7 lessons: launching a chatbot in South Korea
How conversational commerce helps Nutricia Korea to reach thousands of Moms on KakaoTalk…
Kakao-what?
KakaoTalk, you’ve probably never heard about it.
Meet the Korean super-app: KakaoTalk. In South Korea, more than 48 million people use this messaging app every single day.
A unique messaging platform
You (in the Western world) likely use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers. Messenger and WhatsApp are the most well-known and most-used Western messaging apps.
However…in South Korea, things are a bit different. KakaoTalk is a truly unique story in the world of messaging apps.
With the dominating position of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and iMessage, how did KakaoTalk win in South Korea? And, what did we learn launching a chatbot on KakaoTalk together with Nutricia?
We were introduced to KakaoTalk in 2019. Before flying to South Korea, we checked the world map below (showing the top messaging platforms per country):
As you see, Facebook Messenger (blue), WhatsApp (green), and WeChat (red) pretty much rule the world. However, right between Japan (yellow), and China (red), lies the Land of the Morning Calm: South Korea (orange). With a population of approx. ~50 million people, it’s one of the few countries in the world that has its own, home-grown messaging platform.
How did KakaoTalk become so popular in South Korea?
Before we dive into what we learned launching a conversational chatbot on KakaoTalk, a little bit of context and background on the growth and success of the platform.
KakaoTalk was launched in 2010 and quickly dominated 95% of the market, keeping the likes of Tencent and Facebook out. How?
- Market timing: KakaoTalk had a lead position in the Korean market, compared to other messaging platforms when it launched in 2010. WhatsApp only launched the year before. And Facebook Messenger launched in 2011. And don’t forget: KakaoTalk is free, and at the time it saved people money by allowing them to send free text messages (remember when we had paid SMS, it’s a long time ago). Being first in the market, the network effects did the rest of the work.
- Koreans ❤️ local brands: 90% of cars on the road in South Korea are: Korean. The most popular phone in South Korea is, you guessed it Korean: Samsung. Music? K-Pop is taking the world by storm. Beauty products? K-beauty products are a $10 billion market. In short: South Korea likes to have its own version of things. This goes for digital and mobile too. For example: out of the top 10 most used apps in 2019 in Korea, 8 are Korean home-grown brands including KakaoTalk.
- KakaoFriends: you’ve probably sent an emoji to your friends on WhatsApp. South Korea takes animated characters in KakaoTalk to a whole new level with KakaoFriends — a bunch of cute personalities with their own stories, emotions, and resonance:
You can find the 7 friends as animated characters on the Kakao platform. There are animated GIFS, app themes, wallpapers, stickers, and much more. They all express different emotions and you can find one applicable for almost any situation. They are fun right?!
To illustrate their popularity: there are even KakaoFriend stores (yes, offline, brick & mortar stores) that sell merchandise:
Unique design: for its brand & platform design, Kakao chose for a unique color scheme of yellow and brown. The UX (user experience) is on-point, and very much appealing to the eye. Standing out from the crowd of other messaging apps.
Korean Super-App
With the right market timing, local brand positioning, animated characters, and unique experience & design — the platform quickly transformed into a ‘super-app’. As part of Kakao Corp, the platform functionalities include everything from communications (Free Chat, Group Chat, Kakao stories), content (KakaoTV and KakaoFriends), commerce (KakaoCommerce & KakaoShop), to games, fintech (KakaoPay), mobility (Kakao Subway & Taxi, Bus, Maps), and you can even book your appointment for a haircut via KakaoHairshop.
Yes, Kakao did an amazing job of integrating the entire platform into people’s lives. Compared to messaging apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp, Kakao is way ahead of its time.
Simply put: KakaoTalk as a messaging service is heaven for brands & marketers.
So what did we learn? Working on the KakaoTalk platform together with our client: Nutricia.
- Conversations are global, content is local
Conversations are happening everywhere. And so, the social desire to digitally communicate with friends is facilitated by messaging apps.
Increasingly, we see that both consumers and brands want to communicate with each other through messaging apps — it’s convenient, instant & parts can be automated: hello conversational marketing.
