Marketing With Chatbots: Ten Game-Changing Tactics for 2023

Chatbots allow customers to contact a business and engage with them instantly. 

They’re a 24/7 automated solution that’s becoming an essential customer service tool for many businesses. 

Nowadays, customers expect immediate answers to their queries. They’re no longer willing to wait days for an email response or a scheduled phone call. 

In fact, over 43% of B2B consumers say they’re frustrated with the inability to receive simple information from a business quickly or easily.

And, 75% of B2C consumers consider fast responses to be the most important element of the digital customer experience.

But while chatbots are super useful for providing customers with quick answers, they can also play a huge role in your marketing strategy.

And in this article, we’ll show you how. We’ll cover: 

• The definition of chatbot marketing
• The benefits of chatbot marketing for your business
• The top ten ways you can use chatbots for better marketing in 2022

What is chatbot marketing?

Simply put, chatbot marketing is a method of promoting products and services via an automated, AI-powered virtual agent. 

Chatbots can be embedded into your business website. You can also integrate them with your social media and messaging services like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

A chatbot can also act as a basic customer service representative that allows customers and potential leads to contact your business instantly.

With the right chatbot software, you’ll receive advanced features like customization, translation, message previews, data capture, and pre/post-chat surveys. 

With solutions like Talkative, chatbots can also enable seamless escalation to live chat.

This means that your chatbot can transfer any interaction to a human agent if they get stuck.

The benefits of chatbot marketing

The right chatbot marketing tactics can boost your conversions and enhance your customer experience.

Let’s take a quick look at the following benefits to see how.

Instant responses 24/7

Chatbots allow instantaneous replies to customer messages. 

This increases customer engagement and makes consumers more likely to complete purchases or check out additional products and services.

What’s more, chatbots can respond to your customers 24/7.

They enable you to reach more individuals, with fewer dedicated resources, than a targeted marketing campaign.

Improve data collection & lead management

Chatbots can gather useful initial data, including why customers are visiting your page.

Qualified leads can then be sent to the sales department, thus increasing your lead generation opportunities.

Alternatively, the customer data you collect can be sent into the marketing team’s data pipeline to improve future targeted advertising.

Taking things a step further, with the right setup, chatbot marketing can also increase the pace of your lead nurturing and lead scoring.

For instance, you can utilize chatbots to lead customers down the sales funnel, from prospect to purchase - all in a single conversation. 

Personalize interactions & segment traffic

Modern customers expect personalized experiences. 

A well-crafted chatbot can use customer data to deliver personalized greetings and messages with speed.

Moreover, chatbots can also lead users to different products, diversifying their interest and increasing your upselling chances. 

So, if a customer wants to buy product X, you can ensure your chatbot also shows them products Y and Z.

Top 10 tactics for chatbot marketing in 2022

Now we’ve got a better idea of the most important chatbot benefits, let’s dive in and explore the top ten ways you can use chatbot marketing to elevate your business success.

1. Build specific conversation paths

Your chatbot should be able to have specific conversations with users based on what they’re asking. 

If not, the user will likely have an unpleasant customer experience and take their interest elsewhere.

To build these conversations into your chat, it’s important to:

• Map out your customer journey 
• Decide which platforms are most effective for you, e.g. your website, app, or social media channels
• Create a content strategy
• Decide on the best potential responses for each question

You also need to establish a conversational tone for your chatbot. It can be formal, casual, or a mix of the two.

The best way to lead a conversation in a specific direction is to create a conversation path that helps the AI understand what the user wants. 

Then, give users a limited number of response options for every scenario.

Start with major avenues like FAQs, confirming orders, or scheduling calls. Map out responses for each scenario and then create a path that leads to conversions.

Take Domino's pizza bot below as an example.

If the AI can’t understand a user’s query, it should automatically display a message with the contact details for customer support, or escalate to a live chat interaction.

Doing so will make sure your customers don’t go elsewhere.

2. Generate leads 

Chatbot marketing can be used for fast and efficient lead generation. 

For example, if a customer has a query, chatbots can answer it immediately and recommend other products and services. 

For the most effective lead generation you need to: 

• Ensure you craft a compelling opening message
• Use call-to-action buttons for faster responses
• Help your chatbot stand out with visual elements such as images or GIFs

You must also ensure that you promote your chatbot and make it clearly visible, so users know that it exists.

3. Capitalize on FAQs

One of the primary uses of a chatbot is fast customer service. 

An AI-powered bot can answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) instantly and lead users to a web page containing answers. 

You can use FAQs as a guide for your chatbot content strategy. Chatbot interactions also provide opportunities for sharing articles or blog posts related to a user’s query.

The below image is an example of a FAQ-based chatbot from Joy Organics. Answers to its most common questions are linked right on top and lead to immediate solutions. 

Customers can also show whether they’re happy with an answer or not by using one of three emoji options - another opportunity to collect important data.

As you can see from the below example, Joy Organics also uses this section to share blog posts related to its industry. 

Sharing information like this helps keep customers on your website longer, and increases further lead-capturing opportunities. 

It also builds credibility and shows users that you know the ins and outs of your industry and what you’re selling. 

This is hugely important for converting hesitant or new customers on your site. 

To get started with your FAQ question list, make use of customer surveys and marketing data. 

Don’t forget to enlist your customer support team too. They’ll have great insights into your most common queries. 

4. Use chatbots on multiple platforms

Chatbots are an essential tool for marketing across all major platforms - not just your website or app. 

Many businesses make the mistake of only having a chatbot on their website alone. 

Instead, make sure you’re serving as many customers as possible by deploying your chatbot across your social media channels too.

Just remember that the demographics for each social media platform are different - meaning there might be certain platforms you want to prioritize in line with your target audience.

