned statistics. If you have a Facebook page, users can already talk to you directly through the “Message” button. This is where a chatbot can come in to provide an experience and automatically handle the conversation.
All those likes on your Facebook page represent users that are already interested in your brand. With a little nudge into the chat window, you could immediately be chatting with each user one-on-one and helping them see and share any content that you want.
In the sense of the definition of “bot” at the top of this post, chatbots do provide for economies of scale. Chatbots can handle numerous conversations at once without requiring a person on the other end answering messages by hand.
2. Low Risk, High Reward
With the potential for massive reach, you might be wondering “what’s the catch?”. In comparison to other methods of interacting with users, building a chatbot is an extremely effective medium for social engagement. And it’s easy to onboard users too.
There is an element of the unknown for chatbots. You may have read articles detailing experiences with different chatbots that either heralded the progress or expressed disdain for a frustrating conversation. The truth is that chatbots are young but continuously improving. Brands that are jumping on the chatbot train see the value that they provide and know that they will keep getting better. Mostly, brands don’t want to be left behind and consider a small investment worth the upside of great interactions with users.
Because billions of users already have the messaging app platform that you would build a chatbot on, you have no need to funnel users into an onboarding strategy for you app, website, game, etc. All you have to do is make users aware that you have a chatbot. The “onboarding” is frictionless and you can begin talking to users right away.
3. Better Interactions
When you think of your social media strategy, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “post for the sake of posting”. And sure, we get view counts, maybe some demographic data, but is there any insight into the quality of the interaction you are having with someone consuming your posted content? As marketers, we are constantly trying to create experiences that draw strong associations between a feeling and our brand. Although well placed social media posts can help create these associations, how do we know what the user felt outside of a few errant comments left by a troll below the post? And where does that leave us in context to the conversation with the user (if you can call a social media post a “conversation”)?
Through a chatbot, you own the conversation. You create the conversation. And you can analyze the conversation. Through increasingly robust sentiment analysis software, we are now able to tell how a user feels about your brand. Once they have spoken with you, you can then craft messaging based on how you want to make that user feel, and what actions you want them to take.
4. Improved Attribution
The other battle with social media posting and other content mediums is how in the world do we attribute an action taken by a user to a specific post or impression? And even more difficult, how do we attribute actions taken across devices?
Enter messaging services. With direct links from the chat window, we now have the ability to track users through the funnel directly to our desired destination. We can accomplish this through a number of means including tracking pixels or redirect pages that have analytics implemented.
One of the chatbots I recently helped build was able to show a movie studio how its physical promotions were contributing to social media sharing and the overall experience of its viewers.
This is powerful stuff when you consider being able to calculate hard ROI on marketing spend for a service like a chatbot.
5. The Feedback Loop
Lastly, a major challenge we all face as marketers is how to smartly reengage users that have been interacting with our brand. We get thousands of likes on our posts and yet retargeting can be impossible, impersonal, and misses the timeliness of a moment or connection with a user.
In a chat, you don’t have to worry about any of that. The second a user enters a chat with your brand, you can now talk to them whenever you like (obviously, spamming users is a bad idea here, leading to you being blocked).
The ability for you to provide opt-in notifications, or to simply chat with the user as friends would chat is unprecedented. Never again will you have to guess the state at which a user is at in relation to your brand, nor have to lean on unopened emails sent to lists of people reminding them about important events.
Get on It
Chatbots are here. There’s no denying it. There are over 18,000 chatbots on Messenger and that number is growing steadily. The investment into chatbot territory now will yield understanding and improvement over time. The more you know, the better your brand will be at chatting with users and entering the conversational age.
Start imagining what a chatbot could do for your brand. Could you create a new character through a chatbot to tell your fans a story, or would you rather deliver breaking news and receive realtime reactions from your beloved users? The possibilities are endless, the ideas are up to you.
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