Most brands spend hours of their time and hundreds of dollars chasing down new leads. That’s a recipe for wasted energy on a lead pipeline that does nothing for you. 

It’s time to identify your unicorns: You need to yield 80% of your results from 5% of your effort. And that means going all in on conversational marketing.

With conversational marketing, brands move users through their funnel with the power of one-on-one conversations. Instead of pushing ads or spammy emails at shoppers, conversational marketing sends personalized and friendly messages that consumers want to engage with. 

Not sure if it’s right for you? Learn how conversational marketing works and check out these four examples to start your campaigns on the right foot. 

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What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is all about making shoppers feel special by giving them a one-on-one, personalized experience. But if you have thousands of followers or hundreds of customers, it probably sounds impossible to answer all of those messages by yourself. 

That’s why businesses use conversational marketing tools to fill in the gaps. In fact, 45% of businesses use chat tools like a bot to save time (and preserve their sanity). After all, you don’t want to reply to 500 messages yourself, do you? 

Two-way conversations are the future of marketing. And with the right technology, you can give customers the personalized experience they crave, putting conversational marketing to work for your brand. 

4 conversational marketing examples 

Most customers expect a personalized experience. They don’t really care if you have a full inbox and a marketing team that’s stressed to the max: Customers still want you to get in touch with them ASAP. 

Fortunately, conversational marketing tools can help you balance customer expectations without driving your team into the ground.

Why would a company use conversational marketing?

Here are 4 examples of how conversational marketing benefits your biz:

1. Increase audience engagement
2. Bring in more leads
3. Make more sales
4. Offer better customer support

1. Increase audience engagement

Need more engagement from your followers? Conversational marketing is here to help. Conversations can turn passive social media followers and website visitors into engaged brand advocates. 

For example, if you’re sharing pointers on Facebook, add more advice and suggestions in the comments section. This encourages users to scroll through the comments to score even more juicy tips. 

Everyone’s favorite marketer, Neil Patel, took a similar approach on Instagram. He teased the tips to his followers, but only revealed them if the user commented with the “magic word.” When you give people a reason to engage, like a freebie, they’re much more likely to engage with you.

Conversational marketing makes omnichannel engagement a breeze, too. If you need to chat with customers on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, or webchat, conversational marketing bots handle the hard work for you. With a solution like Customers.ai, everything is in a unified inbox so you can manage every customer conversation in one place. 

2. Bring in more leads

Engagement is great, but leads are what you’re after, right? Conversational marketing creates one-on-one messages with engaged users to collect data. This not only saves you a ton of time but it also means you’re talking to leads who are already interested. It’s no surprise that brands with automated lead management like this see a 10% increase in revenue. 

For example, let’s say you’re talking to a lead on webchat. You want to source first-party data from them, so you implement a multichannel contact center to manage the webchat experience and dynamically redirect them to further engage via social media. Additionally, you collect their contact information to proactively reach out through SMS, email, or even a phone call. This way, you can interact with leads on an ongoing basis instead of in the limited time they’re using webchat.  In this case, an Airtable alternative can help to organize and manage data collected through webchat interactions, streamlining your lead engagement efforts.

3. Make more sales

Conversational marketing bots help you sell more products. Brands see a lift in revenue, customer retention, and average order values with conversational marketing. If you invest in ongoing customer conversations with relevant offers and personalized messages, you’ll see the difference in your bottom line. 

4. Offer better customer support

Everyone wants to score more sales, but a purchase isn’t the end of your relationship with a customer. You have to differentiate your brand by offering amazing customer support, both to leads and to repeat shoppers. 

Whether you’re an agency, an Instagram influencer, or a B2C brand, users need to get in touch with you right away—in fact, 82% of consumers expect an immediate response.

Use a unified conversational marketing tool like Customers.ai to talk with customers where they are. With just one inbox for you to check, you don’t have to switch between customer conversations. That means fewer customer messages will fall through the cracks, and you can offer shoppers the immediacy they’re looking for. 

You can also use a conversational marketing bot to answer common customer questions. Instead of answering thousands of messages yourself, just set up keyword-based responses for frequently asked questions. 

Need help? Get a conversational marketing bot

So what is conversational marketing? An instant conversation with a future customer.

Customers don’t just want to hear about your product or service; they care about the experience of engaging with you. Install a conversational marketing bot on your website, eCommerce shop, or social media to give users exactly what they want. When in doubt, consult these four conversational marketing examples to crack the code on conversational marketing for your own brand. 

Need help scaling up your conversations? We’ve got you. Customers.ai helps you talk to thousands of users without losing a wink of sleep.

Sign up for a free trial now to see Customers.ai in action. 

The post What Is Conversational Marketing? Definition and Tips appeared first on Customers.ai.

A list of 18 chatbot marketing playbooks that you can plug-and-play in your business to start driving sales immediately.

Chatbot marketing is the present and future of marketing. If you’re not all-in with building marketing chatbots, run, don’t walk, to get started.

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The One Chatbot Marketing Essential: Chatbot Builder

Before I show you the what, I must tell you the how.

To use these chatbot marketing templates, you’ll first need to install a chatbot builder such as Customers.ai.

Customers.ai uses Facebook Messenger marketing since Messenger is the most widely-used and feature-rich messaging platform available.

With Customers.ai, you can get started for free in less than five minutes. Plus, you’ll get instant access to each of the chatbot marketing templates described below.

Customers.ai is designed for small businesses or freelance marketers as well as marketing agencies. With an agency account, your marketing agency can create and sell chatbot marketing to your clients.

You can automatically install any of these chatbot marketing templates in Customers.ai by clicking Templates → View Templates Library.

Once in the chatbot marketing library, choose your preferred template.

Next, you’ll either add the template to an existing chatbot or start from scratch.

Then, it’s time to start creating your chatbot marketing plan.

Here’s the important thing about these chatbot templates. They can be totally customized to your specific needs.

For example, let’s say you like the chatbot for gyms, but you want to customize it to sell Photoshop actions to amateur photographer moms of newborns.

No prob! You can customize it to whatever chatbot marketing activity you prefer.

Now that you have the best chatbot builder on the market and know exactly how to install each of these chatbot marketing templates, let’s get into them.

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1. Chatbot Marketing for Lead Generation

The one-minute lead gen bot is a good starting place, especially if you’re just getting started with chatbot marketing.

The bot is ideal for client-based businesses that want to create more leads that will be followed up by a salesperson.

The pre-built dialogue has three “quick questions.”

1. Thanks for stopping by! Can I ask for your email address?
2. Thank you. And what’s the best phone number for us to reach you at?
3. Thanks again. What can we help you with today?

To answer the first two questions, email address and phone number, all the user has to do is click or tap in response.

Facebook has this information stored in the user’s account. With the input type set to email, it’s simple for them to reply quickly and accurately with their response. The same holds true for the phone number.

You can use this chatbot as a standalone template for lead-generation or you can add it to another dialogue or template.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

2. Chatbot Marketing for Automotive Shops

Although designed with automotive shops in mind, this template is perfect for any service-oriented brick-and-mortar business who wants to engage in chatbot marketing.

The bot has several built-in features:

• Schedule a service – Select a service, and set an appointment to bring your vehicle into the shop
• Ask our mechanic – Allows potential customers to ask questions regarding car issues
• Reviews – Features the reviews of other customers who have done business with the shop
• Leave a review – Allows customers to share their experience with the shop

One of the most advantageous features of the chatbot is the ability to allow customers to easily schedule appointments simply using the interactive bot.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

3. Chatbot Marketing for Beauty Salons

The salon service industry is one in which scheduling appointments, getting advice, and learning about the salon’s different services can be a huge chatbot marketing advantage.

The chatbot marketing for beauty salons template is designed to help customers quickly select a service and schedule an appointment.

The chatbot marketing sequence begins with a brief welcome message followed by the store’s logo, then the request to choose a service from a menu.

This menu contains three main service categories but can be customized with more or fewer categories based on your particular need.

If a customer chooses the skin care category, for example, they can select from the salon’s different skin care services and schedule an appointment.

Other features of this chatbot marketing template allow customers to sign up for weekly promotions and learn about careers.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

4. Chatbot Marketing for a Powerful Sales Funnel

This template features a powerful qualifying technique developed by Cat Howell, agency owner and chatbot marketing professional.

Her chatbot sequence uses a process to select high-potential clients for sales calls. This qualifying process is executed by the chatbot and follows this flow.

This powerful sequence allows agencies to scale, by eliminating clients that have high-churn potential and onboarding clients that have a track record of improving agency profits.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

5. Chatbot Marketing for a Coffeeshop

The coffee shop chatbot allows cafes and coffee shops to do several things that typically require the time and attention of baristas and staff.

• Customers can join a loyalty reward program
• Customers can get the Wifi password
• Customers can read reviews or leave their own review
• Customers can view the food or drink menu

The coffeeshop bot is designed to both provide customer service help, but also to increase business and loyalty at the coffee shop through chatbot marketing.

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6. Chatbot Marketing for Community Organization

The chatbot marketing sequence for a community organization group is designed for online or in-person communities to form, grow their following, and even gain donations.

This chatbot is great for homeowner’s associations, sports leagues or teams, book clubs, school parent organizations, cause-related organizations, clubs or other small to medium-sized organizations.

Here are the primary chatbot marketing features included in the community organization template:

• Invite members into the group
• Allow members to view location or meeting updates and receive updates about community events
• Provide community news and updates
• Display the rules of the group in an interactive and engaging way
• Allow users to ask questions and get quick answers
• Invite users to read and post reviews of the group
• Solicit donations from users interested in contributing financially

Although it falls under the rubric of chatbot marketing, this template is simply a way to allow any type of organization — neighborhood, non-profit, informal, etc. — streamline and automate their processes.

The features of this template make it ultra-simple for anyone to set it up, turn it on, and experience the hassle-free benefits of Messenger chatbots.

Get Customers.ai now to get this chatbot and more.

7. Chatbot Marketing for Consultants

One of the biggest groups of Messenger chatbot users is consultants. Often, these are marketing consultants, many of whom sell their own chatbot marketing services.

The chatbot marketing for consultants chatbot is also heavily used by agencies, who often provide chatbot marketing solutions for their clients.

As chatbot marketing bots go, this one is simple and straightforward. Its ability to save time and streamline processes, however, is unparalleled.

The bot launches with a greeting. This can, of course, be customized.

One useful feature of any chatbot is that users’ responses can be saved, allowing you to organize and segment the respondents according to specific categories.

For example, you can create a Messenger contact group of only those users who responded to your consultant welcome question. You can later retarget these people with a specific campaign designed to reengage them.

With the consultant chatbot, you can do the following:

• Answer basic questions
• Provide information about your consultancy and services
• Invite users to free training
• Provide a signup form for applicants to work with you
• Invite users to join your Facebook group
• Allow users to get blog updates

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8. Chatbot Marketing for Contests

Contests are a powerful marketing technique, and they become even more powerful with chatbot marketing integrations.

The chatbot marketing bot can handle a contest from soup to nuts, allowing you to simply set up the bot and launch the contest.

There are two types of contests that this bot provides:

• Comment contests
• Giveaway contests

With a comment contest, you allow everyone who comments on an organic post in your Facebook group to be automatically entered into the contest.

The second chatbot contest, a giveaway, allows users to enter an offer to win something free.

The power of these contests is that they provide a fast and flawless way to build your contact list both on Messenger and using other forms such as email.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

9. Chatbot Marketing for Dentists

The dentist chatbot marketing template can be adapted for a variety of other businesses such as wellness clinics, massage therapy practices, or opticians.

The chatbot allows users to do the following

• Schedule an appointment for a selected service
• Find out more about the services
• Meet the team of care providers
• Get directions to the location
• Find out hours of operation
• Learn about promotions

Chatbot marketing features like this take only an hour or two to setup from beginning to end, but they save countless hours in phone calls, inquiries, scheduling, explanation, callbacks, and other time-consuming customer service tasks.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

10. Chatbot Marketing for Gyms

Customers.ai’s gym bot handles all the chatbot marketing needs that a gym or fitness facility might need.

These chatbot marketing features include:

• Fully built out the welcome dialogue (complete with inspiring images)
• Information about CrossFit classes
• Information about weight training
• Information about yoga classes
• Information about one-on-one personal training
• Offer for a free trial gym membership
• Offer for a free health evaluation from the gym
• Gym location
• Gym hours of operation

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

11. Chatbot Marketing for Health Coaches

Chatbot marketing is extremely advantageous for any individual or small team who wants to save time on tasks like scheduling, client onboarding, and answering general questions.

The chatbot marketing bot for health coaches is designed to deliver on each of those fronts. It’s flexible enough to be used for fitness trainers, health coaches, personal coaches, and other professionals providing personalized individual training.

The chatbot is highly interactive, but it’s also designed to elicit as much actionable feedback as early on in the sequence as possible.

Take a look at how this quick back-and-forth has allowed the personal trainer to get the age, weight, and fitness level of a potential client.

All that the user has to do is tap out quick replies.

The trainer bot can then offer additional materials for personal training. It’s important to get the user’s agreement before this happens.

Now that the user is within the intermediate funnel, she or he can select several additional options:

• Read an inspiring story about a client who increased her fitness level
• Get a free consultation
• View a free video about the intermediate training program

This is the intermediate funnel, but the chatbot will provide a different sequence if the user has selected “beginner” or “intermediate” as their fitness level.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

12. Chatbot Marketing for Influencers

The influencer chatbot marketing setup is geared towards individuals who want to cultivate a social media following, retain engaged users, and sell products and services.

Successful use cases of the influencer chatbot include professional athletes, models, YouTubers, Instagram influencers, authors, and others building brand recognition.

The template version of the chatbot is designed for a musician, but the customization options are endless.

Here are some of the features of chatbot marketing for influencers:

• Complete welcome dialogue
• Personalized greeting
• Opt-in to stay updated with news and information about the influencer
• Opt-out option to easily unsubscribe
• Find out about tour dates and locations
• Get tickets to events
• Facilitate payment for tickets or merchandise

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13. Chatbot Marketing for Marketing Agencies

Marketing agencies are among the heaviest users of Customers.ai, and with good reason. Customers.ai is the premier provider of agency-level chatbot marketing solutions.

Marketing agencies receive a special team plan of Customers.ai, which includes advanced features for collaboration and rapidly growing Facebook contacts.

Agencies are also invited to apply for inclusion in Customers.ai’s affiliate program. Affiliates earn a high percentage of the subscription cost for any client that they refer as a Customers.ai user. In the agency world, this can rack up huge earnings quickly.

All agencies can apply to join Customers.ai’s certified agency directory, which places them in direct contact with customers who need their services.

Here is the chatbot marketing process that agencies have found to be successful:

A brief opening menu easily invites users to self-select the marketing service they are most interested in.

In this case, the marketing services are Facebook Ads and Messenger marketing, but these can be differentiated or added based on your marketing agency’s specific offering.

Once the potential client goes further down the funnel, the bot responds by gathering additional information.

The more information you can gather about the client, the more successful you can be at onboarding that client.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

14. Chatbot Marketing Tactics for Podcasts

Chatbot marketing for podcasts makes it easy to grow a podcast following.

Podcasts are an amazing tool for providing valuable content to users, but it’s not always easy to build a community around podcast listeners.

That all changes with this chatbot. The template has these features:

• Listen to episodes
• Become a VIP listener
• Get updates about new episodes
• Get new episodes delivered
• Find out about most popular episodes

Everything you need to run and promote a successful podcast community is included with this chatbot marketing template.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

15. Chatbot Marketing for Real Estate

The real estate chatbot marketing bot is one of the most advanced and built-out. The reason? Real estate agents have to manage a lot of moving parts and paperwork, not to mention in-person meetings, showings, and a legion of other details.

Real estate agents have a large suite of tools at their disposal with the real estate chatbot. Many agents hire personal assistants to manage the avalanche of details that the job demands. If using a chatbot, however, that may not be necessary.

The real estate chatbot is designed to help real estate agents both as seller’s agents or buyer’s agents (including rentals.)

If a real estate agent is offering listing services (i.e., selling a home), then the chatbot will walk the client through a series of questions

• Is the home currently listed?
• How soon do you need to sell the home?
• What is the property address?
• What is your email address?
• What is your phone number?

In less than sixty seconds, a potential seller could entrust you with their complete information, allowing you to follow up easily and quickly.

A real estate agent who is selling a home can do the following

• Display current listings
• View complete galleries of current listings
• Schedule a showing

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

16. Chatbot Marketing for Restaurants

Restaurants have a lot to handle. Menus, pricing, orders, reservations, hours of operation…there’s a lot that stands to be streamlined by using chatbot marketing.

Customers.ai’s chatbot marketing for restaurants takes care of the following:

• Place food orders
• View the menu
• See reviews
• Make reservations
• View current details
• Get directions
• Take a survey

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

17. Chatbot Marketing Tactics for Retail Stores

The template for stores is highly adaptable for any retailer but is primarily geared towards brick-and-mortar shops.

Most of today’s shoppers start the process online, even if they love window shopping. They’ll first get some information to find out what the store offers, where the store is located, and when the store is open.

Here’s what this chatbot marketing template will do for you:

• Segment users according to their shopping preference — for example, men’s clothing or women’s clothing
• Find out what’s on sale
• Get deals or coupons
• Sign up for updates
• Read or leave a review
• Find out the store hours
• Get the store’s location

The bot is designed to both get customer’s information for marketing purposes and to invite shoppers into the store.

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18. Chatbot Marketing for Surveys

Surveys are more than just an information-gathering tool. They are also a powerful method of growing your customer base, spreading the word about your business, and amassing a useful pool of contacts.

Facebook and Instagram Messenger chatbot surveys take the power of online surveys to a whole new level. (Plus, you don’t need to purchase pricey survey software.)

Here are some of the features of surveys using Facebook Messenger:

• They are easy to fill out and complete
• By default, they are mobile-friendly
• They are optimized for a platform that users are already familiar with
• They have very high engagement rates
• You can save respondent’s information into lists
• You can follow up with respondents

The “Quick Survey” tool on Customers.ai allows you to rapidly assemble a survey. If you just want to copy the survey template, that’s fine, too.

The Survey Bot has three survey types in order to demonstrate the realm of survey capabilities:

• Health and fitness survey
• Customer feedback survey
• Skincare survey

All the surveys are easy for people to complete because they simply require tapping one of the existing options. Plus, we’ve created the survey with a bit of incentivization on the front end so users will be eager to complete it.

Test these chatbot marketing capabilities here.

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More Chatbot Marketing Tactics?

This is just a sample of the many chatbot marketing tools that Customers.ai has built for you.

Additional chatbot marketing opportunities include chatbots for mortgage brokers, chatbot marketing for websites, chatbot marketing for health shops, and chatbot marketing for ecommerce websites.

You can even make your own chatbot marketing templates with Customers.ai’s chatbot template builder. When you create your own chatbot template, you can share it across Facebook pages, provide it to clients, or distribute it to your agency.

Start using Customers.ai now.

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The Goal of Chatbot Marketing Tactics: Sales, Leads, Revenue

Each of these chatbot marketing templates has one thing in common — the goal is to increase sales or leads, and eventually to generate revenue.

Regardless of your industry, chatbot marketing is poised to make a massive impact on what matters most — revenue.

Whether your chatbot marketing approach is intended to attract new clients or facilitate orders, it’s easy to turn it on and let it go using these prebuilt templates

What should you do next?

• Sign up for Customers.ai. Joining Customers.ai is the only way to get these templates, plus more powerful chatbot marketing tools.
• Take a free crash course in chatbot marketing, taught by the world’s most authoritative pioneers in chatbot marketing and digital marketing strategy.
• Join Customers.ai Island, an exclusive Facebook group consisting of thousands of chatbot marketers.