Conversational commerce & marketing, much like E-commerce works pretty much the same in every country (people have a desire to consume & purchase items on the internet vs. people want to communicate online). However, making conversational marketing successful in a specific country like South Korea requires attention to detail, context & localization.
We work with brands globally in different markets (from France and the Netherlands to South Korea and Vietnam), and we always see that conversational marketing strategies 1) need to align with business objectives and 2) localization, language, content & cultural adaptions are critical for success.
Example: the Korean language uses a different alphabet, characters known as Hangul. In official writing, people might use spacing between characters (similar to spacing between words in English < like this sentence). However, we learned that in mobile conversations, Koreans rarely use spacing between characters when sending a message (takes too much time). So, when designing a conversation for a Korean chatbot, no spacing.
Lesson: Design a global conversational strategy on a local level
Build better voice apps. Get more articles & interviews from voice technology experts at voicetechpodcast.com
2. Powerful Personality Design
Illustrated earlier by the crew of KakaoFriends — (animated) emoticons and emoji’s play a huge role in Korean & Japanese culture. They allow people to express themselves in a single image. It’s a fun, fast & engaging way of communicating. To illustrate the power of online personalities, let’s look at some numbers:
- In 2017, Kakaotalk made about $198 million just from KakaoTalk’s emoticon marketplace. This shows how much Koreans love the emoticons and stickers, as they are willing to spend money on them. This is similar to Japan, where messaging app Line rakes in 30% of their annual revenue on the digital sticker & emoji market. The top 10 emoji creators earn approx. $1 million per annum on sticker creation alone.
In Western culture there’s a different version: animated GIFs continue to rise in popularity. (Facebook recently acquired online library and maker of GIFS, Giphy for $400 million).
Aegyo — the Korean concept of cuteness
Most of the Asian emoji’s, animations, and digital characters are very cute (remember Pokemon? The main character Pikachu is pretty cute). This is based on the Korean & Japanese concept of ‘aegyo’. Aegyo is a way of acting cute that is very popular in Korean culture.
With cute in mind, we designed an avatar and personality for the chatbot. This is NC, the virtual assistant of Nutricia on KakaoTalk. She’s cute, helpful and likes to chat:
This type of ‘aegyo’ perfectly matches Korean culture. NC lends itself for more relevant local advertising, that resonates and builds a better connection with the Korean audience:
Lesson: Use powerful personalities to bring your chatbot to life.
3. Customer-focus on KakaoTalk: integrate customer service & chatbot
KakaoTalk centrally positions chatbots on the brands’ PlusFriend account. This brand-page within KakaoTalk is the all-in-1 service platform. There’s a news feed for updates, live-chat with customer care. You can have a conversation with the chatbot, and even buy products via KakaoShop (inc. payment via KakaoPay). A fully intergrated messaging channel!
KakaoTalk offers a unique feature that allows users to easily switch between the chatbot, and a brand’s careline team (live-chat). With one click you move the conversation from a virtual assistant to a real human being. This happens seamlessly in the same chat window.
Nutricia has special Nutritional Advisors (who are also Moms themselves). They help moms with questions and advise them on all kinds of matters regarding baby nutrition and health. NC, the cute chatbot, lives happily next to the careline on Kakaotalk. She serves as a brand introduction for customers and automated in-bound lead generation tool for Nutricia.
Lesson: Integrate the work of a virtual assistant with a real human agent.
4. Conversational marketing 101: the quick path to convert
We started with a chat-based, lead acquisition process which led to fantastic results with conversion rates north of 80%.
Unlike anything we’ve seen in any of the markets that we operate in. Attracting new customers through a chatbot conversation on KakaoTalk proved to be a successful method to acquire leads: users sharing data with NC in exchange for a free product sample:
It all starts with good conversational strategy and thoughtful conversational design;
Conversational design vs. conversion design
Building and designing a chat conversation is similar to web design. If the objective is to convert as quickly as possible, then focused, straight-forward web design ensures to capture the users’ attention to drive conversion (e.g. strip away any distractions on the screen).