For example, the majority of Facebook users in the U.S. are between 25 and 34 years old, while on LinkedIn, it’s 40 to 55 years old.

So, make sure your chatbot has a voice, tone, or script that best speaks to your key customer demographics.

5. Use chatbots to automate your shop

If you run an ecommerce site, you can use a chatbot to automate the following processes: 

• Schedule appointments
• Contact customer service
• Collect reviews
• Process payments
• Provide company updates

Businesses can use chatbot marketing to spread the word about their business and offer promotions to entice customers. 

For example, you could offer a discount code to anyone who opens a chat on Facebook Messenger or to website chat users who have items in their carts. 

Customers who’ve had a pleasant chatbot experience should be urged to leave a review - both through a post-chat survey and as an actual review on social feeds. 

This is for two key reasons. 

Firstly, feedback surveys help your customer service, marketing, and sales teams know whether they’re adequately catering to users, or if your chatbot needs to be tweaked.

Secondly, when customers rave about your brand, it shows their peers that your business is trustworthy. 

Meaning more future customers and conversions in turn.

6. Share content via chatbots

Once you’ve built your content strategy and customer journey maps, you can use chatbot marketing to share content with consumers. 

Like the example above, you can leverage website or social media customer conversations to share content that impacts users.

Sharing optimized content via chatbots is especially useful on your website since visitors have already shown interest in your business. It can keep users engaged and boost conversions.

This engagement can be further enhanced by the ways in which you choose to end your chatbot conversations too. 

For instance, you could continue to provide value by prompting users to sign up for your newsletter, blog updates, eBooks, reports, or promotional emails. 

Just remember: you must always ask for permission before sending these emails or content unless you want them to end up in the spam folder.

It’s also best to let your users pick how frequently they want to receive content and what type of content they are interested in, rather than bombarding them randomly. 

7. Host contests

Contests and giveaways are a great social media marketing strategy, and you can use chatbots to streamline the entire process.  

With chatbot marketing, you can use AI to effortlessly gather participant information and to provide information about a contest. 

You can even use chatbots to help users enter. For example, you can promote the contest on social media and ask users to sign up via the chatbot. 

Social media contests and giveaways with chatbots allow you to collect essential information about potential leads and customers. 

You can ask for their names and work emails as part of the entry process. Then you’ll have a list of leads before the contest ends.

To show users that your contest is trustworthy, be sure to announce the winners publicly.

8. Escalate to video or audio

Chatbot marketing is far more effective when you can get customers and leads to contact a salesperson or customer service rep directly.

To do this effectively, your marketing chatbot must give users the option to schedule contact with a human agent.

So long as you’ve got the contact center support team on hand to serve in these scenarios, creating these kinds of escalations is as simple as offering a conversational pathway or button. 

For instance, if you want to offer video chat or voice calls to your customers, simply feature buttons like the ones in the image below.

By giving your customers the option to speak to a real support agent, you’re not only improving the customer experience, you’re also improving the chance of making more conversions. 

In fact, we’ve found that shoppers who used Talkative video chat are 4 times more likely to make a purchase. 

What’s more, 94% said they had a positive experience when using video chat - an increase in customer satisfaction as well as sales.

9. Test your chatbot

While AI is extremely useful in automating many business processes, you don’t want to leave anything to chance.

It’s crucial to test your chatbot conversations to ensure every user finds what they’re looking for- even if you think you’ve got everything covered.

Prior to launch, many conversation trees and customer journeys seem obvious and easy to implement. You might think you’re fully set. 

In practice, however, actual conversations with customers can quickly become complex, especially if the response instructions are unclear.

A poorly-implemented chatbot can lead to frustrated customers that are stuck and unable to find answers to their questions.

This is double trouble if you haven’t got a human support agent on hand to take over the interaction. 

So, it’s imperative that you test out every conversation pathway you create and view it from the customer’s perspective. 

The aim is to see if your chatbot actually does what it's supposed to do. 

After all, you don’t want a marketing chatbot that makes your team’s lives harder.

10. Monitor and optimize

Once your chatbot is ready to go, it’s time to launch. Promote your chatbot and monitor usage for areas needing optimization.

Monitor the first few conversations to ensure everything is going as planned and make tweaks if necessary. 

Let’s say your initial conversation pathway expected users to view Product A after a conversation, but most of them were more interested in Product B. 

In this scenario, you can then tweak the conversation path to replace Product A with B or include an option that starts a conversation about Product B.

Some chatbot solutions also have detailed analytics that will help you garner more leads. 

Talkative, for example, integrates with Google Analytics so you can see which pages generate the most chat inquiries.

Monitoring also helps identify and address any potential bottlenecks that affect most users. It ensures that your chatbot customer experience is seamless from beginning to end. 

The takeaway

Chatbot marketing is becoming an essential strategy for many businesses as they endeavor to provide consistent 24/7 customer experiences.

But these experiences don’t just take place on your website and app. Chatbots can be used across all platforms, helping your customers connect with your brand in just a few clicks.

So, when creating a marketing chatbot, you must consider your target audience, what they want, and the most common queries they have. 

Doing so will mean you can create a marketing chatbot that genuinely helps your customers, highlights your products, and boosts conversions.

Of course, to really get the most out of a chatbot on your website, app, and social channels, you need a platform that allows you to create on-brand automations on your terms.

And that's where Talkative comes in.

With options available for sophisticated NLP bots or simple pathway triage, Talkative can help you create a bot that not only engages more customers, but one that helps you convert them too.

It's what our customer engagement platform is all about: creating a more connected customer experience for your most high-value visitors.

Want to learn more? Book your personalized Talkative demo today.