The post 18 Chatbot Marketing Tactics That Will Drive Sales in Any Industry appeared first on Customers.ai.

Now you have more time to do other important things, like chatbot conversation design. 

Why should you care? 

• 77% of customers say chatbots will transform their expectations of companies in the next five years
• 68% of customers said that they’d had positive interactions with customer service bots in the past
• 55% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if they could text them.
• In 2022, companies will save $8 Billion with enterprise chatbot solutions.

Obviously, chatbot marketing is a MASSIVE growth opportunity, with no signs of slowing down. 

Zuckerberg himself has said that messaging is the foundation of Facebook’s future. If Facebook’s Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger integration wasn’t a clue, you should be paying attention to chat messaging apps.

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What Is Conversational Design?

Chatbot conversation design is a way to guide the chatbot interaction using anticipatory and suggestive questions and answers. 

The best practice for this is to use a chatbot with a live operator takeover option to supplement your chatbot sequence. 

The next best practice to follow is to use a visual chatbot builder. 

Doing this allows you to see the conversational flow or “tree” and also take advantage of any Facebook Messenger templates. 

When you sign up for Customers.ai, you are given the option to start a chatbot from scratch or utilize a template. 

How Do You Make A Chatbot Conversation?

You make a chatbot conversation by creating a diagram of your chatbot conversational flow. 

Start with a greeting message, ask a question, provide multiple choices for answers, and mockup what your chatbot will say in response to each answer. 

Whether this is your first try at designing a chatbot conversation or if you are a seasoned chat blasting pro, Customers.ai has you covered with this step-by-step guide for chatbot conversation design. 

Unicorn Level FREE Resource: Chatbot Conversation Design Guide

This fantastic tool from the Customers.ai Chat Marketing Master Class covers all the bases to create a mind-blowingly effective chatbot conversation design. 

Grab your copy of our chatbot conversation design guide and let’s start your pre-qualifying, lead gen and nurture, customer serenading chatbot conversation design today! Here’s how to do it in a few simple steps. 

Chatbot Conversation Design Guide Step #1: Know Your Brand Persona

Start your chatbot conversation design and ROI-quadrupling adventure by considering your brand’s voice or tone. Make the chatbot visually appealing and customized by adding your brand elements and your custom logo.

What’s your persona? Let that shine through as you customize a template or craft a chatbot from scratch. 

The next thing is to ask yourself, what is your goal? 

Chatbot Conversation Design Step #2: What Is Your Chatbot Designed For? 

You must have a goal in mind for your chatbot, and you can use that purpose to shape your chatbot conversation design and include a CTA. 

Your chatbot masterpiece might serve for one or more of the following: 

• Lead collection
• Customer service
• Lead qualification
• Educational resource
• Lead nurture/engagement

Or are you getting strategic with instant ROI driving direct response marketing campaigns?

When you click the “Step 2” tab in the ‘Chatbot Conversation Design Guide’ you will see some tips on how to start drafting your chatbot conversation design. 

At the bottom is “Chatbot agent brand and tone of voice” which asks you to rate a scale of 1-10 how professional or casual your brand is. 

Are you all business and no fun, exuberantly entertaining, or somewhere in between? 

This is a more in-depth look and elaboration of Step #1. 

Extremely important and insightful for even the DIY chatbot conversation designer. 

Chatbot Conversation Design Step #3: Choose Your Channels 

Where do you want your chatbot to live? Don’t just stick to one channel! Go Multi-Channel with Customers.ai’s OmniChatⓇ chatbot. 

Harness the cost-reducing, customer-inducing power of deploying the same chatbot autoresponder and drip sequence across various messaging platforms: SMS, Website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, and more! 

Choose one of the following six options: 

• Chat on your website
• SMS text marketing opt-ins
• Facebook page send message button
• Facebook posts that DM to commenters
• Instagram story mentions
• Instagram DM

Once you’ve logged into your Customers.ai OmniChatⓇ dashboard, head over to the “Chatbot” menu to get started and follow the prompts to select your chatbot’s channels. 

But before getting ahead of yourself, continue through the Chatbot Conversation Design Guide until you have collected all of the information you need. 

Chatbot Conversation Design Step #4: What Lead Info Are You Capturing? 

Once you’ve got a lead in your chatbot magic funnel, what kind of information do you want to capture for your lists and remarketing? 

Here are some ideas to choose from that are all super easy to accomplish using a good chatbot conversation design.

• Email
• Phone
• Address
• Company name
• Customer question

It ultimately depends on your unique sales process and internal workflows.

The fact that you are interested in using a chatbot for lead gen is telling that you probably want their email, phone, and perhaps company name. 

However, the order of priority matters. If there is one piece of info you must have to follow-up at all, such as email, come out swinging with that question right away. 

Whether you have a Facebook retargeting strategy that you’d like to make more conversational (and profitable!) or an email list to build out — chatbots are your new best friend. 

Customers.ai makes chatbot conversation design easy. With our advanced visual chatbot builder, you can choose from blocks of dialogue as a foundation for your custom chatbot conversation design. 

Or perhaps you’re interested in pre-qualifying leads. You might try a chatbot conversation design similar to this example: 

These Facebook Messenger templates are all readily available to you within your Customers.ai OmniChat dashboard. 

Chatbot Conversation Design Step #5: Are You Using Paid Ads? 

It would be unwise not to. Nothing can compare or beat the 100% conversion rate and low CPCs of Click-to-Messenger ad campaigns. 

Once you get that prized opt-in, which is astoundingly easy with Facebook Messenger and a Customers.ai autoresponder, there is so much you can do! 

From chat blasting (email marketing’s cool and successful younger sibling — send push notifications!) to customer service or FAQ bot. It’s a safe bet you will save time and money. 

Besides, chatbot conversation design is fun! This is marketer’s bread and butter… unless you don’t like making sales? 

Whichever killer chat marketing strategy you choose: Click-to-Messenger ads or Sponsored Message ads, you’re going to get a better ROI.

The best way to do that is by utilizing Customers.ai for a chatbot conversation flow design that crushes leads and slays customer service 24/7. 

Chatbot Conversation Design Step #6: Decide Where To Send Lead Data

Now that you’ve got a crazy awesome custom or 1-Minute-Lead-Gen Bot rip-roaring through Facebook for targeted contact info, where will you send this glorious list of leads? 

Most likely a CRM of some sort, email marketing platform, or spreadsheet. 

Here’s how to send lead data from Customers.ai straight into Google Sheets.

And you can connect and automate just about anything using Customers.ai and Zapier. 

Now that you’ve completed all of the steps in the first tab of our Chatbot Conversation Design Guide, click the second tab labeled “Tips for drafting content.” 

What Are The Questions Your Chatbot Will Ask? 

Deciding what questions to ask is a foundational part of the chatbot conversation design process. This is how you will engage your customers or leads. 

In the Customers.ai Chatbot Builder, you will be able to create a directory of dialogue folders that contain your various campaigns and chatbot creations. It’s time to get organized! 

Make your chatbot conversation flow more engaging by dropping in some of our sweet little widgets, from lead forms to funny GIFs, images, or pre-filled questions. 

If you are going to have multiple questions in your chatbot conversation flow you will want to decide on some CTAs for the buttons. Which you should be able to use your answers from the prompts in our Chatbot Conversation Design Guide. 

Frequently Asked Questions And Responses

You will quickly find out that people do not always follow your chatbot design framework. They like to say and ask things that don’t always compute.

This is where you get to use your clairvoyant and intuitive skills you gained when you reached unicorn nirvana — why else would you be reading this right now? 

With keyword triggers, you can take an educated guess and predict what your prospects or customers might say or ask your chatbot. 

You can route different keywords to trigger different dialogue paths, creating a very human-like chatbot conversation design. 

So if someone mentions the word “hours” or “pricing,” your bot will know what to do! 

Furthermore, you can use keywords on different messaging automation channels, all within Customers.ai, such as SMS keywords for text message marketing.

Jot down some of your most commonly asked questions and use that as a starting point to build upon. Perhaps launch an MVP chatbot supplemented with a live agent takeover to start learning what people tend to ask your bot. 

Get creative and give users some options. It’s like building out one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Remember those? 

This adds an additional layer of engagement. It guides customers down the correct path of follow up questions, buttons, and content rounding out your conversational chatbot UX. 

Save Your Leads As Contacts And Segment With Customers.ai

The big payoff! You’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into building the perfect chatbot conversation flow design (or lazily clicked a few buttons to copy and paste a template — work smarter, not harder!). It’s time to save your bounty: oodles of captured leads’ contact info!

You can easily segment and remarket all from within Customers.ai, your one-stop chatbot-shop. But you can also send contacts to a sheet, CRM, or email marketing app. 

When you’re all done, don’t forget to take your chatbot for a test drive! 

If you’d like to test one of our chatbot templates, here is a live demo for you! 

How Do You Become A Conversation Designer? 

Chatbots are the future of digital marketing. We’ve already established that with Mark Zuckerberg’s stamp of approval. 

Because of the massive shift to Messaging apps across all social platforms, it’s pretty clear there will be some new industry job titles and positions that revolve around chatbot conversation design. 

If you’ve gone through the steps in our Chatbot Conversation Design Guide, you are already a conversation designer! Own it! This is everything you need, right here. 

When you’re ready to go after your Chatbot Ph.D., we have the Chatbot University, Marketing Summits, and Facebook Group to further your chat skills and mingle and learn from chat blast masters.

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Important Next Steps

FAQs about Chatbot Conversation Design

Q: What is chatbot conversation design?

A: Chatbot conversation design refers to the process of creating interactive and engaging conversations between users and chatbots. It involves designing the structure, flow, and language of chatbot interactions to provide effective and efficient communication.

Q: Why is chatbot conversation design important?

A: Chatbot conversation design plays a crucial role in creating positive user experiences. Well-designed chatbot conversations can enhance user engagement, provide helpful and relevant information, and guide users toward desired outcomes. It helps ensure that interactions with the chatbot feel natural, intuitive, and satisfying.

Q: What are the key elements of chatbot conversation design?

A: Key elements of chatbot conversation design include:

1. User personas: Understanding the target audience and creating user personas helps tailor the conversation design to match their needs, preferences, and communication style.
2. Conversation flow: Designing a logical and coherent conversation flow that guides users through different stages of the interaction. This involves anticipating user intents, designing appropriate prompts and responses, and providing clear navigation options.
3. Language and tone: Choosing the right language and tone of voice for the chatbot that aligns with the brand personality and resonates with the target audience. This includes using appropriate greetings, greetings, and providing helpful instructions.
4. Context awareness: Designing chatbot conversations to be context-aware, allowing them to remember previous interactions and personalize responses accordingly. This helps create a seamless and personalized user experience.
5. Error handling: Designing effective error handling mechanisms to handle user input errors or misunderstandings. This involves providing clear error messages, offering suggestions for correction, and guiding users back on track.

Q: How can I create engaging chatbot conversations?

A: To create engaging chatbot conversations:

1. Keep it concise: Use clear and concise language to deliver information and avoid overwhelming users with lengthy responses.
2. Use visual elements: Incorporate visual elements such as images, buttons, or cards to enhance the chatbot conversation and provide visual cues for users.
3. Provide options: Offer users multiple response options or quick replies to streamline the conversation and make it easier for users to express their preferences.
4. Use conversational design patterns: Utilize conversational design patterns such as acknowledging user input, providing confirmation, and offering next steps to create a conversational flow that feels natural.
5. Incorporate personality: Infuse the chatbot with a touch of personality that aligns with your brand. This can make the conversation more engaging and memorable for users.

Q: How can I test and improve my chatbot conversation design?

A: Testing and iterating on your chatbot conversation design is essential for continuous improvement. Some strategies to consider:

1. User testing: Conduct user testing sessions to gather feedback and insights from real users. Observe their interactions, note pain points, and incorporate their feedback into refining your conversation design.
2. Analytics and data analysis: Utilize chatbot analytics and user data to gain insights into user behavior, preferences, and areas of improvement. Analyze user feedback, interaction logs, and metrics to identify patterns and optimize your conversation design accordingly.
3. Iterative design: Adopt an iterative design approach by making incremental changes and improvements based on user feedback and data analysis. Test new designs, measure the impact, and iterate based on the results.
4. Continuous learning: Stay updated with industry trends, best practices, and advancements in chatbot technology. Attend webinars, read case studies, and engage with the chatbot community to learn from others’ experiences and incorporate new ideas into your conversation design.

The post Step-by-Step Guide for Chatbot Conversation Design [Free Template] appeared first on Customers.ai.

Engagement is the name of the game in today’s world of fast-paced digital marketing, and selling with chatbots can give you an edge, as there is nothing more engaging for your customers than having a live chat.

Selling with chatbots can also help you gain extra insight into consumer behavior, as your chatbots can store the responses it gets so that you can enhance your e-commerce success.

In this article, we’ll review the super-effective secrets to selling with chatbots with digital agency founder Isaac Rudansky of AdVenture Media. Isaac’s agency uses paid advertising, conversion optimization, content marketing and chat marketing to help clients sell more online.

Here we look specifically at how to sell products online using chatbots like Isaac’s agency does for clients like Forbes Magazine and Sofamania.

In this article:

• What is selling with chatbots?
• How to sell products online using chatbots: 3 money-making tactics that drive sales
• Why is chat marketing such an effective way to sell products online?
• Do customers really want to speak to a bot?
• How do chatbots help sales?
• What do the best bots have in common?

What is selling with chatbots?

A chatbot is a piece of software that can integrate into messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, website chat and SMS and take part in automated, interactive conversations with prospects and customers.

When done correctly, using a chatbot can play a vital role in moving people through your sales funnel.

If you’re looking for the best way to sell products online, then you’ll want to consider a chatbot platform like Customers.ai to help you scale your reach and achieve your sales goals.

How to sell products online using chatbots: 3 money-making tactics that drive sales

These are the 3 super-effective sales techniques that a sales chatbot needs to demonstrate in order to help a business effectively sell more online.

How to sell products online using chatbots: Tip #1) Be friendly and personalize messages.

If you’re just getting started with building chatbots, start here: How to Build a Chatbot in 5 Minutes.

Once you know the basics of creating a chat marketing campaign, you can understand the importance of being friendly and personalizing messaging when selling with chatbots.

You can’t go wrong when you open up your chatbot dialogue with a friendly question.

From a psychological perspective, people generally feel very compelled to answer a question if it’s asked of them. It feels rude to not answer a question, and you’ll see that the vast majority of people will reply.

This is a great way to get your first engagement from your visitor. This is not only valuable because the visitor is more engaged, but it’s also valuable from a Facebook perspective.

If your bot is operating on Facebook Messenger, then Facebook’s policies only allow you to continue interacting with a visitor if they engage with you first. Getting them to answer a friendly question will satisfy that requirement and allow you to continue the interaction!

Be sure to show plenty of humor and uniqueness in your message. Nobody likes a dull and boring brand. Keep it fresh and light!

After the user replies to your first question, you can then use the {{first name}} tag to address them by their first name in future messages, which is also a great way of making them feel welcomed, as well as for continued engagement.

Using Customers.ai you can also incorporate funny animated GIF images into your messages to add loads of personality to your chatbot. Don’t miss out on this tactic!

While all of these tricks are great, you should always remember that you’re not trying to get the bot to pretend that it’s human. 

The purpose of the chatbot is not a pretense. The purpose of it is to show your visitor or customer that you take them seriously as a person and that by building a semi-personalized chatbot, you want to deliver them a wonderful, amusing and personal experience. 

Not only does it set a great tone for the present moment, but it also gives them a clue as to how you’ll treat them in the future. So it’s worth setting that tone right at the start.

How to sell products online using chatbots: Tip #2) Run promotions to chat marketing contacts.

When your bot is up and running, whether a Facebook Messenger bot, an SMS bot or a website chatbot, you’re creating new contacts with every lead and customer who starts a conversation.

Next it’s time to let your subscribers know about products and offers, sales and promos.

Here we’re going to build a popular and effective chatbot use example: a sale or promo bot blast.

In the screenshot, notice how scarcity is used by emphasizing that the sale is running today. People want more of what they think they can’t have for much longer!

Notice also how subtle social proof has been added with ‘one of our most popular sectionals.’

Finally, at the end of the message a question has been asked, which triggers the impulse to reply with an answer that we mentioned before.

In one tiny chatbot message, we have used three powerful psychological triggers!

After the user replies to the first question, the second promotional message is sent, which mentions the product details.

40% off and free shipping are both fantastic value propositions, and the fact that they are delivered exclusively in a chat window makes it feel even more special and exclusive for the customer.

The scarcity has also been re-emphasized as well, with ‘only a few left in stock.’ This is again a great psychological trigger that encourages the sale right from within the chat.

You can add in some powerful imagery to help your sale too. This can be done using the gallery feature. It really helps to incorporate some tempting visuals into your chatbot sale interaction.

Let’s not forget that Facebook Messenger is a rich communications channel, so you can make full use of galleries, videos and GIFs to provide highly engaging visuals to your visitors.

Another thing you can do is provide an extra push by providing a discount code too! Again, you can stress that this has limited time validity.

To learn how to send a chat blast in Facebook Messenger, read this guide: “How to Chat Blast Your Facebook Messenger Contacts.”

To learn how to send a mass text message, read this guide: “How to Send a Text Message Blast.”

You can also initiate conversations about sales and promos using an automated follow-up that sends a coupon code to new subscribers. Learn more in “What Is a Drip Campaign? How to Do SMS Drip Marketing & Messenger Chat Drips for More Sales & Deeper Customer Relationships.”

How to sell products online using chatbots: Tip #3) Send non-sales content to chat contacts to nurture, educate and engage.

You don’t need to focus all your chatbot time and attention on the bottom of your funnel.

In fact, chatbots are just as great at the top of the funnel, or even without a sales objective clearly in mind.

You can make your chat visitor aware of some of your non-sales content as well. Think of it like having a casual conversation with someone about your business, without pushing sales at all.

Here in this example, we are framing a piece of content as a curious question. We’re making it very tempting and easy to engage with.

When you provide people with high-quality content that isn’t salesy and which provides them with free and useful information, you’ll trigger a reciprocity instinct. They will want to return favors to your business for being so helpful to them!

Naturally, when the time comes for this person to buy a rug, their mind will gravitate towards your business as they will view it as an authority in the field. This is a very powerful place to be in when you want to generate sales.

In this screenshot here, you can see how we present the piece of content. It’s delivered in a calm and practical way, without any hype or sales talk.

The only objective is to be useful to the person in that given moment. You can’t fool people into buying before they are ready!

Why is chat marketing such an effective way to sell products online?

In short, consumer behavior has changed so much in the last few years that previous generations wouldn’t even recognize it now.

Back in advertising’s golden age, the only place that consumers could get product information would be from the ads themselves. 

In order to learn about products, people had to buy newspapers and look at the ad section to find out about the latest products on the market.

The importance of psychological triggers

Human nature is never going to change, and even though the technology has changed hugely, the same undying principles of persuasion in sales continue to persist as they always have. 

The fundamental ideas of reciprocity, identity, information, value, social proof and scarcity will always work in sales, and we recommend that you study these at least a little before you build a chatbot flow.

Isaac is the expert when it comes to applying psychological principles of persuasion to marketing.

Be sure to check out Isaac’s advanced chatbot conversion video tutorials in Customers.ai’s Chatbot University.

Samples and free trials are the new normal

In today’s day and age, marketing is so far removed from that old tradition. Nowadays, samples and free trials are the new normal. 

As well as wanting to try before they buy, consumers are now completely in charge of when, where and how they find product information.