It’s very enticing to design a fluffy conversation for a chatbot (e.g. ‘beautiful website’), with a lot of extras. However, the data always shows us that the path to convert is short, sweet & straightforward. Simple language, short questions, and quick responses are the way to go.
Another clarification for this huge success is the fact that Korean customers are relatively used to virtual assistants and engaging with brands through KakaoTalk.
Single-channel effectiveness — another reason, why this chat-based strategy worked very well: the possibly-closest alternative channel would be e-mail. However, email marketing would be nowhere near as effective because Korean people hardly use email outside of work (‘’because we have KakaoTalk’’). To illustrate: Korean consumers primarily get order confirmations from online shopping through KakaoTalk (not e-mail).
Lesson: Focus on a quick path to conversion in the right channel (and let data do the talking).
5. Activation: Instagram influencer marketing
By far, the best activation strategy to generate high-quality traffic into the chatbot was: using Instagram Influencer Marketing. With the help of influential Korean moms on Instagram, we were able to get 2000+ sample requests in less than 8 hours. Again, ‘cuteness’ was the overarching creative theme to resonate and connect with the audience:
Optimize, optimize
On a bi-weekly basis, we continue to test different activation strategies and tactics. As a team, we test different creatives and messages. We look at the data, scale-up were it makes sense, and stop where it doesn’t. Conducting small advertising tests on Naver Search (Korea’s own Google), Kakao Stories, Instagram and push messaging allows to get data quickly and make informed decisions.
Lesson: Test your activation strategies before scaling.
6. Hacking Covid-19
Late 2019 the world was shocked by the impact of Covid-19. Suddenly health became the number 1 priority for people. We tapped into this by offering discounted products in combination with free special ‘health & sanitizer kits’ on KakaoCommerce.
KakaoCommerce is the integrated e-commerce & shopping solution within the Kakao eco-system. It allows consumers to directly buy from brands on their favorite platform. This is Nutricia’s own KakaoShop:
The Kakao platform offers brands a unique customer experience: from conversational chatbots to online shopping. All-in-one.
Lesson: Use a crisis as an opportunity to communicate.
7. Build a (small) growth team & optimize
Teamwork makes the dream work, right? We started this adventure with our client Nutricia in South Korea. A leading IFT brand that only launched in the market a few years back. Because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the team, we as entrepreneurs could work alongside each other as 1 team. Data-driven decision making, willingness to test & learn, and operating at a fast pace helped to deliver conversational marketing success.
Chul-Ho Park, Head of Marketing & E-commerce for Nutricia Korea says: ‘’The digital community of Korean moms and the way they gather information requires a digital solution that is easy, fast and connected. For Nutricia Korea, conversational commerce & chatbots are the perfect digital solution for consumer engagement. In partnership with Conversed.ai, we will further help our customers by providing great service with tailored nutritional information for mom & baby’’.
We work with a small team: Nutricia, AMC Asia (media & creative partner), and Eibe (fulfillment and logistics partner). The feedback loops are short and quick: weekly insights from the chatbot would be used to optimize a media campaign the week after. And, learnings from the logistical process would directly lead to improved content. A fully efficient operational circle with ‘growth & optimization)’ as the key objective.
Lesson: Build a growth team & optimize
To summarize:
When launching a conversational marketing strategy & chatbots (in South Korea but also elsewhere), make sure to:
- Design a global conversational strategy on a local level
- Use powerful personalities to bring your chatbot to life
- Integrate the work of a virtual assistant with a real human agent
- Focus on a quick path to conversion (and let data do the talking)
- Test your activation strategies before scaling
- Use a crisis as an opportunity to communicate (example: Covid-19)
- Build a growth team & optimize
감사합니다 (thank you!)
Big shout out to our clients Alexandre Freri (Country Director South Korea & The Philippines) & Chul-Ho Park (Head of Marketing & Ecommerce, South Korea), for being entrepreneurial partners in this journey!
Note: This article was written by Sagar Boers (Asia-Pacific Lead at Conversed.ai)