Consumers now want to have a different kind of conversation with brands, and they are in charge of the flow of information. This is in stark contrast to the old days, when brands were in charge of the information flow.

Chatbots are 24/7 sales assistants

Part of being in charge of the information flow means that consumers also expect to be able to get in instant contact with a brand and get fast responses to their queries.

This is why using a chatbot builder can be such an asset for your bot-powered business. It gives you the ability to provide instant responses to a generation of consumers that has come to expect that as part of standard service.

You can of course achieve this with a call center or human live chat operators, but a chatbot gives you the ability to respond 24 hours a day, and is also a lot more cost-effective.

Chatbots can improve conversions vs conventional web forms

Also consider a conventional form on your website that requires various fields to be completed by your prospect. Perhaps not all the fields are relevant to them, and maybe the form is so large that they feel too lazy to complete it.

Our Facebook Messenger conversion forms can solve this situation too. You can design the whole chat flow to determine what’s relevant to that particular person, and ask them only the things that you need from them specifically. 

This makes it much easier and engaging for them, and they’ll be much more likely to provide the information that you need from them!

Why is chat marketing an effective way to sell products online?

The number one concern that businesses have about using chatbots is that they will appear artificial.

Chat bots are not designed to replace the moments when a real human being is required.

There are obviously certain times when your leads and customers will need very particular advice from a real person, and your business should definitely have that person available when they’re needed.

Customers want fast answers more than anything

What’s actually surprising though, is that there are many cases when customers don’t want to speak to a real person, and this is where a chatbot can be ideal.

With their ability to listen for keywords, chatbots can also solve problems and queries that an information or FAQ page can, especially if these pages are too long and complicated, making some people leave your site because they can’t find an answer quickly enough.

Have you ever called a company on the phone, only to be put on an endless waiting list while you listen to music? Remember how frustrating that feels? Again, a chatbot can prevent this happening to your customers.

Lastly, a chatbot allows you to expand your reach into familiar communication channels such as Facebook Messenger, web chat and SMS. 

This means that someone can switch from talking to a close friend to speaking with your business all on the same screen. It’s wonderful to be able to reach people in this special and almost intimate space.

How do chatbots help sales?

If set up correctly, chatbots move prospects from the consideration phase to the purchasing phase. That’s what makes them a key tool for moving people down your sales funnel.

Forget what you’ve heard about short, punchy copywriting being the best for selling products. In most cases, a sale will take a lot more writing. So why not take that writing into a chat window where it can be more engaging for your customer?

After all, brands are constantly underestimating the amount of information that consumers want before making a purchase. Not only can a chatbot help with providing this information, but it can also help the brand learn about what people are asking.

You can use your chatbot to notify visitors of new sales and promotions, or perhaps a valuable piece of content that you have just published. By having something there, you’ll always prevent some visitors from leaving that otherwise would have!

What do the best bots have in common?

The vital key to a successful chatbot is the correct setup. You have to take the time to set up the chat flows carefully, and try to address as many potential questions you can with helpful answers.

One of the most important tips is to have your chatbot admit its identity – have it tell your visitors that it’s a bot to set expectations, but at the same time let them know that your bot has some very cool features. This will encourage them to ask the bot some questions.

If your bot uses predefined buttons for the user to submit replies, then make sure that you spell this out to the audience segment. Make it as easy to use as possible.

Seeing as the success of a chatbot is all about the setup, we’re now going to have a look at 3 easy examples in Customers.ai!

Closing thoughts on how to sell products online using chatbots

Chatbots offer you an incredible chance to engage with your customers across new platforms and communication channels, and to form special personalized relationships with them that would otherwise be impossible without an army of staff on your payroll.

They are also capable of providing you with unique insights into the needs of your customers that you would otherwise have no clue about.

So don’t delay, set up your first chatbot today and enjoy a big difference in engagement and sales. You won’t look back!

Are you currently thinking about how to sell products online using chatbots? Let us know how it’s going and any questions you have in the comments.

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How to Sell Products Online Using Chatbots: Important Next Steps

The post 3 Money-Making Tactics for Selling with Chatbots: How to Sell Products Online Using Chatbots appeared first on Customers.ai.

A marketing bot is software used by a business to carry out certain marketing activities automatically.

And that’s where everything starts.

With the right marketing bot, your business can scale to new heights.

Chatbot marketing is a special kind of marketing, where a chat conversation is the end user interface.

Here we’re not just going to tell you about the benefits of marketing chatbots. We’re going to tell you exactly how to put chatbots to work in your business.

You’ll discover exactly how to do the following:

1. Place a Facebook Messenger chat widget on your website to automatically answer marketing questions, secure new contacts, and deploy ultra-targeted marketing campaigns.
2. Launch a Facebook Messenger Ad to secure high-value contacts, lower ad spend, and improve conversion rates.
3. Qualify any audience down to only the users who are likely convert on your audience.
4. Create an ultra-compelling drip campaign to bring contacts through your marketing funnel, closing in a sale or conversion.

And Larry’s 15-minute training video of how to build a marketing bot to grow a list, promote products and services, and drive traffic to a website is a helpful primer in what businesses can do with marketing bots.

What is a Marketing Bot? 3 Things To Understand

To get ready for the tactical how-to of marketing bots, there are three things you should understand about marketing chatbots.

It’s important to note:

• A marketing bot carries out marketing tasks automatically.
• A marketing bot uses conversational interaction to carry out these marketing tasks.
• To create a marketing bot, a marketer doesn’t need to write code; they can use a visual chatbot builder.

That’s right. Chatbot development used to require writing complex code. But today, a chatbot builder like Customers.ai opens the gates to any businesses, marketing agency, entrepreneur, or freelancer to use Facebook Messenger marketing bots.

With Customers.ai’s robust chatbot builder:

• Chatbots require no coding
• The cost is free
• The process of building a chatbot is simple

Marketing bots are an emerging technology. As such, there is a lot of untapped potential in the technology itself. It’s imperative that marketing bots not only function from a marketing standpoint but also undergo thorough functional testing to ensure that every feature works flawlessly.

Apart from the technology, however, very few businesses are tapping into the power of marketing bots. This gives you first-mover’s advantage as you learn and embrace marketing bots.

Customers.ai is especially powerful for marketing agencies. With a strategic pricing structure and unparalleled features, agencies can massively scale by selling marketing bot services to new and existing customers.

Now that the why and who are established …

How do you use marketing bots?

To get the greatest value from the guide below, first sign up for Customers.ai. It takes just two minutes and it’s free.

Then come back here, and learn these powerful marketing bot tactics.

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Marketing Bots for Drip Campaign Success: How to Develop an Irresistible Drip Campaign on Messenger

Let’s start with a fixture of marketing — the drip campaign.

Drip marketing takes users through a cycle of messages that lead up to a conversion action.

Drip campaigns can have added layers of complexity depending on what action the recipient takes.

For the most part, drip campaigns are synonymous with email marketing.

And that’s unfortunate.

Because email is a dreadful way to carry out a drip campaign.

Delivery rates are stunted. Open rates are low. Clickthrough rates are lower still, and the entire campaign can take days or even weeks to complete.

The open and read rate on Messenger campaigns sent by Customers.ai is astronomically higher than email.

To put it plainly, Facebook Messenger drip campaigns are far superior to email marketing drip campaigns.

Here’s exactly how to create a marketing bot that rus a drip campaign.

For this marketing bot tactic to work, you’ll need to create dialogues — the “conversation” that takes place between the customer and the chatbot.

You will build and save these dialogues in the bot builder → dialogue creator.

These dialogues form the building blocks of so many different types of marketing activities — from drip campaigns to sponsored messages.

Once you create your drip marketing messages, you can construct the drip campaign itself.

Go to Marketing Automation, and then click on drip campaigns.

This opens up the drip campaign creator.

Most drip campaigns are promotional in nature, which means that they will need to comply with Facebook’s regulations surrounding promotional messages.

From the drip campaign creator, you will title your campaign, define your audience, and then set time requirements.

After that, you will assemble the various messages that constitute the campaign.

Once you’re ready, you’ll launch the campaign and benefit from the results.

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Marketing Bots for Converting New Customers: How to Create a Compelling Facebook Messenger Ad Campaign

Facebook Messenger ads are one of the hottest methods of bringing in new leads.

Why? Because Facebook Messenger ads are comparatively inexpensive, intrinsically engaging, and ultra-powerful.

Messenger ads require chatbot integration. In Customers.ai, go to Advertising → Messenger Ads.

The Messenger Ad creator makes the process of assembling your ad really simple — from selecting your content to syncing it to a campaign.

You will, of course, need to create the ad in Facebook Ads Manager in order to set it up and launch it successfully.

The chatbot builder walks you through the entire process. If you’re just getting started with Facebook ads, you’ll understand exactly what to do.

The power of Facebook Messenger ads is in the targeting. So when you’re developing your audience and placements, be sure to get the in-depth intel on how to structure your ad for maximum success.

What differentiates a ho-hum Messenger ad from an explosive one?

It’s all about post-click engagement.

Your goal is not only to get contacts to click on the ad. That’s the starting point, of course, but then what?

Then you set up this new audience with a drip campaign.

In this way, you’re connecting the intrinsic appeal of a Messenger ad with the compelling nature of a drip campaign — win and win!

Marketing Bots for Customer Support: How to Place a Facebook Messenger Widget on Your Website to Add New Contacts

Think about all the people who visit your website every day and then leave.

You have no idea who they are. You have no idea if they got what they wanted. You have no idea if they had questions you could have answered.

You just don’t know.

What if that could change?

By adding a Messenger widget to your website, your website transforms from a sieve into a contact-collecting bucket.

Users will land on your website. Then, instead of passing through like ghosts, you can capture the information of the ones who really are interested and engage with them in a conversational way.

This too-good-to-be-true scenario is accomplished with a Facebook Messenger widget.

You’ve probably seen them before, a little chat widget somewhere on a website that allows you to ping customer service with questions.

Okay, great, but so what?

Most of these widgets allow people to chat and then leave. It’s the same issue — those potential leads are gone and you have no way of interacting with them again.

Another problem is that there are too few humans to answer too many questions, meaning that a potential customer is chatting into empty space until someone has the time to respond.

A Facebook Messenger chatbot widget solves these problems.

Here’s how to add a chat widget to your website.

1. Install the WP-Chatbot plugin onto your WordPress site.
2. Connect the chatbot to Customers.ai.
3. Set up a chatbot to respond to people who open up a chat on your website.

The sheer quantity of leads that this widget brings in is astonishing.

The chat widget not only functions as a service to interested website visitors. It also allows you to retarget those customers with promotional chats in the first 24 hours (plus one additional promotional chat outside of the 24-hour window).

Here’s an overview of how the chat widget works.

Adding a chat widget to your website is one of the quickest, easiest, effective and most direct ways to employ the power of a marketing bot on your website.

Marketing Bots for Qualifying the Right Customers: How to Automatically Segment Your Contacts to Isolate the Hot Leads

Many businesses and agencies face a common problem — not enough leads!

When you turn on the power of Facebook Messenger marketing with chatbots, you might have a different problem: too many leads.

This is, of course, a good problem to have.

But how do you solve it?

Not every lead will turn into a customer. So you’ll need to sort out the tire-kickers from the real McCoys.

You can do this using a chatbot.

When assembled correctly, a chatbot can manage first contact to final qualification without you doing a thing.

To show you how this works, we’ll use the example of Cat Howell, who used this process in her agency. Howell’s agency provided Facebook marketing services for events and speakers.

Her funnel started with a Facebook ad and finalized in a call booking.

In order to make sure that every lead who booked a call was prepared to become a client, she created the following qualification parameters using a chatbot.

This way, a potential customer would answer a few questions — for example, how much revenue per month are you looking to generate?

Some users provided responses that predicted a paying client. Other users did not.

The chatbot automatically funneled high-potential users into a call booking. And those who did not qualify were provided resources and placed in a Facebook group for nurturing until they eventually became clients.

All of this happened automatically with no time-wasting activities by sales personnel, account reps, or agency team members.

Genius.

Best of all, true to the conversational nature of chatbots, the entire process feels natural and interactive.

If you’d like to use this marketing bot for your business, go to the templates section of Customers.ai and view the templates library.

From the templates library, choose Cat Howell’s Agency Bot.

You can clone the marketing bot and customize it to your exact needs.

What is a Marketing Bot? All of This & More

So, what is a marketing bot?

A marketing bot is a form of marketing automation that business use to get more customers and support existing customers with time-saving automation.

Marketing bots on Facebook Messenger use the powerful form of conversation to improve engagement and to bring users closer to conversion.

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Here’s what to do next:

The post What is a Marketing Bot? 5 Ways to Revolutionize Your Marketing with Bots appeared first on Customers.ai.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t code. I’m not a developer. Not me.

And with the massive increase in chatbots, it’s no longer just coders who want to build chatbots. I’m not alone in being one of the uninitiated who nonetheless wants a chatbot.

Marketers, business owners, digital strategists, and content specialists want to know how to create chatbots, too.

So, if you’re like me — good at some things, but coding is not one of them — this is the chatbot creation guide for you.

Here’s how to create a chatbot even if you don’t code.

Step 1: Get a Chatbot Builder (Customers.ai)

First, you will need to use a chatbot building platform like Customers.ai.

When selecting a chatbot builder, look for these five features:

1. Affordability – You should be able to test the builder for free, and upgrade to a paid plan
2. Ease of use – It should be intuitive, quick to learn, and not require any coding
3. Powerful – The builder should have a variety of advanced features and capabilities
4. Support – Make sure that the chatbot platform has a support team that can help you
5. User base – Look for a chatbot builder that thousands of businesses already use

Most chatbot builders use Facebook Messenger. Messenger is one of the most widely-used and versatile messaging platforms available.

Customers.ai is one of the leading chatbot builders available and is the fastest-growing Facebook Messenger partner.

The remainder of this article will show you how to make a chatbot using Customers.ai. You can sign up for free and start building a powerful chatbot in minutes.

When you sign up for a Messenger chatbot builder, you’ll sign up through Facebook. This way, you can automatically connect your Facebook Business page to your chatbot.

Everything begins right here. Once you’re signed up for Customers.ai, you’re in the door.

Now, let’s go make a chatbot.

Step 2: Connect Your Facebook Page to Your Chatbot Builder

Next, you’ll need your Facebook Business Page and chatbot builder to start talking to each other.

Log in to the chatbot builder (https://app.mobilemonkey.com/). From the home tab click the button, “Connect Facebook Pages.”

From the menu, select any Facebook pages you want to connect to your chatbot platform, then click “Connect Facebook Pages.”

That’s all that is required to connect your Facebook page to your chatbot builder.

You only need to connect your Facebook page once. After that, it will always appear on the home menu.

If you create any new Facebook pages in the future, you’ll simply go through this process again.

3. Select the Facebook page where you want to build a chatbot.

If you’re only working on one Facebook page, then things are kind of simple.

As it is, all you need to do in this step is to click on the Facebook page where you’re making a chatbot.

I’ll be making a chatbot for my fictional real estate company, Unicorn Realty.

(Be honest. You’d love to by a house from a place called Unicorn Realty.)

Once you click on the correct page, you’ll enter Customers.ai’s main page. This page features the main menu, which includes access to the following:

• Bot builder – this is the workshop for building all your chatbot sequences
• Advertising – here’s where you can set up things like Facebook Messenger ads and Sponsored Messages
• Marketing automation – These are chatbot tools for marketing tasks such as chat blasts and drip campaigns.
• Lead Magnets – Lead magnets offer different methods of growing your Facebook Messenger contacts like landing pages and Facebook post autoresponders.
• Audience Insights – Here’s where you’ll find all the analytics on your chatbots and audiences.
• Templates – Want a pre-built chatbot? Here’s where to find a bunch of them!

There’s a lot that we could do here, but we’re going to dive straight into the bot builder.

4. Open up the Bot Builder.

When you start making chatbots, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the chatbot builder.

Let’s open it up and start looking around.

There are two options when opening the bot builder — dialogues and Q&A.

Dialogues are the heart and soul of chatbots — asking questions, providing options, delivering content, basically, anything that a chatbot does.

Q&A involves a method of teaching your chatbot what to do when faced with certain keywords. For example, if a customer is interacting with your chatbot and mentions price or cost, you can program your chatbot to respond with pricing information.

To use the Q&A feature, you’ll have to create dialogues that are triggered based on certain keywords.

So, we’re going to work on dialogues (not Q&As in this post).

5. Open the Dialogue Bot Builder.

When you open the bot builder for the first time, you’ll see a pre-built Welcome Dialogue.

This is meant to make your life easier.

Basically, we could stop here and you could go tell your boss, “I built a powerful chatbot, yo.”

That took five minutes, tops.

You’ll obviously want to do a bit more to customize things and make this chatbot your very own. Let’s take a look at the dialogue builder to see what’s what.

Don’t get overwhelmed. At first pass, there’s a lot to take in with the chatbot builder.

It’s divided into four main sections:

1. The main menu, which is always the left sidebar no matter where you go in the app
2. A list of all your chatbots. You can organize them according to folders and even search through all your dialogues. The more you create, the more important this will be.
3. The main chatbot building place. This is where you craft your dialogues, piece by piece.
4. The right side of the screen includes an option to test your bot in Messenger or just copy the link. The Q&A section allows you to build keyword prompts to open up the chatbot.

To give yourself more room to work, you can always tap that purple slider in the lower right corner.

Okay, time to get into some real chatbot creation.

I’m going to be starting from scratch. The chatbot builder probably already has a default welcome dialogue all made up for you.

To delete it and start from scratch, simply click the trash can icon above any widgets until you’re down to nothing. We’re doing this from scratch!

Your bot builder should look like this now. Barren.

6. Add a Quick Question Widget

Widgets are the chatbot building blocks. So, when learning how to create a chatbot dialogue, you’ll have to add widgets.

It’s all about the widgets.

There are fifteen of them:

1. Attachment – add a downloadable file to your chatbot
2. Attribute – Create an attribute which will be used to define audiences or actions
3. Email – Automatically send an email with your bot
4. Form – Create a chatbot form for the user to fill out
5. Gif – Add an interesting gif to the chatbot
6. Gallery – Feature a gallery of images, products, etc., with titles and descriptions
7. Image – Show a picture in the chatbot
8. List – Create a list of items or images, for example with a menu or product listing
9. Navigate – Provides functionality that prompts a specific dialogue
10. Tag – Add a tag to easily track and sort your chatbots
11. Text – Add some simple text to your chatbot
12. Typing – Makes it appear as if the chatbot is taking a few seconds to type a reply
13. Video – Add a video
14. Zap Connection – Integrate with any of your Zapier triggers and connections

One of the most versatile widgets is the quick question widget. Click the Quick Question button to add it.

7. Add your quick question with an attribute.

Since we’re creating a welcome dialogue, the question is intended to draw the user into a conversation.

Type your question and add an attribute. Attributes are things that the bot builder will automatically add based on what it knows about the user.

This includes things like the user’s name, gender, time zone, etc.

It’s a good idea to personalize your chatbot by including something like the user’s first name.

8. Save the user’s answer by creating a new attribute.

Customers.ai will automatically save a list of these answers. Set up a new attribute by clicking the new attribute button and naming it.

9. Add an input type for the user’s answer.

“Input type” means what kind of answer you want from the user.

You have five choices:

1. Multiple choice – The user selects their answer from options that you create
2. Free form text – The user can type whatever they want to
3. Location – The user can send their location with a single tap
4. Email – The chatbot automatically populates the answer with the user’s email and they tap to send it.
5. Phone – The user can provide their phone number with a quick tap

For this example, we’re going to use multiple choice. Multiple choice can include just a single choice or as many as you want. To answer the quick question, users will tap or click the response.

10. Create multiple choice answers.

Click “Add Answer” to start creating the answer to the multiple-choice question.

I like to add images to my answers. It just makes it look more interesting. Click the small image icon to the left of the answer box. You can select an image file from your computer. This image is going to be a tiny thumbnail so don’t go for anything really detailed.

Type in your answer, and create as many choices as you want to.

Now that we’ve created a couple of answers, it’s important to discuss where we’re going with this.

Each answer is, obviously, going to lead to something else. That something else is another dialogue.

Essentially, what you’re doing is creating a branching menu, where one option opens another conversation or dialogue.

Let’s take a look at our chatbot so far to see how it’s performing.

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11. Test your chatbot periodically.

Click in the upper right corner and click the “Test Dialogue” button.

(If you’ve collapsed the right menu, simply click the purple arrow in the lower right corner to open it up.)

I usually open up Messenger on my phone to test the chatbot both on a mobile device and desktop.

Looks good so far.

Now, it’s time to build out a second dialogue to follow up on these options.

12. Start an additional dialogue.

I’m going to go through this one a lot quicker since you now have a handle on the basics of the bot builder and how to add widgets.

To create a new dialogue, simply click “add dialogue” in the dialogue menu.

The first thing you’ll do is name your dialogue.

Once you’ve added a name, you’re back to creating a dialogue from scratch.

My dialogue will help the user get in touch with an agent.

First, I’m going to show a nice picture to hold the user’s attention and provide some visual interest. I selected the “image” widget.

Next, I confirm that the user wants to get in touch with an agent.

This is a quick question that has one answer — ”yep.” I do this simply to get confirmation that the user wants to go down this path. (This can eliminate tire-kickers and time-wasting leads.)

Next, I add another quick question and select the input type as email.

Next, I use the typing widget. This will simulate typing for two seconds.

Next, I get the user’s phone number. You can do this using a quick question with phone as the input type.

Pro tip: The email and phone input type are magic. It takes the normally tooth-pulling process of getting a phone number or email address feel effortless.

To hand over their precious phone number, all the user has to do is tap the pre-filled box with their number. Tap. Boom.

Throw in the fact that you’re in a conversational widget, users feel a lot more comfortable providing information that might not be as forthcoming if they were, say, filling out a form on a landing page.

Now, I throw in a gif using the gif widget.

Then, another quick question about their communication preference. The input type is multiple because there are two possible answers — phone or email.

Now, to round out the conversation, I’ll close out with a word about next steps.

But first — more gifs!

For this one, I use the quick question widget once again. The single-choice answer is “Sounds good!” to give the user a sense of acceptance to the upcoming communication with the agent.

That’s it, folks.

Want to take it for a spin?

Go ahead and try out the chatbot here.

(Don’t worry. We don’t have any nefarious plan to steal your email address and phone number since this is a dummy bot. Educational purposes only!)

I just created a robust, powerful, lead-generating, revenue-spawning chatbot in fifteen minutes.

You can totally do the same thing.

How to Create a Chatbot and Beyond

Here’s what you need to know about creating chatbots.

This is just the beginning.

There are dozens of chatbot tools, a website chatbot widget, Facebook Messenger ads creator, Messenger automation tools, list building tools, and tens of thousands of integrations.

The sheer potential of chatbots blows the mind.

This little chatbot we created in our sample exercise is only a taste of what you can do with chatbots.

If you want to discover more of the potential of chatbots, try out the Customers.ai templates library.

We have a collection of pre-made templates (100% free) that will take that fifteen minutes of chatbot creation time and sink it down to, oh, five or so.

How to Create a Chatbot: Important Next Steps

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Not only do scheduling assistant chatbots save you time and money, but just as important, an appointment reminder SMS bot is super convenient for your clients to use.

Today it’s very common to see one of the following industry-specific appointment scheduling bots:

• Doctor appointment chatbot
• Chatbot for travel industry
• Real estate chatbot 

And this makes a ton of sense, considering sending business appointment reminders to customers through chat reduced missed appointments by 26%.

Additionally, this isn’t limited to live chat on your website. You can build a chatbot for appointment reminders for Facebook Messenger and SMS text scheduling assistant chatbots as well.

In fact, 67% of people would rather text with a business about appointments and scheduling than by email or phone.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to build an SMS chatbot for appointment reminders and scheduling for your own business.

What is an Appointment Reminder Text?

An appointment reminder text is exactly like it sounds. It’s an automated text messaging chatbot that you can implement using a chatbot builder like Customers.ai, where you can easily send appointment reminders to your clients to confirm or cancel their appointments.

Customers.ai has dozens of SMS marketing tools for you to choose from and test out.

You can experience the bot by using an SMS keyword. To do so, text REMINDER to (802) 294-4135.

Additionally, you can experience the appointment reminder text bot via Facebook and Instagram Messenger by clicking here ????

Or, you can experience the appointment reminder text bot on live chat by clicking the “Let’s chat!” button in the chat widget at the bottom right of your screen.

Here’s how to build an appointment reminder text message chatbot in 7 easy steps using Customers.ai:

1. Create a new folder and your first Dialogue
2. Build your conversational workflow using chatbot widgets
3. Add answers and create a new Dialogue
4. Create a Dialogue for a “NO” answer
5. Create a Dialogue for a “YES” answer
6. Build out your remaining Dialogue paths
7. Test your appointment reminder text chatbot

How To Send Automated Appointment Reminder Text Messages

In order to pull data from your CRM, such as customer appointment dates and appointment times, see the following pages:

• Customers.ai API Documentation 
• Webhook Connections
• Customers.ai integrations.

It’s super easy to get set up with Customers.ai’s Zapier integrations, and if you need help pulling your customer data from your systems, you can get in touch with our Customer Success team, who will be more than happy to get your appointment reminder texts up and running smoothly!

Step #1: Create a new folder and your first dialogue

You’ll want to create a separate folder for this use case because you’ll be creating multiple dialogues. 

Go to Chatbots > Dialogues from the tabs at the top of your Customers.ai dashboard.

Then, create a new Folder and give it a name that makes sense for your use case. I’ve named my example folder “Appointment Confirmation.”

Now that you’ve created a Folder, it’s time to build the first Dialogue of your appointment reminder text.

To create a Dialogue, click where it says + Add Dialogue inside the Folder you created. Then, name your Dialogue.

Step #2: Build your conversational workflow using chatbot widgets

In order to start building your conversational workflow, you need to choose from one of dozen plus chat widgets. 

Choose from the many rich-media content widgets, such as text, buttons, quick questions, images, attachments, videos, GIFs and more.

For this SMS workflow example, I’ve chosen to start with the Quick Question widget.

The Quick Question widget will allow us to add some text and then provide multiple choice answers that work for SMS text messages, live chat, and Messenger.

However, since this is an appointment reminder text message, we just need to keep in mind that the person will be experiencing this bot via SMS.

Below you can see the first Dialogue our chatbot will use. At the end, we’ll ask a question and then move onto Step #3 to create the possible answers responses the end user can give.

Before adding the answers, you’ll want to take note of the ability to add custom fields in your text, like where I added {{first name}} in the beginning of the dialogue. 

Since this is an appointment reminder, you’ll want to add the day and time of the appointment. Access your custom fields

In order to connect Customers.ai to your CRM and other systems that hold your customer data, see the Customers.ai Integrations page, as well as the Customers.ai API documentation.

Step #3: Add answers and create a new Dialogue

Now it’s time add answers to your question. Note that for SMS, you don’t need to type out “Reply Y for Yes, or N for No.” 

Customers.ai’s SMS marketing tools will automatically assign numbers to each of your multiple choice answers, such as: “Press 1 for Yes. Press 2 for No.”

To add answers to your Quick Question widget, click on the + Add Answer button. You can add as many answers as you want, but it’s best to keep it simple.

In this example, we’ve added two possible answers: YES and NO

This next bit may seem confusing at first, but trust me, it’s very simple.

Depending upon whether the person answers “Yes” or “No”, there will be different paths that user will take.

In this example, we’ve already created a new Dialogue and named it, “Appointment Confirmation – YES” in the case the person answers “No.” This path will cause the user to receive a message that most likely will end the conversation.

Now that we’ve created our next Dialogue (Appointment Confirmation – YES), we need to build out the user flow. In the image above, you’ll see that if the person selects “YES” from the “Appointment Confirmation” Dialogue, they’ll be sent to the “Appointment Confirmation – YES” Dialogue.

Similarly, if the person selects “NO” from the “Appointment Confirmation” Dialogue, they’ll be sent to a different Dialogue, which I named “Appointment Confirmation – NO.” 

Step #4: Create Dialogue for a “NO” answer

We’ll get the Dialogue for an answer of “NO” out of the way first, because it’s very simple. 

Here’s a screenshot of the example I created for what you could use if the person can not make it to their appointment:

If you want to get real fancy, you can even use the Customers.ai Integrations to connect your favorite calendar application to Customers.ai. That way the person will be able to schedule a new appointment right there in the chat!

Explore Customers.ai’s +100 integrations here. 

Step #5: Create a Dialogue for a “YES” answer

Next, we need to create the conversation for the Dialogue if the person selects “YES” to confirm their appointment.

In this example, I’ve added another quick question widget with a question that I’m sure we’re all unfortunately used to being asked in 2020 – the COVID-19 questionnaire.

Now, all we need to do is add some answers to the COVID-19 questionnaire, as well as a new Dialogue for an answer of “YES” and a new Dialogue for an answer of “NO.”

However, let’s say you want to save the answers to the COVID-19 questionnaire if the person answers YES. Maybe you want to be able to know to ask in the future if the person has been cleared with a negative test since the last time you spoke.

In order to do this, you can add an attribute to the Dialogue, which will be attached to each person’s contact profile info. To add an attribute to the Dialogue, place a checkmark in the “Save response to attribute” box and either select an existing attribute or create a new attribute.

We’re done with the “Appointment Confirmation – YES” Dialogue. Now it’s time to create new Dialogues depending on how the person answers the question in this Dialogue – YES or NO.

In the screenshot below, you’ll see that I’ve created a new Dialogue called “Appointment Confirmation – No Symptoms” for those who say they are experiencing no COVID-19 symptoms.

Similarly, I’ve also created a path for those that answer “NO.”

Step #6: Build out your remaining Dialogue paths

Below you’ll see two screenshots. The first is an example Dialogue you could use for those who answer that they have no COVID-19 symptoms, and the second is for those who answered that they were indeed experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.

1. Appointment Confirmation – No Symptoms:

1. Appoint Confirmation – Yes Symptoms

Step #7: Test out your appointment reminder text chatbot

To test this bot for yourself, text REMINDER to +1-802-294-4135, click here to chat in Messenger, or test out the bot right here in the bottom right corner of the page by clicking the “Let’s chat!” button.

Here’s what you will see when you use the SMS keyword opt-in.

For more on SMS marketing, check out these super hand SMS marketing tips!

Important Next Steps

The post How To Send Automated Appointment Reminder Text Messages to Clients appeared first on Customers.ai.

In 2020, I was a little surprised that my friend didn’t know what a chatbot was. So I did what any reasonable person would do and took a poll from everyone in the establishment. Totally normal, right?

The result: Roughly half of the patrons I asked had any idea what a chatbot was.

So, let’s make sure everyone knows exactly what a chatbot is!

In this article, we’ll cover the following topics to leave no doubt that you’ll be able to explain what a chatbot is to anyone who asks: 

• What’s a chatbot and how does it work?
  • Chatbot definition
  • How do chatbots work?
• What are chatbots used for?
  • How to use a chatbot for business
  • What is a Messenger chatbot?
  • What is text message marketing?
  • Examples of chatbots
• How to build a chatbot
  • Build bots for Messenger and SMS
  • How to add live chat to your website

Let’s get straight to it! What on earth is a chatbot?

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What is a Chatbot and How Does it Work?

In order to define chatbot accurately, let’s start with a textbook definition. Then, we can move onto what a chatbot for business is, and how chatbots work.

Chatbot definition

So, what is a chatbot?

Here’s the definition of ‘chatbot’ according to Dictionary.com: a chatbot is a computer program in the form of a virtual email correspondent that can reply to messages from computer users.

Okay, now that we have the not incredibly exciting definition of what is a chatbot out of the way, here’s an alternative definition that’s more suitable for business people and marketing professionals.

Also known as “conversational agents,” chatbots are software applications that mimic written or spoken human speech for the purposes of simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person. 

You’ve used a chatbot before. I almost guarantee it.

Look in the lower right corner of your browser. That’s a chatbot.

There are two main ways chatbots are offered to visitors: 

1. Web-based applications: Software that allows users to interact through a web browser interface.  
2. Standalone apps: An application that runs on a device and doesn’t require anything else to be functional. All the logic is built into the app, so it doesn’t need an internet connection or any other services installed.

Today, chatbots are used most commonly in the customer service space, assuming roles traditionally performed by living, breathing human beings such as Tier-1 support operatives and customer satisfaction reps.

How do chatbots work?

Now that we know what a chat is, we should understand how a chatbot works and what a chatbot used for.

How do chatbots work?

From a high-level view, it looks like this:

• A user communicates with a computer program via text, voice, or even a smile or a wave.
• The computer program responds to what you’ve said based on how it has been programmed. Perhaps you typed “pricing” and the chatbot has been programmed to serve up information about your product costs.

The idea is fairly simple.

Chatbots can take different forms, depending on how they’re used.

For example, some chatbots use AI (artificial intelligence) and NLP (natural language processing) to simulate human conversation.

AI technology allows these chatbots to better understand, adapt to, and respond to a conversation.

Chatbots with advanced technology like NLP are increasingly useful. But for the day-to-day use of marketing, sales, and customer service, text-based chatbots are perfect.

Chatbots also differ according to where and how you interact with it.

For example, you can build chatbots to work on Skype, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger for Facebook and Instagram, as well as most other channels where messaging is permitted.

What are Chatbots Used For?

How to use a chatbot for business

For business, it’s important to know when and where to use chatbots to your advantage.

Chatbot software for business is most commonly used for marketing, customer support, and sales.

Plus, chatbots can be used across different marketing channels, such as Messenger for Facebook and Instagram, SMS text messaging, and live chat for your website.

What is a Messenger chatbot?

Facebook Messenger marketing solutions for business include a range of tools and platforms to create chatbot virtual assistants for marketing, sales, and customer support on the most popular chat application in the U.S. 

In fact, Facebook Messenger is the second most used chat application in the world, with over 1.5 billion active monthly users.

So, what is a Messenger chatbot?

Facebook Messenger chatbots are artificial intelligence computer characters that can hold conversations with humans from within the Facebook Messenger chat application.

Businesses can develop inexpensive, feature-rich automated chat solutions for customer communication ranging from customer service to entertainment to marketing and sales automation.

These solutions run on the end user’s chat marketing mobile app, desktop, or on their business website for users with a Facebook Messenger login.

Facebook Messenger chatbots are a scalable and affordable solution that can help businesses operate at a high level on par with large scale systems.

Advantages of Facebook Messenger chatbots include the fact that there are over 1.5 billion active global users of Facebook Messenger.

Customers report instantaneity and convenience of communicating with service providers from the chat applications they already have as their top two reasons for favoring chat for customer service communications. 

This is followed by the benefit of retaining a persistent chat history, another unique advantage of chatbots in Facebook Messenger.

Business use cases for Facebook Messenger

So, what are the most valuable things a Facebook Messenger chatbot can do?

• Build a chatbot for Facebook Messenger
• Send chat blasts to your Facebook contacts
• Run Facebook Messenger ads
• Facebook post autoresponders
• Run Facebook Messenger drip campaigns
• Using Facebook Messenger for customer support
• Measuring performance with bot analytics
• Run a giveaway on Facebook
• Get contact information from Facebook fans
• Messenger for Facebook Business Page

What is text message marketing?

Text messaging, or short message service (SMS), is used by every mobile phone user — regardless of where they live, the mobile device they own, and the technology they have on their phone.

And SMS marketing is increasingly popular, as made clear by the data and SMS marketing statistics such as these:

Here are 10 SMS marketing example campaigns:

1. Welcome message. “Thanks for signing up for updates.”
2. Sales and promos. “Take 20% off your order with code THANKYOU.”
3. Event invitations. “Join us for a live webinar on 5/1 at 4 pm.”
4. Status updates. “Valued client, we have updated our policies.”
5. Lifestyle and community. “Everything’s going to be amazing.”
6. Booking confirmations. “You’re booked! See you on 3/17/2020 at 3:00 pm.”
7. Appointment reminders. “Your appointment is tomorrow, 3/17/2020, at 3:00 pm.”
8. Billing reminders. “Your balance of $100 will be paid by card on 8/1/2020.”
9. Security codes. “123456 is your verification code. It expires in 15 minutes.”
10. Internal company updates. “Team, please be aware of building maintenance.”

For more text marketing examples, see this article with 10 instant SMS marketing examples to stay in touch with customers via text.

Chatbot examples

Chatbots have gone mainstream and many of the world’s largest companies have incorporated bots into their overall growth marketing strategy. 

Take the following popular chatbot from Fandango for example. This bot informs you of all the latest movies, where to find showtimes, and even purchase tickets:

There are too many chatbot examples to cover in this article. However, here are 10 to start with, and if you want more, along with the details, check out these 17 successful chatbot examples to grow your business!

1. Increase open rates by 3X with text message marketing bots.
2. Create an interactive survey.
3. Get prospects and customers to opt-in to messaging on other channels, such as SMS. 
4. Qualify and capture leads with live chat.
5. Use menus and automated FAQs.
6. Interactive mobile ads on Facebook. 
7. Increase sales by 5X using chatbots.
8. Proactively engage with visitors on your website using live chat.
9. Get more reviews with a bot.
10. Increase ROAS (return on ad spend) using chatbots.

Here are seven more chat marketing tactics you can use today.

How To Build a Chatbot

So, how do you build a bot for business?

There are different chatbots for different channels. For this article, you’re about to learn how to add a chatbot to your website. 

However, you can build a bot for other major marketing channels such as Messenger and SMS. And, if you use omnichannel chatbot software like Customers.ai, you can build them all on one platform.

How to build chatbots for Messenger and SMS

So, when you’re ready to build Messenger bots, Facebook live chat bots, or SMS text marketing bots, you can find those guides here:

• How to build an SMS bot in 10 minutes or less with zero coding experience.
• Add Facebook live chat to your website. Yes, you can do that. ????
• How to build a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

How to add live chat to your website

The most popular use case for chatbots is adding live chat to your website.

Here’s a great video, part of the Customers.ai tutorial series from Chatimize, that you can follow along with by creating a free Customers.ai account on how to add live chat to your website in just a few minutes:

Important Next Steps

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Supported by data, there’s no better channel for business and marketing pros to master: 

• 75% of customers prefer live chat with businesses over email or call.
• Chat messaging has 10X – 100X higher engagement than email and social media channels.

Rated #1 by Entrepreneur, Customers.ai chatbot software is the most advanced omnichannel marketing bot platform. And there’s a lot to unpack.

So, we’ve broken down the best overall chatbot software into the following sections:

• Different ways to use chatbot software for marketing
• How to use chatbot software to sell more online
• Improve customer experience with chatbot software for customer support

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Chatbot Software for Marketing

Founded by globally recognized marketing mastermind, Larry Kim, Customers.ai has a growing list of growth marketing tools to choose from.

Using its proprietary OmniChatⓇ technology, Customers.ai connects chat marketing solutions from Facebook Messenger, Instagram messaging, live chat on websites, SMS text message marketing, and other top performing marketing channels, all from one platform.

Lead generation chatbot software

Customers.ai OmniChatⓇ facilitates lead capture, lead qualification, and lead nurturing in the chat apps your customers prefer.

Having the ability to use live chat software tools across different marketing channels, all from one unified messaging inbox, is a game-changer that only the best chatbot software can deliver.

Here are some other great examples you can get started with today to generate leads using live chat:

• Add a Free Facebook Lead Generator to your Facebook Page and Posts.
• Proactive live chat increases prospect and client engagement on your website.
• Using Facebook autoresponders to capture your fans’ contact information.
• Run a giveaway on Facebook to generate many leads, fast.

Adding Customers.ai to your lead generation tools is guaranteed to generate tons of quality leads for your small business with the help of marketing automation tools.

Make Facebook ads interactive

One of the many digital marketing tools available on the Customers.ai platform is built specifically for Facebook Messenger ads.

Facebook Messenger ads present a rare opportunity that pro digital marketers are taking advantage of. 

And that’s because Facebook Messenger ads are different than regular Facebook ads. Most importantly, Messenger ads perform better than normal Facebook ads because they start a more engaging conversation with chatbots.

A couple of types of Facebook Messenger ads exist. There’s an ad viewed on any Facebook property that directs traffic to Messenger. And then there’s sponsored content that’s native in Messenger.

Another cool thing about Facebook Messenger ad experiences is that they can take place across the Facebook family of apps, including the Facebook newsfeed, Instagram newsfeed, Facebook and Instagram Stories, Marketplace, Messenger, and others.

Here are the top 4 reasons to use Facebook Messenger ads:

• Messenger ads outperform other ads by 2X-10X
• Instant lead and data capture
• More features available for personalization
• Automated lead qualification and follow-ups with chatbots

Check out the top 7 Facebook ad hacks of all time to get some more ideas!

Remarketing with chatbot software

Chatbots are great for remarketing and retargeting. You can reengage your contact lists by sending:

• Messenger blasts
• SMS blasts
• Facebook ads
• Remarketing lists
• 1-on-1 communications

Remarketing takes place both at the top and the bottom of your marketing and sales funnels.

You have these Facebook tools at your disposal:

• Facebook ads – Use Customers.ai’s Facebook Ads audience sync to create a custom audience based on any audience you segment in Customers.ai.
• Facebook Messenger ads – Set up a click-to-Messenger ad using the same audience sync tool mentioned above.
• Sponsored Messages – Sponsored messages are sent via the Customers.ai Promo Blaster to send a promotional message outside of the 24+1 window to an audience of your existing contacts.

Your remarketing pitch can include things like blog content, coupons, deals, discounts, giveaways, contests, quizzes, downloads, etc.

If you were diligent about creating attributes and segmenting your audience when you set up your dialogues, remarketing should be easy.

You can check out your Customers.ai’s Audiences dashboard to look at all the audiences you’ve created. Then, you can design a remarketing campaign designed to reach a specific audience that may be close to converting.

If you haven’t, no worries. There are plenty of opportunities to learn, re-test, reconfigure, tweak, optimize, and experiment.

Two things will be helpful as you work to improve your Facebook Messenger funnel: Page Insights and Customers.ai bot analytics.

In order to get to your Facebook Page insights, select “Page Insights” from your Page menu, and then “Messages” from the Page Insights menu. From here, you can take a look at some of the key data trends on your Messenger activity, such as new connections and block rate.

Another great source of information can be found in Customers.ai bot analytics, which you can access by going to from the Analytics tab.

Bot analytics in Customers.ai provides data on your contacts, custom audience segmentation, forms statistics, and advanced bot analytics.

Using Bot Analytics, for example, you can get valuable insights into the growth of your contacts, open rates, sessions, conversions, and more.

List building with chatbot software

Whether you’re just getting started with growing your email list or you’re ready to grow your audience 10X in 2021, there are many options for marketers to grow your email list fast

But here’s why chatbots are your secret weapon to growing your email list:

When prospects or customers are chatting with your bot, they’re engaging with your brand. This is a great time to invite someone to create a connection via email as well.

And chatbots, it just so happens, are a great email capture software tool because they’re interactive, convenient, and instant. Plus, people are more likely to engage in chat than they are to fill out a form.

So, once you capture user data, where does it live? Customers.ai will hold all of your bots captured user data. Additionally, chatbot software can be connected directly to an email marketing platform to automatically send contact data, including an email address.

Lastly, here’s some bonus material with multiple options for how to get email addresses from Facebook using chatbot software.

Target the right audience with chatbot automation and segmentation tools

Live chat is the channel of choice for customer support, but it’s also a great tool for lead generation.

Using live chat for lead generation includes leveraging the interactivity and high-engagement of messaging to get more subscribers, signups, and opt-ins.

Where you have signup forms, consider using interactive chat forms to increase form conversions.

Customers.ai customers have found that switching from static web forms to interactive web chat forms that users can finish at their own convenience increases conversion rates by up to 75%.

Additionally, Quick Questions allow you to save attributes to your contacts’ profiles with ease. String Quick Questions together to qualify leads and customize conversion funnels based on user selections.

Forms, as you’d expect, let you collect multiple fields of lead information. Like Quick Questions, Form data saves custom variables to contacts.

Use Forms to specify fields that count as a completed conversion in bot analytics:

In the example above you’ll see that the chatbot asks the question, “What’s your phone number?” When the user replies with what the bot recognizes as a phone number, a conversion is recorded and can be viewed in your chatbot analytics.

Chatbot Software for Sales

Chatbot marketing is an extremely effective way to sell products online. This is due to a number of factors, including, but not limited to:

• Chatbots are 24/7 sales assistants that can sell on their own or capture client information for follow-ups.
• And that chatbot software improves the customer experience and improves conversion metrics throughout the sales funnel by creating an interactive and low-friction process. 

Check out how to build a chatbot for sales when you’re done with this article.

Promotional marketing chatbot solutions

Chatbots are great for running promos. And that’s because with an omnichannel chatbot like Customers.ai, you have multiple avenues to get in front of the right prospects at the right time.

It’s very common to add a discount or other promotion to sweeten the deal and encourage conversions. Without a tempting offer, a direct marketing campaign stands little to no chance to succeed.

Other examples to increase conversions in your direct response campaigns include time restrictions, giveaways, and information highly sought out by your target audience. 

The more you refine your offer combined with the right chatbot channel, the lower your CPA (cost per acquisition) will be.

For example, SMS text marketing is a great chatbot channel for running a promotion. 

You can also initiate conversations about sales and promos using an automated follow-up that sends a coupon code to new subscribers through chatbot drip marketing campaigns.

Opt-in prospects and customers for ongoing messaging

You’re never going to make a sale 100% of the time on the first interaction, of course.

Instead, for those interactions that do not result in a sale, you can use chatbot software to sign people up for ongoing marketing communication in real-time messaging channels like Messenger and SMS.

For example, using a Customers.ai chatbot for text message marketing, you can use an SMS keyword to opt-in customers to receive future communication via text. In the case below, the keyword being used is, “CLUB”.

An American Marketing Association report notes that businesses report live chat supports all stages of a customer journey:

• Marketing awareness: 29%
• Early-stage direct sales: 32%
• Marketing conversion to sales prospects: 39%
• Mid-stage direct sales: 24%
• Sales closing: 18%
• Post-sales customer support, education, engagement: 39%

For more opt-in strategies, take a look at this article on how to get more SMS subscribers.

Chatbot Software for Customer Support

The best chatbot software should strive to create a better CX (customer experience) from the first touchpoint with a prospect to actions that help to retain long-time customers.

There are incredible benefits to gain from customer support chat software, such as:

• Increased customer loyalty, sales, and revenue as a result of live chat, according to 79% of businesses surveyed.  (Kayako)
• A 10% lift in AOV (average order value) when a buyer’s journey includes customer support chat. (ICMI)
• Chat support (41%) is preferred to phone support (32%), email support (23%), and support via social media (3% ). (Kayako)

Unified multichannel live chat inbox

Giving customers control to use the chat app that’s already on their phone means more conversations started. And when customers use live chat in their customer journey, it leads to more downstream revenue.

In fact, according to eMarketer, 38% of surveyed buyers said they had made their purchase directly because of a chat session.

The advantages of customer chat are clear.

So what’s it look like in practice? And how can a business effectively be available in all the chat messaging apps that a customer may be looking for?

Enter the OmniChat inbox: One messaging inbox that streamlines a business’s multiple customer chat channels. That includes, Messenger, SMS, and live web chat for your website.

Use a unified OmniChat inbox to:

• View all conversations happening across native chat, Messenger chat, and SMS (WhatsApp, Instagram Messenger, and Apple Business coming soon).
• Filter conversations by status (e.g. follow-up, done), assigned agent, or messaging channel.
• Respond to conversations with live chat.
• Save notes and tags to customer profiles.

The right tool can be a time saver and efficiency generator that makes marked improvements in customer satisfaction.

24/7 automated chatbot support software

In addition to generating leads, sign-ups, and opt-ins with chatbot software, when a customer messages your business you can:

• Set up menus so they can browse your content and offers easily.
• Automate answers to FAQs.
• Talk to them one-on-one from the live chat mobile app for iOS and Android.
• Integrate your chatbot software with your marketing tech stack.

More than anything, prospects and customers want fast answers to their questions.

This is why using a chatbot builder can be such an asset for your bot-powered business. It gives you the ability to provide instant responses to a generation of consumers that has come to expect that as part of standard service.

Customers don’t need to talk to a person to get an instant answer in chat. 

Your business can program answers to FAQs for your bot to handle and customers can get the critical information they need without ever talking to a live agent.

The way you set that up is with customer support chat Q&A triggers.

Set up keywords that trigger a response to a customer’s question in the chat.

You can even see the questions people are asking in chat sessions and program answers to those questions from existing bot content or create new content.

Create an ideal customer journey on your website

Every page on your website has a different goal. And different pages might even have multiple customer profiles in mind.

So don’t make the mistake of adding just one generic chat widget on every page on your site.

Instead, take a look at the different customer personas using your site. Then map your web pages to the customer journey and use page-specific chat widgets to help users navigate to info aligned with their needs.

Additionally, set up custom greetings for important website pages. Predict what that page visitor is looking for, and use a greeting designed to start more conversations.

For instance, the web chat greeting on your pricing page might be: “Do you want to see if you qualify for SPECIAL pricing?”

While the web chat greeting on the purchase confirmation page might be: “Would you like to receive text message updates about your order?”

Here are some custom greetings that can act as ice breakers:

• Would you like help in finding the right-size bicycle for your kid?
• Are you looking for a rental apartment, buying a home or condo, or selling your property?
• Would you mind taking a brief survey about your customer experience today?

It’s easy to set up a custom greeting, the automated follow-up, and menu system for individual web pages using Customers.ai. Which could look like this:

Create a new customer chat widget for each custom greeting and conversation flow you want to design.

Then select the page to display it on, and build the chat menu system. This should resemble a ‘phone tree’ that helps a user select the info they need.

Check out these 11 brilliant web chat examples that you can use today for more ideas.

Take over live chat conversations and route customers to the best live agent

Chatbot software should allow you to set up smart notifications in email, mobile app, and browser to alert agents when to take over with live chat.

Live chat takeover and hot lead alerts for your live agents need to be timely in order to close more deals.

Transferring a customer from chatbot to live agent is easy to do and always available with a live operator chat takeover in Customers.ai.

A smart chatbot does the job of answering FAQs and routing customers that need a live agent to the right representative.

Live operator takeover is supported by smart alerts and notifications of conversations requiring a live agent follow-up. 

Notifications can be set up as browser notifications, mobile app notifications, email notifications, and more.

Then, live agents can jump into the conversation at the right time thanks to easy-to-setup live chat lead notifications.

Drop a notification widget into any automated conversational flow and select from the notification options that work best for any team — from browser notifications to email alert to web app or mobile app notification.

And the Customers.ai desktop inbox features more advanced customer support team features, such as assigning chats to agents and marking conversations as needing follow-up or done.

Furthermore, the OmniChat inbox collects all the chat conversations happening across your brand’s messaging channels. Which includes Messenger, live web chat, and SMS – in one unified location so that you can streamline your chat support efforts.

Customers.ai also has tools to let you respond to customers in a mobile chat app: View and respond to customers wherever you are from the live chat mobile app for Android and iOS.

Using chatbot software for customer satisfaction surveys

Surveys are a great engagement and data gathering chatbot example. Set up drip messages to automate customer support satisfaction surveys.

Drip campaigns automatically send messages to customers based on triggers, like when a new contact subscribes, you can send a welcome message and offer.

Or when a customer support ticket is closed, and a chat conversation is marked done, that can trigger a satisfaction survey.

Using a pre-chat form as a way to qualify leads for your live agents is a great way to proactively engage with your website visitors and generate leads. Customers.ai live chat surveys:

• Are quick and easy for users to complete with clicks of the mouse
• Save the survey information they collect in your customer profiles
• Allow for you to send follow-up content

There’s a lot of marketing value in pre-chat surveys. And maybe the most valuable is the data you can capture quickly and then use to create targeted audiences for future engagement with customers and prospects alike.

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Important Next Steps

The post Best Chatbot Software: #1 Ranked Omnichannel Marketing Solution appeared first on Customers.ai.

But in order to gather more leads, your business can’t be publishing donkey-level Facebook posts all the time.

Here’s the thing: Facebook’s news feed algorithm only gives visibility to posts that have engagement.

The more active engagement, like comments, on your Facebook posts, the more people will see them.

So here’s a unicorn tactic for higher Facebook post engagement which will help you increase your leads….

The Facebook post auto responder is a Facebook tool that helps your business engage customers, expand reach, and, most importantly, convert your commenters into leads.

Today I want to inspire you with 5 ideas of how you can use a Facebook bot auto responder to convert commenters into leads.

Then we’ll make this comment guard together.

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What is a Facebook Auto Responder?

The concept of a Facebook auto responder is simple.

It’s actually a Facebook auto reply bot that automatically sends a message to any user that comments on a Facebook post that is set up with one.

These bots go by different names — Facebook auto responder, auto reply bot, comment guard — they all serve the same purpose:

Turn the people that comment on your posts into named contacts that you can message privately and personally.

The process is simple:

• Build a Facebook auto responder
• Set up a compelling Facebook post with the bot
• Wait for users to comment
• When users comment, the bot will automatically send them a message

The best part is, when the user responds to the bot’s message, that user will be added to your Facebook Messenger contact list.

If the bot requests more user information, such as email or phone number, the user can be added to your business’s other contact lists!

Piece of cake.

There’s some secrets to having a Facebook auto responder that gets unicorn engagement and gathers tons of leads.

First of all, you’ll want to make your Facebook post compelling, so that people will want to comment on it.

Some great ways to guarantee comments are:

• Offering services
• Hosting contests
• Asking open-ended questions
• Giving discount codes
• Entertainment and user interaction

If you create a post offering a discount code, for example, you can encourage users to comment in order to receive the code.

Then, you can set up your Facebook auto responder bot to request the user’s email before giving them the discount code.

Boom!

Now you’ve increased your engagement by encouraging a lot of users to comment on your post, and collected tons of leads using your Facebook auto responder tool.

5 Ways to Use a Facebook Auto Responder to Get More Leads & Increase Engagement

There’s some awesome examples of Facebook auto responders in the wild, so here’s some ideas to inspire you to create your own…

B2B Services

Businesses aren’t always interacting the most with everyday Facebook users.

And there’s no reason that Facebook auto responders should be limited to use by B2C companies.

Companies that provide B2B services can get just as much use out of this Facebook tool.

Here’s an example from Search Engine Journal:

This is a question directed at marketers and people who know marketing well — otherwise, why would they have left behind any marketing tactics in the first place?

Users comment on the post in order to receive SEJ’s list of outdated marketing tactics.

Here’s the result:

First, they send a message with the content of their original post, asking the user to type “ghosts” in order to receive the list.

So, I typed “ghosts,” and…

The bot sent the list, complete with ghost GIF.

Offering B2B services like white papers, lists, etc. in exchange for connecting in Facebook Messenger is an exchange of value to collect leads.

Converting commenters into leads through posts like this is as simple as asking the user for their email and emailing the list to them instead.

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Contests

A great way to get folks engaged on your post is to host a contest.

Businesses host contests all the time; prizes can include giveaways, discounts, free products, or things that aren’t even related to the company.

People love contests, so these types of posts tend to get a lot of engagement — especially if entering the contest is as simple as commenting on the post!

That’s why using a Facebook auto responder for a contest is a great way to convert more users into leads.

Check out this example of a contest demo bot responding to users that commented on the contest entry post:

All users do is comment the name of their favorite football team, and the Facebook auto responder sends them a message.

There is one thing to be mindful of when your posts involve contests, giveaways, or specifically asking people to comment: steering clear of Facebook’s cautions around engagement bait.

Facebook has rules against posting engagement bait, which simply means posts that goad users into interacting.

It’s important to be mindful of Facebook’s Newsfeed Guidelines when setting up your Facebook auto responder bots, otherwise your posts might get removed.

Open Ended Questions

On the topic of avoiding engagement bait, here’s an example of a post that could be set up with a Facebook auto responder without specifically asking people to comment, like, or share the post.

Asking open-ended questions allows people to share things (which we all love to do!).

Consider creating a post that asks users an open-ended question where they can type whatever they want for an answer.

Examples of these are “What’s your favorite food?” “what’s your favorite color?” “what’s your dog’s name?” etc.

Check this out:

I posted a simple question on the Customers.ai Island Facebook group.

This wasn’t set up with a Facebook auto responder, I was simply posing a question.

But, look at that!

It has 309 comments of people sharing where they’re from.

If this was a post on my Facebook business page set up with a Facebook auto responder, that would have been around 309 potential leads.

Discount Codes

Offering discount codes will definitely boost engagement, leading to greater post visibility and helping your convert more users into contacts.

Here’s an example from another Customers.ai demo bot:

Notice how this post does not explicitly ask users to comment on the post in order to receive the discount code.

It says “Let me know below!”

This way, users know to comment on the post, but it isn’t in direct violation of Facebook’s engagement bait rules.

User Interaction

As we’ve covered, more engagement means more leads.

And in order to get more engagement, a post needs to be compelling.

What better way to interest users than making them part of the fun?

Facebook posts that promote user interaction tend to do well.

Posts like this can include guessing games, silly quizzes, riddles and other fun topics.

Take, for example, this tweet of mine:

It’s simply a photo of a chalkboard with a riddle written on it.

The riddle is silly and fun, so it sparked users to comment…a lot!

Most commenters got the answer right.

The riddle has no question mark at the end, so it’s not a riddle at all — it’s simply a statement!

Regardless of how silly the riddle was, it got a lot of engagement from users online.

Now, if this tweet was a Facebook post set up with a Facebook auto responder, it would have still gotten a ton of engagement — but that engagement would have generated leads.

Because if this riddle was in a Facebook post with a Facebook auto responder, the bot would have reached out to anyone who commented on it, offering them the answer.

Then all of the folks you see tweeting the answer here (and over 100 other replies you don’t see!) would have been converted into leads that I could reach out to again.

In fact, let’s make this exact Facebook post auto reply bot together in Customers.ai now. Comment on this post to see the final comment autoresponder in action.

How to Build a Facebook Auto Responder in 3 Steps Using Customers.ai

The first step to building any bot is to sign up for the free Customers.ai chatbot builder.

This is where you’ll get started by creating the Facebook Messenger funnel that your bot will follow with its dialogues.

To get started, sign up for Customers.ai and connect your Facebook page. Then you can follow along with these steps.

From the Facebook tools in Customers.ai, go to FB Comment Guards.

Step 1: Name the comment guard and the choose the post you want to add this comment guard to from the drop-down of your recent Facebook Page posts.

With Customers.ai’s Free Forever Unlimited Contacts plan, you can make a comment guard that triggers on every comment on every post of your Facebook Page. It’s called a Catch All Comment Guard and it turns every commenter into a lead you can follow-up with using Customers.ai.

If you upgrade to Customers.ai PRO (see all chatbot prices here), you can select a specific post for the bot to respond to.

Step 2: Write the conversation that your bot will have with your Facebook post commenters.

Your first question will be what the bot says to people as soon as they comment, so ask a question that matches whatever you included in your Facebook post.

In my Twitter riddle example, I’m going to ask “would you like to know the answer to the riddle?” and I give people a thumbs up emoji to enter the conversation. I follow up that question with the answer to the riddle.

As soon as the commenter clicks that thumbs up emoji (or says anything to the bot) they are now a lead in Customers.ai. Facebook automatically provides businesses with that users name and basic info like where they are located, their gender, their language, and more useful lead qualifying information.

Because it’s useful to get more lead info like their email address, I’ve added a question to collect their email, where I will send them a follow-up.

Step 3: Set up a frequency cap (how often in a given period someone can comment and get this autoresponder.

And that’s it! Click “Activate” and now your Facebook Post autoreply but is running and ready to collect leads from everyone who comments on your Facebook posts.

And that’s it!

You’ve created your Facebook auto responder and connected it to your post(s).

If you want, you can boost your Facebook post for more visibility, or you can leave it to gather comments from organic traffic.

Either way, whoever comments on your post will become a new lead — and it only took a couple of minutes.

See this whole lead generation chatbot flow in action by leaving a comment on this post.

Who Will See Your Facebook Auto Responder?

Unfortunately, it can be tough to get out of donkey territory in terms of views and engagement for your business on Facebook.

But there are ways to improve your chances of unicorn posts!

Using a Facebook auto responder helps to boost engagement, increase reach, and promote brand awareness for your business.

This great tool also guarantees leads by using Facebook Messenger automation to collect user information and convert more commenters into customers.

Now’s the time for you to head over to Customers.ai and create a Facebook auto responder for yourself.

Watch your engagement boom and your contact lists grow!

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The post Convert Commenters Into Leads with a Facebook Auto Responder for Page Posts (in Just 3 Steps for Free!) appeared first on Customers.ai.

However, with the current overload of requests and accurate information that needs to be efficiently distributed, there’s never been a time where chatbot automation was more needed for healthcare organizations. 

There are countless cases where a digital personal assistant or a chatbot could help physicians, nurses, patients or their families.

Here are just a few ways how healthcare organizations can use chatbots during these uncertain times, and in the future:

• Real-time updates: Publish necessary information in a timely manner.
• 24/7 access: Provide self-check guidelines that users can access anytime they start a chat session.
• Push notifications: Send outbound notifications with recent updates.
• Automate FAQs: Easily set up automated responses to frequently asked questions.
• Live chat takeover: Alert personnel as needed to follow-up in live chat.

In this article, we’ll show you two different ways to get up and running in minutes: 

1. Build a symptom checker chatbot from scratch with a code-free chatbot campaign builder, or 
2. Use a pre-built template from our healthcare partners to distribute vital information related to COVID-19.

Chatbot Technology in Healthcare Option 1: Build a symptom checker chatbot from scratch

The bot we’ll build together here will guide the user through self-assessment of COVID-19 symptoms.

Customers.ai chatbots feature OmniChat — write conversations once and they work on your customer’s favorite chat applications.

To try this chatbot technology in healthcare symptom checker for yourself, you can use any of these options:

• Click here to see the bot in Facebook Messenger
• Text COVID to +1-802-294-4135
• Chat with the bot in the bottom right corner of this page. After a few intro questions, you’ll have a chance to type COVID and start the self-checker sequence.

We’ll create this symptom checker bot in 4 steps:

• Step 1: Use Customers.ai’s free chatbot builder to write the symptom-checker conversation.
• Step 2: Add a keyword to trigger the symptom checker chatbot in Messenger and web chat.
• Step 3: Create a keyword opt-in for SMS subscribers.
• Step 4: Step 4: Test your health checker chatbot.

Step 1: Use Customers.ai’s free chatbot builder to write the symptom-checker conversation.

The first thing you’ll need to do is build a new chatbot using the Customers.ai chatbot builder.

Start by creating dialog folder by opening the Chatbots menu, selecting Dialogues, and then adding a new folder. In this example, we’ve named the Folder “COVID-19 Self Checker.”

After creating your Folder, choose “Add Dialogue” to start building your conversational workflow.

Here, you can add text, buttons and quick replies, images, attachments, videos, and GIFs using more than a dozen rich-media content widgets.

In our example, we’ve kept it simple and chosen the Text widget.

Here you can see the first dialogue our chatbot will use. We’ve named this dialogue our “Self Checker – Welcome” message.

Next in the chatbot builder, we add another dialogue, which in this case we’ve named “Self Checker- Assessment 1.”

For this dialogue, we’re using the “Quick question” widget, which you can use to ask a question and add answers for the user to choose from.

In this example, we’ve asked if the person is experiencing any symptoms at the moment, and we provide either an answer of, “Yes” or “No.”

Note that when we do this for text messaging, the SMS tools will translate quick replies into numbers, like “Text 1 for Yes, 2 for No.”

Depending upon whether the person answers “Yes” or “No”, there will be different paths that user will take.

If the answer is, “Yes” then no new dialogue needs to be created. However, if the answer is, “No” you will want to “Take users to a new Dialogue.”

In this example, we’ve already created a new Dialogue and named it, “Self Checker – No Symptoms” in the case the person answers “No.” This path will cause the user to receive a message that most likely will end the conversation.

Now that we’ve created our next Dialogue (Assessment 1), we need to build out the user flow. In the image below, you’ll see that if the person selects “I understand” from the “Self Checker – Welcome” Dialogue, they’ll be sent to the “Self Checker – Assessment 1” Dialogue.

Additionally, you can use Customers.ai to segment your audience. So, what we’ve also done here, is we’ve added a tag for anybody that selects, “I understand.” In this case, we’ve used the tag “self_checker_covid_bot”.

This will make it easy for you to separate this audience from others, and to use that specific audience for immediate and future marketing campaigns, if you so choose.

So, what do we do if the person using chatbot technology in healthcare actually is experiencing symptoms?

In the example below, we’ve added another “Quick question” widget with eight possible answers for the end-user to choose from. Seven are common COVID-19 symptoms, and the eighth is what they would choose should they not be experiencing any of those symptoms – “None of these.”

Now, chances are if you’re building a serious chatbot technology in healthcare, you’re going to want to be able to not only collect, but filter the data you’ve collected.

One of many audience segmentation and data collection tools you can use in Customers.ai is the attribute tool. Every interaction that happens in automated messages gets saved to your contact database, creating rich customer profiles.

You can view a contact’s profile, including conversation history and the responses saved as attributes, from the Customers.ai contact manager.

See contact attributes from the mobile app inbox as well as the desktop app tools.

In this example, we want to be able to save the response to an attribute that will allow us to filter which of the symptoms people are experiencing.

To do this, we’ve added a new attribute and named it, “COVID-SYMPTOM”

For more information on Customers.ai audience segmentation tools, check out #15 and #16 from this list of 20 SMS Marketing Tools No Business Should Be Without.

You can also add the attribute you’ve created in your text, as you can see in the image below.

In this case, the person has selected a symptom, and we’re providing that person instructions on what to do next. For example, if the person chose “Feeling confused” as a symptom they were experiencing, this healthcare chatbot’s response would automatically replace where it says, “{{COVID-SYMPTOM}}” with “Feeling confused.”

Step 2: Add a keyword to trigger the symptom checker chatbot in Messenger and web chat.

Alright, we’ve created a fairly simple symptom checker chatbot. Next, we need to define a keyword to trigger your chatbot.

You can use the Keywords tool to set up an autoresponder via web chat or Facebook Messenger when someone texts a special word to your chatbot.

All you have to do is go back under the Chatbots menu, select the Q&A option, and create a custom keyword.

In our example below, using the keyword “COVID” or “coronavirus” will trigger the autoresponder to deliver your Self Checker – Welcome message.

Go ahead and test it out for yourself by typing “coronavirus” into the chatbot at the bottom right of this page.

Note: in order to test this out via Customers.ai’s web chat, you’ll need to answer a couple of questions from the bot first. After that, you’ll be able to trigger the bot using the keyword.

Step 3: Create a keyword opt-in for SMS subscribers.

We’ve all seen the keyword method of SMS messaging opt-in that looks something like this:

“Text the word CLUB to 309-740-3151 to join Larry Kim’s unicorn marketing text message club!” (Yes, you can test this one out as well).

Use the SMS Keywords tool to set up an SMS autoresponder when someone texts a special word to your SMS marketing phone number.

It’s as easy as going to the SMS Keywords tool, customizing your keyword, and then setting up the SMS autoresponder using the StartBot chatbot builder.

For our chatbot technology in healthcare bot, we’ve identified our SMS Magic Keyword as “COVID”.

To set up your SMS chatbot for healthcare, simply copy and paste the text you used previously, and add the same navigation path.

Now, any time someone texts the keyword to the number, they will receive the custom SMS autoreply.

Step 4: Test your health checker chatbot.

To test this bot for yourself, text COVID to +1-802-294-4135, click here to chat in Messenger, or type COVID into the chatbot in the bottom right corner of the page after a few intro questions.

Here’s what you will see when you use the SMS keyword opt-in.

Chatbot Technology in Healthcare Option 2: Launch the COVID-19 Awareness Chatbot Template — A Customers.ai & Facebook Partnership

Customers.ai is working to help launch chatbots for government health organizations actively supporting COVID-19 response efforts.

We’ve partnered with Facebook in their global program to connect government health organizations and UN health agencies with developers that can assist them in leveraging the Messenger platform to more effectively share timely and accurate information, and speed up their responses to concerned citizens. 

Customers.ai is one of those developers, where organizations can get help with things like automating responses to commonly asked questions, which can take some of the burdens off of overwhelmed staff. You can also get guidance on effectively sharing updates with your audiences and seamlessly handing-off automated conversations to a live person when necessary.

In fact, we already have a full COVID-19 template you can use immediately to help you and your healthcare organization get started. 

Here’s some of the ready-to-go information that your healthcare chatbot will immediately be able to share with your online audience:

• What to do if you have COVID-19 symptoms.
• Preventative measures you can take to help stop the spread of COVID-19.
• The latest news on the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Answers to the most commonly asked COVID-19 questions.

How to Use the COVID-19 Awareness Chatbot Template

Step 1: Create a Facebook page (if you don’t have one already).

Step 2: Verify that messaging is turned on for Facebook page.

Step 3: Sign up for a FREE account with Customers.ai. Follow the step-by-step instructions in this helpdoc when you go through the signup process as a healthcare partner.

When you sign up, remember to: Select “COVID-19 Awareness Bot” as your template. Then edit and customize content to meet your needs.

Step 4: Schedule an onboarding call with one of our chat specialists.

Step 5: When you’re happy with your chat experience, activate your bot and start sending updates!

Using Chatbot Technology in Healthcare to Address the COVID-19 Pandemic

Customers.ai is proud to work with both Facebook and healthcare organizations around the world to help disseminate the most up-to-date information to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’re a qualifying healthcare provider, Customers.ai wants to have your back, which is why qualifying organizations will receive the following for a complimentary offer to get started with a free account. For your first 3 months you’ll get:

• Unlimited Facebook contacts
• Unlimited Facebook messages
• 3 additional user seats
• Access to all Customers.ai PRO features and revolutionary OmniChat technology

After this promotional period, you will have the option to upgrade to a value-packed pro plan or maintain your free account indefinitely, with some messaging limits.

We’re in this together, which is why we want to help healthcare providers and businesses stay connected with customers instantly using the messaging apps they already use.  If you need more help check out this link.

Claim our new Free Forever Edition Customers.ai account, and see our Customers.ai for healthcare organizations page for more information.

Important Next Steps

• Sign up for Customers.ai’s OmniChat chatbot builder to build an SMS bot and launch and text message marketing campaigns.
• Text “DEMO” to 1-802-294-4135 to see an interactive SMS bot in action. 
• Learn about SMS marketing with other businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs. Join Customers.ai Island, a Facebook Group of 35k marketers and entrepreneurs.

The post How to Use Chatbot Technology in Healthcare Organizations [COVID-19 Symptom Checker] appeared first on Customers.ai.

That’s simply by definition. To have a popular chatbot, it needs to be fun, interactive, and profitable.

Whether you’re looking for inspiring chatbots for ecommerce or retail, chatbots for generating B2B leads, or are trying to gain traction for your products and services in an innovative way, look no further. 

The chatbots shared here are unicorns that you can leverage for your own chat marketing campaigns.

We are constantly adding to this list and we’d love to know the exciting, helpful and purposeful chatbots that check the boxes for you. Add yours in the comments and we’ll add them to this list of chatbots.

What is a marketing chatbot? If you want to know, look there.

What are the most popular chatbots?

Here are 11 of the world’s most popular chatbots today achieving growth marketing strategy gains in sales, publishing, education, and service industries:

1. Fandango
2. Sephora
3. Wall Street Journal 
4. National Geographic 
5. James Patterson “The Chef” Short Story 
6. AccuWeather 
7. TGIFridays
8. Western Union
9. Summit Academy OIC 
10. Customers.ai 
11. Stanford’s QuizBot 

Let’s take a closer look at what makes these popular bots such a valuable asset for business.

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Create chatbots like these using Customers.ai’s free multi-channel chatbot builder. 

Customers.ai integrates SMS marketing tools alongside for Facebook Messenger bots, website chatbots and more.

Fandango

This one’s for the movie fiends. Fandango’s chatbot is perfect for those who want to be in the loop on all the latest movies. 

Others will simply enjoy the chatbot because of its easy-to-use interface, right through Facebook Messenger, and the way it highlights the top trending movies, trailers, and theaters.  

You can even find showtimes and purchase tickets. Fandango’s popular chatbot is truly a one-stop shop.

Don’t know about you, but I’m way more likely to use it because of this. 

It’s so much cleaner and easier to navigate than trying to compare movie times through three different movie theater sites. 

Convenient, useful chatbots for the win. 

Sephora

Sephora does a great job with their unique popular chatbots. Not only can you book makeup or skin services, some that are even free (!!), but you can explore your closet stores. 

Chatbots are a fantastic use-case for Sephora. 

They offer all types of appointments, from facials to full-face makeup to brow makeovers or even “lash & dash” appointments where they put your false eyelashes on for you. 

Sephora has a huge following and their popular chatbots simply allow everyone to take advantage of their services and appointments in a much more efficient way.

That’s what we call a popular chatbot. It’s solving problems, winning over old and new customers alike, and drawing attention.

Plus, by simply highlighting their services but not focusing too heavily on their products, they’re able to draw visitors into their stores, where they’re more likely to purchase items. 

The chatbot also lets users deal with customer service issues and provide feedback on store locations. A multi-use chatbot directly through Facebook Messenger. 

Wall Street Journal 

What better way to deliver the news than through a popular chatbot that delivers a personalized, one-on-one content delivery experience? 

Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Messenger chatbot sends you a “WSJ news digest” each morning, you can personalize it to the types of content you’d like to see. 

For example, readers can choose between receiving the latest news or focus in on a particular company for updates. There’s even a pre-filled button for podcast listeners. 

It’s a solid way for a company to innovate their product. Sure, WSJ newspapers are still being printed each day. 

Each day, those stories are loaded onto the web. But now, they’re taking it one step further with a bot that delivers news the way readers would like to see it. 

Think outside of the box when you’re building a chatbot for business.

National Geographic 

Who isn’t up for a game of trivia? 

National Geographic uses their Facebook Messenger chatbot in an unexpected and fun way for readers with Pop Geo, a world trivia game. 

They let you customize the chatbot game to topics you care about, like space.

Then, Pop Geo users get a few questions straight from the latest Nat Geo Almanac. 

All the while, they’re able to lightly push a sale. It’s genius. 

Popular chatbots don’t always have to be some crazy invented game. You can simply take something classic, like a trivia game, and put a spin on it to build engagement with your users. 

James Patterson “The Chef” Short Story 

Yes, you can take a classic game like trivia and put a spin on it, or you can completely surprise everyone with something that’s never been done before.

Bestselling author James Patterson chose the latter route when he published a thriller short story through a suspenseful chatbot. 

Not only did it catch readers’ eyes, but it was an innovative new way to deliver a story. 

Stories have been delivered the same few ways for years, and Patterson took a risk.

This popular chatbot paid off by getting the attention of new readers (after all, the story bot was free) and built up loyalty through engagement with longtime fans. 

I won’t give the whole story away. You’ll have to go check it out for yourselves, but I will say it’s a truly immersive experience to search through evidence alongside characters. 

Short story X mystery game X chatbot — anything is possible with chatbots.

AccuWeather 

Stepping away from games for a moment, AccuWeather’s Facebook Messenger chatbot provides you with an AI meteorologist. 

Not only does Dawn inform you of the weather in any location you wish, she also alerts you to any severe weather alerts so you can stay safe. 

My personal favorite function is the actual feels-like temp and the fact that I can view the next few days weather all through Facebook Messenger. There’s no need to download another app to my phone. 

AccuWeather isn’t doing anything complicated here. 

They’re simply providing a new efficient way for users to reach their product. And it works just as well as other popular chatbots out there. 

TGIFridays

If you have a loyal user base, why not give them another up-to-date way to order food efficiently?  

Much like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, or other popular chatbots, TGIFridays wanted to get in on the order-ahead bot business.

With their Facebook Messenger app, you can order to-go, find your closest locations, or make reservations. 

It’s an easy way for office employees to cater a meeting, make a lunch order, or book an after-work meal. 

If you’re in the food service industry, make your popular chatbot today! 

Western Union

Western Union, the financial services company, dove into popular chatbots by making it easier for their customers to send money. 

With their Facebook Messenger chatbot, users can send money or track transfers at the click of a button.

It’s a smart use-case for Western Union as customers no longer need to navigate through pages or log-ins on their site. They can simply access where they need to go, and they can do so instantaneously. 

Take note of their “What would you like to do?” welcome screen. It provides a valuable menu for users so they can make their way through the bot with pre-filled buttons. 

Not to mention, their Customer Care option that provides users a chance to explain their issue so that customer care agents can solve the problem faster. 

Summit Academy OIC 

Summit Academy OIC used their popular chatbots to enroll more students at their academy. Their campaign led to a 30% increase in prospective students. 

So, how’d they do it?

With click-to-Messenger campaigns. 

They cost-effectively increased enrollments and nurtured leads through automation. First, they ran click-to-messenger Facebook ads. This allowed them to filter to prospective students, and then provided those leads with the information they needed to make a decision. 

Prospective students could sign up for an information session via the Summit Academy OIC’s Facebook Messenger chatbot. 

And all of this was made possible through the Customers.ai chatbot. It’s bananas.

You can learn more about this Facebook Messenger ads case study, or jump in and build your own bot for free. 

Customers.ai 

Customers.ai has used a popular chatbot to broaden reach and lower the cost of lead acquisition. 

How?

With spectacular copy, personality, and content. 

Using Facebook click-to-messenger ads, they gained new contacts that they could then cycle through the customer lifecycle and send follow-up messaging and advertising too.

This is a clear example of how you can make content fun and engaging, while providing a valuable resource.  

Look at the below example from a later perspective in the customer lifecycle and take note. 

Popular chatbots can also come from providing users with exactly what they’re looking for.  

Customers.ai uses a single chatbot that works simultaneously in web chat, Facebook Messenger and SMS. 

See the effect of automated SMS lead tools for yourself by signing up for my SMS drip campaigns. Just text “CLUB” to 1-309-740-3151 to get my chatbot marketing updates.

Stanford’s QuizBot 

There are dozens of popular chatbots out there, but Stanford University’s QuizBot highlights the future potential of these intelligent bots. 

Stanford researchers designed a bot that helps students study factual information, and it outperformed other study methods like flashcards. Pretty impressive, right? 

Students who used QuizBot had over 20% more correct answers than those who used a flashcard app. 

The popular chatbot is designed for self-paced learning and it uses dialogue to help users learn science, English, and safety vocabulary. 

Now, just muse over the future applications…

Unicorn Tips to Making Your Own Popular Chatbots

OK, now it’s your turn. 

What’s your use-case for chatbots? 

While you can create popular web chat bots and start running them without a clear goal or use-case, you probably won’t receive the best possible results. 

Popular chatbots aren’t successful because they automatically know what to do (maybe by 2030 we can have next-level intelligent bots!), but because people are designing them in creative ways to elevate their businesses.

They’re finding the diamond in the rough, the unicorn disguised as a donkey.

Once you see it, you can’t go back.

If you’re having trouble determining your purpose or goal, here are some ideas:

• Welcome site visitors 
• Use chatbots for customer support that’s 24/7 instant and automated
• Provide fast access to information 
• Understand why someone’s come to your website
• Set up appointments or calls 
• Qualify and re-engage leads
• Promote offers and products
• Increase sales by relieving bottlenecks
• Entertain and delight visitors
• Reach consumers with your products in new ways

Those are just a few. There are dozens of more additional goals for chatbots for business.

Some of my personal favorite chatbot use cases start by inspiring and delighting consumers, as well as reaching consumers in innovative ways. 

Think of the James Patterson example or Nat Geo. But it doesn’t have to start out so complex. 

Just look at Sephora’s success with a relatively basic chatbot design. 

Once you have a use-case in mind, you can move onto designing your popular chatbots. 

Get started fast with Customers.ai chatbot templates for ecommerce, real estate, gyms, hair salons, etc. Customize templates to add details and swap out copy for your company’s voice and style. 

Get started today, and if you need more inspiration from popular chatbots, swing on over to Customers.ai’s chat marketing case studies.

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Popular Chatbots: Important Next Steps

FAQs About Popular Chatbots

Q: What are popular chatbots?

Popular chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate human conversation and interact with users in a conversational manner. They are widely used across various industries to provide customer support, automate tasks, and deliver personalized experiences.

Q: Which industries are using popular chatbots?

Popular chatbots are utilized in a wide range of industries, including e-commerce, healthcare, banking, travel, and customer service. They can be found on websites, messaging apps, and social media platforms to enhance customer engagement and streamline business processes.

Q: What are some examples of popular chatbots?

Some popular chatbots include:

• 1. Chatfuel: A chatbot platform used for creating Facebook Messenger bots.
• 2. Dialogflow: A natural language understanding platform by Google that powers chatbots across various channels.
• 3. IBM Watson Assistant: An AI-powered chatbot solution capable of handling complex conversations.
• 4. Customers.ai

Q: What are the benefits of using popular chatbots?

Popular chatbots offer several benefits, such as:

• Improved customer service and support.
• Increased efficiency by automating repetitive tasks.
• 24/7 availability for users.
• Personalized user experiences.
• Cost savings by reducing the need for human resources.

Q: Are popular chatbots capable of understanding natural language?

Yes, popular chatbots leverage natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and interpret user input. They analyze text or speech and use machine learning algorithms.

The post The Big List of the Most Popular Chatbots & Lessons for Making Your Own Unicorn Bots appeared first on Customers.ai.

And unless you can serve precisely what they’re looking for in a matter of nanoseconds, they’re going to be off like a monkey up a banana tree! ????

Today we’re going to answer “How to Build a Q&A Chatbot for FAQs” in the second episode of the Chat Marketing Train. We’ll show you how to answer your users’ questions instantly with a chatbot — and build a Q&A chatbot step-by-step in this quick demo.

The Chat Marketing Train is Customers.ai’s new series that delves into chat marketing tips, tools and case studies as well as reviewing new Customers.ai features — plus conversing with chat marketers who are leading the way in this brave new world!

Build a powerful Q&A automation while honing your chatbot for FAQs

Providing a smooth, enjoyable Q&A chatbot experience is key to your success. Utilizing an FAQ-based chatbot can not only up your customer satisfaction levels, but also up your number of customers due to increased conversion rates.

Why take the chance that users are going to stumble on the answer that they’re looking for on your website when you can provide the same answer faster in a chat marketing environment that you have much more control over?

Traditionally, businesses have published ‘frequently asked questions’ (FAQs) on their website. That’s perhaps been a cumbersome way for users to pinpoint the exact information that they’re looking for. How can you use chat to deliver the right piece of content to the right person at the right time, more efficiently?

Website chatbots are a helpful kind of ‘pull mechanism’. If a customer or a prospect is looking for information, if they don’t know what they’re looking for, they know that they’re going to have to ask a question. Through natural language processing, in a format that’s very conversational and interactive, a chatbot has the potential to deliver the right answers instantly at any time, 24/7. This can be game-changing for a business that’s reliant on answering their customer’s questions in a timely and efficient manner.

The challenge to service these needs for the marketer or the person building the chatbot is having all the potential answers lined up beforehand. Start with your product or service documentation, or your FAQ chatbot content.

Of course, you’ll want to retain this FAQ content on your website as well (for users and search engines alike). This isn’t a bots-versus-website scenario. Start programming your answers into Customers.ai on an “if, then” basis – i.e. if a question includes a phrase that’s likely to require a specific answer, offer that as a solution to the customer’s needs.

You’re also going to be able to learn much more about what customers are looking for using chatbots. It will become a discovery mechanism for you as well – a place to get into the heads of your customers and learn what they actually need from you, what they’re asking your bot. Use this as a way to hone your chatbot for FAQs.

When you’re programming your Q&A triggers, you’ll also be able to see what the chatbot wasn’t able to match content to. Use this information to either match these unanswered questions to content that already exists in your chat form responses already, or write new FAQ responses for these queries. Just look for “unanswered questions” inside Customers.ai to get started with this.

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Delivering the right FAQ-based chatbot response at the right time

One of the keys to delivering a satisfactory experience via your FAQ-based chatbot is to ensure that you’re delivering the best answer to each and every question and so that users feel satisfied and pleased that they have engaged with your brand using chat.

How do you deliver the right answer to the right person, especially when some website FAQs can quite long and cumbersome?

Delivering the right content to the right person through your chatbot, as well as knowing how much content to include within your conversational chatbot can be something that you’ll just want to test over time. (Remember that you can link out to other resources from your bot. You don’t have to include everything in the direct conversation with your bot.)

Start with establishing the essence of the question, or the answer. Then say, “Has this answered your question? Offer to point to other resources. Offer to teach them more about a particular topic or finish off with a link that will let them explore further.

However, bear information overload in mind. And if you’re providing a link, review what percentage of your audience are actually clicking on the link. Use all the analytics at your disposal inside of Customers.ai. Compare click-through rates to see how useful your linked-to resources as perceived to be. Analytics is one of your key weapons when you’re designing your bot conversation and optimizing it for human users.

Analytics is one of your key weapons when you’re designing your bot conversation and optimizing it for human users.

Question auto-detection or FAQ menu?

Is it generally sufficient to detect phrases within the questions that your audience is asking in order to deliver your answers to those questions, or is it necessary and recommended to provide your users with an FAQ menu inside of your chat experience too?

It’s very much recommended and it’s best practice today, to give your customers or the people talking to your bot an architecture or a menu of options, very much like a phone tree. When you’re automating anything in marketing, you’re going to be looking to help people find the right path for them, because you can’t design for infinite responses.

That’s what AI is trying to get us towards, but that’s really not the most practical type of implementation of a set of automation sequences or a bot today. Think in terms of what the most common options are that somebody in their situation is looking for; and how you can help direct them to the answers that they need.

How to set up a keyword trigger that serves up the most appropriate answers

Let’s take a look at how to set up a keyword trigger that allows you to serve the right FAQ content to somebody who’s looking for it.

Here’s a screenshot of Virginia logging into the support bot that’s located inside of the Customers.ai app:

If you’re actively using Customers.ai at the moment and you have a question, then this is the bot that you can interact with to try to find a feature that you’re looking for.

Let’s test the bot to see if we have any smart answers that are already set up for the keyword “FAQ”:

We can see that this isn’t something that we have set up at the moment. It may be an opportunity that we’re missing, so as an example, let’s try to service that potential need and create a new sequence for queries that include that keyword.

Click on “Q&A” inside the “Chatbots” section in Customers.ai. We can see that here we already have a menu set up for people who are looking for information. Let’s try to create a smarter response for when our audience type in “FAQ”.

We can see that there are a number of FAQs that are already set up, related to the search query. For example, if somebody asks for something like “billing”, “refund”, “bill” or “upgrade”, we’ll then send them some information about how to access the billing area of the Customers.ai.“

Doing some more research, we can also see that we have some unanswered questions for this chatbot sequence. It’s a good idea while we’re here to either hook up these questions to existing answers or find a way of providing new answers for these queries and similar future queries.

However, we don’t see anything about FAQs directly here, so let’s try to resolve this opportunity first. To do so, we need to think about what information we’re wanting to deliver or where we’re wanting to send users who have this particular query.

For this example, let’s choose to send users to a frequently asked questions page on our website, so we’re going to send them to https://Customers.ai/help.

Let’s try setting this up and test our bot sequence…

Adding a new smart response for “FAQ” inside Customers.ai

This is where you add the keyword which is going to result in your smart response being delivered:

Selecting the smart response that gets displayed if our customer includes the keyword in their message

This is where you enter your desired smart response:

That’s done now. Whenever anyone types “FAQ” into the chat, they get referred to the “Help” section on the Customers.ai website. However, it’s important to always test your new sequence, just to make sure that it is working as intended:

This is how you can trigger the right response to somebody who’s looking for something particular in your bot.

You can use this type of response to set up some help information being delivered or trigger the right response to somebody who’s looking for something in particular. Consider the common words or phrases that people may search for in relation to your product or service – and implement something similar for your business!

Dealing with a particularly large FAQ section using a bot

If you have set of FAQs that can be broken down into several categories would it be good practice to set up a two-step approach, directly within the chat, initially asking something like: “Which category would you say your frequently asked question or your question runs under?”

In short, yes. However, there are different and possibly smarter ways of implementing this compared with trying to keep the whole content experience inside of your chat experience. Think about relating the chat experience with the content that your audience happens to be consuming on your website as well.

For instance, if you’ve embedded a bot on your prices page, you may know that people on your prices page typically have three categories of questions. You could then use your bot to prompt them, initially asking something like: “Are you interested in knowing pricing based on quantity, based on where you’re shipping to, or based on return policy?”

This could then be a menu that gets inside the head of your audience who are on that pricing page and the typical types of questions that they may ask you, drawing them further down the path towards transacting with you by providing great chatbot support.

This is a clever blending of inbound and outbound digital communication. Traditionally, organic marketers have expected website visitors to navigate their own way around websites without any external prodding or assistance. It’s OK to drive certain visitors to your frequently asked questions page, but if you’ve got an overwhelming amount of content on there, you should be breaking that content into logical sections and offering to assist your audience to ensure that they receive the answer that they’re looking for. After all, a satisfied website visitor is much more likely to turn into a customer.

Think about how you prefer to discover something yourself. If it’s a complex issue that you’re dealing with or it’s hard to find the answer that’s specific to your circumstances, wouldn’t you prefer to hit that chat button in the bottom corner of a web page and see if somebody from the business can help you find the information that they’re looking for more quickly?

5 key takeaways:

1. Always be matching unanswered questions

Look at what people are searching for in your chat experience and see what the chatbot wasn’t able to match your content to. Use this information to match these unanswered questions to content that exists in your chat bot already or as a reason to produce more answers.

2. Try to provide a menu of options

Try to provide a menu of options for your audience. As good as chatbots are at the moment, they’re nowhere near as powerful as they are going to be in the coming years. Providing answers based upon keywords can still be an inexact science, so don’t just rely on that and always be available to jump-in to the conversation in-person if need be.

3. Don’t leave your audience unsatisfied

Always ask whether or not your users were satisfied with the answer that they received through the chat app and offer to continue helping if that’s what they want. Try and encourage your audience to positively share that they are satisfied before ending the conversation.

4. Bot analytics is your friend

Make good use of your bot analytics – especially what links your audience are finding to be particularly useful. If you have a low click-through rate, maybe this means that the answer that you’re trying to provide doesn’t match what your users are looking for.

5. Bots are even more powerful when blended with web pages

Blend the power of bots with the pages that your audience is consuming on your website. Create website chatbot widgets that addresses the questions that are more likely to arise from each of your key web pages.

We hope that you enjoyed episode 2 of the Chat Marketing Train ! What are your thoughts? Are you currently using a Q&A chatbot? If so, how so?

I’ll be back with you in a week’s time for episode 3!

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Important Next Steps

• Sign up for Customers.ai’s OmniChat free chatbot builder to create your own Facebook Messenger, web chat and SMS chatbots that assist businesses in automating FAQs.
• Subscribe to Customers.ai’s Bot Training for Marketers YouTube channel to get notified when new chat marketing tutorials and stories are added each week.
• Want to talk to other chatbot enthusiasts about chatbot marketing? Join Customers.ai Island on Facebook!

Frequently Asked Questions about Q&A Chatbots

Q: What is a Q&A chatbot?

A: A Q&A chatbot is an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to interact with users and provide answers to their questions. It uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand user queries and delivers relevant responses based on its knowledge base.

Q: How does a Q&A chatbot work?

A: A Q&A chatbot works by using machine learning and NLP techniques to analyze and understand user input. It matches the user’s question with relevant information from its knowledge base and provides a suitable response. Some chatbots also have the ability to learn and improve their responses over time based on user interactions.

Q: What are the benefits of using a Q&A chatbot?

A: The benefits of using a Q&A chatbot include:

• 24/7 availability: Chatbots can provide instant responses to user questions at any time, improving customer service and support.
• Scalability: Chatbots can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, allowing businesses to handle a large volume of queries efficiently.
• Time and cost savings: Chatbots automate the process of answering common questions, reducing the need for human intervention and saving time and resources.
• Consistent responses: Chatbots provide consistent and accurate answers, ensuring that users receive reliable information every time.

Q: Can a Q&A chatbot handle complex queries?

A: While Q&A chatbots excel at answering common and frequently asked questions, their ability to handle complex queries may vary. Some advanced chatbots can handle more complex queries by leveraging advanced NLP models and integrating with external data sources. However, there may still be limitations in addressing highly specific or technical questions that require human expertise.

Q: What platforms can I use to deploy a Q&A chatbot?

A: There are various platforms available to deploy a Q&A chatbot, including:

• Website chat widgets: Embed the chatbot directly on your website to provide instant assistance to website visitors.
• Messaging apps: Integrate the chatbot with popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Slack for seamless customer interactions.
• Voice assistants: Connect the chatbot with voice assistant platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant to provide voice-based Q&A interactions.

The choice of platform depends on your target audience, preferred channels, and the capabilities of the chatbot platform you are using.

Q: Can I customize the appearance and behavior of a Q&A chatbot?

A: Yes, most Q&A chatbot platforms allow customization of the chatbot’s appearance, behavior, and branding. You can typically customize elements such as the chat widget’s design, color scheme, chatbot avatar, greeting messages, and response styles to align with your brand identity and user experience preferences.

Q: Can a Q&A chatbot handle multiple languages?

A: Yes, many Q&A chatbots are designed to support multiple languages. These chatbots leverage language processing capabilities and language-specific models to understand and respond to queries in different languages. However, the accuracy and performance may vary depending on the languages supported and the quality of language models used.

Q: How can I measure the performance of a Q&A chatbot?

A: To measure the performance of a Q&A chatbot, you can consider the following metrics:

• Response accuracy: Evaluate the percentage of accurate responses provided by the chatbot compared to human-generated answers.
• Customer satisfaction: Collect user feedback and ratings to gauge the satisfaction level with the chatbot’s performance.
• Response time: Measure the average time taken by the chatbot to provide responses to user queries.
• Conversation completion rate: Track the percentage of conversations that are successfully completed without user drop-offs or interruptions.

Analyzing these metrics can help you assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your Q&A chatbot and identify areas for improvement.

The post How to Build a Q&A Chatbot for FAQs appeared first on Customers.ai.

Customer communication is undergoing a massive shift.

If you’re still relying on old school digital marketing techniques, you’re probably seeing results dwindle.

The future of customer communication is chat marketing, and it’s time to jump on the bandwagon.

The global chatbot market is going to continue growing exponentially over the next few years.

It’s time to adopt chat automation for customer support, marketing, and sales.

Don’t believe me?

Get ready to learn all about this communication shift and chat marketing at the Chat Marketing 2019 Summit on December 12.

In the meantime, here are some stats to inspire you…

Chat Automation Stats

• 75% of customers prefer to text or chat with businesses.
• 80% of businesses say they want to implement chatbot automation in 2020.
• 53% of customers would rather chat with businesses to solve problems more quickly.
• 45% of those surveyed said the top reason is because it’s most convenient to chat on apps they already use.
• 85% of customer communication will be handled without a human in 2020
• 73% of customers said that they’re open to dealing with a chatbot
• 48% of consumers prefer a chatbot that solves problems over a chatbot that has personality

Text Message Marketing Automation Stats

• 75% of millennials say the most helpful texts they receive are appointments, delivery, payment reminders, surveys & promotions.
• 55% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if they could text them

Artificial Intelligence Stats

• 27% of consumers worldwide are interested in artificial intelligence-based tools
• 16% of adults in the United States own an AI assistant like Amazon Alexa
• 28% of top companies use artificial intelligence for marketing, while 31% of top companies plan to implement artificial intelligence in the next year
• 63% of marketers say Machine Learning is speeding up their ability to create strategy.
• 52% of markters say that Machine Learning is speeding up their Tactical (Day-to-Day) work.
• 25% of marketers say that the marketing technology they feel most unprepared for is Chatbots (making it the No. 1 answer among marketers).

Customer Service Stats

• In 2022, businesses will collectively save $8 Billion by employing chat-based automation
• 68% of customers said that they’ve had positive interactions with customer service bots in the past
• 58% of customers say emerging technologies such as chatbots and voice assistance have changed their expectations of companies
• 77% of customers say chatbots will transform their expectations of companies in the next five years

Time to Evolve with the New Year

The new year is upon us, and with it, the future of customer communication.

It’s time to evolve your business.

It’s time to evolve your business to connect with customers in the communication channels they’re already using.

It’s time to evolve your business while saving money with automated customer care.

It’s time to scale your business with record leads and revenue.

Meet your customers where they are.

Evolve your business to keep up and adopt chat marketing in the new year.

Important Next Steps

• Make a Customers.ai chatbot so that you can get in on the benefits. Get Customers.ai for free and try out the easy-to-use bot builder!
• Want to learn more about different functionalities of chatbots? Join Customers.ai Island, a Facebook group of over 30k people that are ready to support you!
• The future of customer communication is here. Reserve your seat to Chat Marketing 2019. There are a limited number of free seats. We hope to see you on Dec. 12.

The post 19 Chat Marketing Stats that Signal the Future of Customer Communication appeared first on Customers.ai.

Customer service chatbots, support chatbots, and sales chatbots are the future. Their nature of automation makes things fast and easy for people who are constantly on the go.

If you’ve ever frequented a business, whether it be your local coffee shop or the auto repair center that you like the best, you know that it’s nice to receive benefits for customer loyalty. 

In fact, 77% of customers want free products and 75% of customers expect discounts and offers.

And studies show that a 7% uptake in a customer loyalty program can boost lifetime profits per customer by as much as 85%!

Customers also like when things are easy and quick, and the fact of the matter is, old-school customer loyalty programs no longer fit modern lifestyles. 

Punch-cards are easy to forget or lose, and there’s no way of proving how many punches were on it.

Saving receipts can be tough.

And these days, most people carry most of their world in their pocket on their mobile device. 

That’s where chatbots come in.

Customer service chatbots, support chatbots, and sales chatbots are the future.

Their nature of automation makes things fast and easy for people who are constantly on the go. 

Best of all, bots make customer loyalty programs more efficient than ever. 

So we’ve put together a guide on how to create a chatbot loyalty program using Customers.ai.

Say hello to better engagement, higher customer average order value, and decreased customer service costs.

Keep reading to learn how to create a chatbot loyalty program!

And test the experience of a chatbot loyalty program yourself. Give the free chatbot customer loyalty template a spin here.

How to Create a Chatbot Loyalty Program Using Facebook Bot Templates

Making chatbots has never been easier thanks to Customers.ai’s free chatbot platform.

Simply sign up your business’ Facebook page with Customers.ai’s free plan and then navigate to the templates section of the chatbot builder.

This will bring you to the templates library, which gives a number of options for chatbot templates. You are very likely to find one that will fit your business here.

Once you select the type of template you want to copy, you’ll have the option to import the contents into a current chatbot or create a new bot altogether.

I’ve chosen to create a new bot for my fictional coffee shop, Chatbot Coffee Shop. 

Keep in mind, free Customers.ai accounts only support one chatbot at a time, so in that case you’ll want to import the template into your current chatbot.

Next, the monkeys will get to copying the contents of the template! 

Next, you’ll find yourself with your new chatbot template, and you can get to customizing!

This template is from another fictional coffee shop called Cafe Blendy.

Since I’ve created a new coffee shop, I’ll edit the contents of the welcome dialogue on the template to match my own information.

I’ll also edit some of the menu options to include an option for a customer to view an existing loyalty account.

Then, you can go through and add specifics to your menu items.

For example, add your food and drink menu. Add the onboarding options for the loyalty program. The options are endless! 

Here’s some examples of the bot I created for Chatbot Coffee Shop using the coffee shop chatbot template: 

From this chatbot example’s opening dialogue, you’re able to sign up for the loyalty program.

To join the customer loyalty program, the customer will have to sign up with their email and phone number — a great way to grow your list.

Now let’s walk through the loyalty point redemption process.

In order for a customer to gain a customer loyalty point, the store staff will need to enter a code in order for the point to save to the user profile.

Here’s the secret passcode that you can customize for your own bot:

• Choose the first # symbol for question 1.
• Enter “777” as the employee passcode.

This will save a point to the user’s customer profile!

Find out what happens when you reach 5 points by repeating the process yourself.

Everything was incredibly simple to set up with the user-friendly chatbot loyalty program chatbot. Try it for yourself! 

Here’s a comprehensive video tutorial on how to use Customers.ai’s chatbot templates.

The Basics of a Chatbot Loyalty Program

There’s a number of key functions that a chatbot should have when implemented in a chatbot customer loyalty program. 

Your customers and your business will:

1. Sign up for the loyalty program.
2. Access to their account rewards.
3. Receive promos from the business.

1. Sign Up for the Loyalty Program

As it goes right now, the sign up and onboarding process of customer loyalty programs might be the most frustrating part. 

It takes time and data to download multiple apps for the various businesses that a customer might want a loyalty account for.

The multiple apps clutter their mobile homepages. It’s really hard to remember all that login information.

Using Facebook Messenger automation to implement a chatbot loyalty program simplifies this whole process, especially since Facebook Messenger is already the most popular messaging app.

The first step in any business’s loyalty program is creating a lead magnet to incentivize people to sign up — this means defining what they loyalty program is going to be.

For example, what are customers earning? What is the reward they are striving towards?

The best way to allow people to sign up for the loyalty program, especially in an in-store setting, is by using QR codes that link people. It’s super easy to generate these codes – simply use a QR code generator.

How to Use QR Codes on Facebook Messenger

Facebook actually has its own native QR reader, making a scanable QR code posted in store a great method for joining your chatbot loyalty program.

Here’s how a business can create a QR code to post in their store:

• Step 1: Copy the link of the loyalty program from the bot builder. Here we’re looking at the dialogue that starts people signing up for the loyalty program

• Step 2: Paste the URL into a QR code generator.

• Step 3: Download the image to print.

• Step 4: Post it prominently in the business location!

Now, it’s even easier for a customer to sign up for the loyalty program — all they have to do is scan the code that’s posted in the store with their mobile phone, and boom!

They’re interacting with the chatbot loyalty program.

All they have to do is provide the chatbot with some key information (like email) and they will be good to go.

Another plus of using a chatbot loyalty program is that once the chatbot has gathered contact info from the customer, their info can be added to your business’s various contact lists. This will help grow your contacts and boost brand awareness and sales. 

No more download times, inefficient onboarding, and password juggling.

By using a chatbot loyalty program, your business is ensuring ease-of-access for all customers.

Here’s a bonus tip: Implement a way for the customer to link existing customer rewards with the chatbot. For example, have the customer snap a photo of their customer rewards punch-card.

Then those rewards that the customer has already obtained can be applied to the new and efficient chatbot loyalty program. 

2. Provide Access to Users’ Account Rewards

Using a chatbot loyalty program makes it so much easier for customers to access their own customer loyalty information. 

Conversational chatbots are easy to interact with and already have all of the customer’s personal information on hand.

Best of all is the leading dialogue options that chatbots have, so customers need not even type their requests; they can simply click buttons like “My Rewards Balance” or “My Account” to receive their own information. 

Using a chatbot loyalty program also makes it easier than ever for a customer to access their customer loyalty cards, because now, they aren’t cards at all! 

Prompt the customer to pull up their loyalty card and they can easily access a QR code that will act as their loyalty card. 

For the customer-on-the-go, this can all be done while standing in line to order coffee!

3. Use the Chatbot Loyalty Program to Push Promos 

Promotions are important to a business’s brand awareness and customer engagement, and implementing a chatbot loyalty program simplifies promos more than ever. 

While interacting with a chatbot, a customer can select an option to view current promos that a business is offering. Having a sale? Let the customers know via the chatbot loyalty program. 

Bots can also push promos to customers that engage with the chatbot loyalty program. 

Facebook has recently updated the Facebook sponsored messages rule to only allow a business to reach out to a customer with a message within 24 hours of the customer’s last contact to the business.

So, 24 hours after the customer last interacted with the bot, the bot can send a single reminder to the customer. 

This is a fantastic way to boost engagement for your business. 

Chatbot Loyalty Program: Fun Extras

Now that we’ve gone over the basics of implementing a chatbot loyalty program and why chatbots are the optimal way to do this, let’s talk about some more fun things that can be done by using chatbots!

Favorites Menus 

In addition to ordering ahead, a chatbot loyalty program is an easy way for customers to collect their favorite products for a faster experience.

People — especially people who frequent coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, etc. — love when things move quickly. They love when they can stop in on their way to work and pick up their order, already prepared for them. They also love when they don’t have to spend a long time selecting the same items that they select every day.

So add a favorites menu option to you chatbot loyalty program bot, and then all a customer has to do is “add to favorites” a menu item that they frequently order! 

Other functionalities can be present within the favorites menu, as well. For example, a chatbot can use the favorites menu to push different menu items.

If your cafe or restaurant is featuring a particular menu item and it seems in line with the user’s interests based on their favorites, the chatbot can use a sponsored message to push different ideas. Or, it can use that opportunity to up-sell items that have been newly added to the menu!

Bot Suggestions for Products or Items

Sometimes, we don’t know what we want!

Sometimes, we don’t know all of the functions that a piece of technology has.

With a chatbot loyalty program on your side, maybe you don’t have to.

Using a chatbot loyalty program can allow you to implement a suggestion option for your customers. Perhaps they don’t know what they are looking for, no matter what type of product.

They can ask the bot to suggest products for them and, after a round of personalized questioning, the bot can suggest to them the perfect product to purchase.

Perhaps the customer doesn’t know that the chatbot has a favorites menu feature, and they spend 10 minutes every day scrolling through options to select their items. 

Here, a chatbot can push suggestions of functionality towards the customer. For example, it can suggest that the customer add an item that they order every day to their favorites menu.

Surprise Loyalty Gifts

Loyalty programs are meant to reward customers for being customers. Shouldn’t your best customers get rewarded even further?

Chatbots are fantastic pieces of software because they collect information about customers and the information is never truly lost due to the nature of the platform.

A bot can use this information to drive your chatbot loyalty program to the next level, by surprising particularly loyal customers with gifts. 

A chatbot will know that a customer has gone above and beyond; perhaps they ordered something every day for a month; perhaps they interacted with the bot a certain number of times in a week; the options are endless.

Use a chatbot loyalty program to surprise particular loyal customers with extras and gifts, such as coupons, discounts, free products, etc. 

Social Integration to Earn Rewards 

One of the best parts about chatbots is how easy it is to use chatbot integration as a means to increase the functionality of the chatbot and have access to more applications at once without having to juggle several apps or a massive inbox.

Social media is a popular platform for customers to earn rewards. You can begin integrating social media into your business’s chatbot loyalty program by using a comment guard.

A comment guard is when you set up a Facebook post with a Facebook auto reply bot.Then, whenever someone comments on the post, the auto reply bot will immediately send them a message.

Your business can create a post asking people to comment if they’d like to sign up for the loyalty program, and then it’s as simple as them commenting on the post and the bot will reach out.

Afterwards, you can follow up with a drip campaign asking the customers if they’d like to share the chatbot loyalty program with their friends.

Time to Create Your Own Chatbot Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty programs are a great way to increase customer satisfaction, promote brand awareness and brand loyalty, and grow a business.

Chatbots make everything faster and easier, are the preferred method of communication, and have functionality that regular punch-cards don’t have.

Using a chatbot loyalty program will differentiate your business from others and excite your customers. They’re easy to create (just check out our comprehensive chatbot tutorial) and are guaranteed to drive your business.

Important Next Steps 

• Ready to start creating your own chatbot loyalty program? Get Customers.ai for free and try out the easy-to-use bot builder! 
• Want to learn more about how chatbots are used? Join Customers.ai Island, a Facebook group of over 30k people that are ready to support you!
• Interested in learning more about how chatbots can help businesses and organizations? Check out some of our chatbot case studies. 

The post How to Run a Customer Loyalty Program with a Chatbot appeared first on Customers.ai.

In 2020, it’s predicted that 85% of customer interactions will be handled without human intervention (1). In 2022, businesses will collectively save $8 Billion by employing chat-based automation (2).

Today, nearly half of enterprise CMOs, chief strategy officers and senior marketers report that they are currently using automation in marketing, sales and customer service. Next year, that number is expected to jump to 80% of businesses using chatbots (3).

For many, enterprise chatbot solutions, or chat-based marketing automation is the next technology in line to scale efficiencies, reduce costs, and set up business success.

This article goes in-depth for marketers evaluating enterprise chatbot solution requirements and platforms for launching chat-based virtual assistants:

• What are enterprise chatbots?
• What is chatbot technology?
• Enterprise chatbot examples
• How can an organization evaluate chatbot development frameworks?
• Requirements of a GUI chatbot platform for enterprise

What Are Enterprise Chatbots?

Chatbots are software that interacts with end users in an interactive conversation in a chat interface.

Large-scale enterprise chatbot solutions typically require additional advanced capabilities:

1. Intelligent handling of user requests personalized based on conversation history, past purchases, location, and context of the request.
2. Monitoring user input and provide a seamless live agent takeover when requested.
3. Integration with business systems and platforms, such as mobile app, marketing stack or security system.
4. Multiple language handling.

Enterprise bots can be internal software for automating tasks including recruitment, hiring, or payroll.

However the majority of enterprise chatbot solutions involve customer-facing agents, performing roles from customer service to customer acquisition to engagement and virtual shopping assistants.

In 2017, Mindbrowser survey found that 95% of consumers feel customer experience is the major beneficiary of chatbots.

What Is Chatbot Technology?

In describing the current state of chatbot technology today, it is helpful to establish common terminology:

Artificial intelligence (AI): The idea that computer systems can be programmed to do things that require human intelligence, from visual and speech recognition to decision making.

Machine learning (ML): The ways that computer systems are trained to perform tasks by using patterns and inference instead of explicit direction. ML is a subset of AI.

Natural language processing (NLP): An area of computer science and AI development focused on how computer systems can understand and find patterns in human languages.

A primary question for a cross-department initiative involving IT, marketing, sales and customer service teams in early phases of implementing chatbot technology is:

How does a chatbot learn?

There are three major models of programming chatbots for business applications outlined in the 2019 Gartner research report “Competitive Landscape: Virtual Assistant Platforms, Worldwide“:

• Develop Machine Learning Algorithms (High Development Requirements & Management)
  • “Use architectures emphasizing computational linguistics-based algorithms when multiple language support and small compute and storage footprints for edge deployment are required.”
• Leverage Existing AI Frameworks (Moderate Development Requirements & Management)
  • “Leverage popular, affordable cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks wherever cloud-first or cloud-only VA systems are required.”
• Program Functional Rule Systems (Least Development Requirements & Management)
  • “Generate domain-specific rules, lexica and intents if their VA system requires swift time to market and clearly defined decision trees such as those found in more basic customer self-service applications or on interactive voice response (IVR) systems.”

The best-fit chatbot programming model depends on the organization’s development capabilities, program budget, and team collaboration requirements.

We recommend reviewing the decision-making framework to review the key questions for your evaluation of enterprise chatbot solutions.

Enterprise Chatbot Examples

There are a number of chatbots that provide real-world examples of what chatbots can accomplish for enterprises.

No matter the industry, use of chatbot automation can help a company provide great service while supporting fast customer care and lower costs.

Here are a few real-world enterprise chatbot examples that illustrate the power and game-changing nature of chat-based AI technology.

1. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’s Customer Support Bot

BB Bot by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (BB is short for Blue Bot, blue being the airline’s signature color), is a travel assistant chatbot that has significantly improved the enterprise’s customer service.

BB is capable of handling 13 different languages and in a given week will respond to 15,000 social conversations using those languages.

As an enterprise chatbot built to improve and simplify KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ customer service, BB is doing its job with great success.

Beyond conversing and helping customers, this special enterprise chatbot utilizes Facebook’s checkbox plugin on the checkout page to allow customers to opt-in for booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass, and flight status.

And it does all of this from within the Facebook Messenger application, used by 1.3 billion monthly users worldwide.

Chatbots improve the travel industry by providing personalized and user-friendly assistance on channels that are optimized for mobile users.

BB utilizes chatbots in its omnichannel strategy to boost accessibility for customers worldwide.

2. Verizon Wireless Customer Support Bot

Wireless phone and service provider Verizon Wireless utilizes a chatbot for customer service within its native mobile app.

The Verizon Wireless mobile app provides customers with a convenient mobile enterprise chatbot solution for actions including viewing account settings, account features, data usage and filing a claim for repair or insurance.

Source: Verizon Wireless

3. Car Loans Canada Auto Insurance Application Bot (Customer Acquisition)

Canada’s largest online automobile insurance provider Car Loans Canada automates lead generation and customer acquisition via connection to Facebook Ads.

Tests by the organization show a higher conversion rate and lower acquisition costs using a Customers.ai chatbot connected to Facebook ads, as detailed in the enterprise chatbot solution case study.

How Can an Organization Evaluate Chatbot Development Frameworks?

As with every new tech system integrated into a large-scale organization, there is an in-depth discovery process and requirements gathering phase for the enterprise business preparing to launch chatbot solutions.

Paul Gallovich, IT & network systems specialist, and principal chatbot developer at Chat-Intelligence, develops enterprise chatbots.

“Starting with questions like ‘who is the end user?’, ‘what is the role or objective of the automation?’ and ‘what teams will own and manage the system?’ — these are the questions that cross-departmental teams, from IT and engineering to CS and marketing, must navigate.”

Paul has taken part in designing and launching dozens of chatbot virtual assistants — from custom development, internal chat-based virtual assistant for colleges to public-facing chatbots intended to increase customer engagement and loyalty for multi-location food service chains.

So we asked him, what’s the best chatbot solution for enterprise?

“Every large-scale enterprise business has a different marketing stack, a different audience and interface requirements, and varying internal resources and expectations for chatbot management. It helps to apply a framework to derive what the right chatbot development or chatbot platform is best for a given organization.”

5-Point Evaluation for Chatbot Development

Customers.ai has helped hundreds of thousands of businesses determine the best chatbot development solution in light of resources and requirements.

How can an enterprise organization evaluate the appropriate fit and functionality of a chatbot platform for its firm?

The following 5 questions represent the essential discovery process for any enterprise preparing to implement chatbots.

1. What is the business objective for the chatbot?
2. What application will the chatbot function within?
3. What business systems will be integrated with the chatbot?
4. What team will design and run the chatbot?
5. What teams require regular access to the back-end bot data and analytics?

Each consideration is detailed as follows.

1. What is the business objective for the chatbot?

This step involves identifying the chatbot use cases for each department within an organization.

Key decision makers and invested parties including directors, managers and employees may be interviewed for input.

The program lead will collect data needed to define the entities, intents and chatbot responses.

Chatbot business objectives include:

• Customer acquisition – marketing function
• Engagement & retention – marketing, sales and production function
• Customer experience – customer service function
• Internal systems automation (e.g., payroll, hiring) – often HR function

2. What application will the chatbot function within?

This step understands the objective of the chatbot and seeks to identify where the chatbot should interface with the end user.

The most common chatbot channels or entry points are:

• Website chat
• Web application
• Desktop application
• Mobile application
• Digital advertising platform

3. What business systems will be integrated with the chatbot?

The answer to this critical question is used to determine the capability of a chatbot platform to send and receive data obtained from the chatbot in connection with other systems used by the enterprise.

The most common integration requirements are:

• Digital ad platforms
• Ecommerce cart software
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Email marketing platform
• Website CMS

4. What team will design and run the chatbot?

Chatbot technology ranges in complexity and requirements dependent on an organization’s objectives.

Yet those objectives must inform the user interface of those managing the bot.

The enterprise must assess what teams will run day-to-day operations including content and response programming for the chatbot.

When non-technical teams such as marketing and sales managers are the organization’s intended users, a user-friendly graphical interface is required.

5. What teams require regular access to the back-end bot data and analytics?

Similarly, if an organization requires ongoing access to chatbot analytics and user data in order to assess effective implementation, successful enterprises adopt chatbot platforms with user-friendly, non-coding graphical user interfaces.

Paul Gallovich, enterprise bot builder and systems engineer, shared his process for information gathering at the outset of a new chatbot build.

Identify the chatbot use cases for each department within an organization.

• Interviewing directors, managers and employees
• Collecting data needed to define the entities, intents and chatbot responses.

Identify the business processes where chatbots could be used to automate and save time for each department.

• Interviewing directors, managers and employees.
• Collecting data needed to define the entities, Intents and chatbot responses.

Identify use cases for customer or client facing chatbots including touchpoints in the day to day operations. (These are all sources of data for building your AI chatbot.)

• Collecting data needed to define the entities, intents and chatbot responses related to the following.
  • Customer service
  • Customer acquisition
  • Customer feedback

Develop the bot’s persona.

• Creating content that reflects the bots personality.
• Developing a consistent model for defining the following elements needed to train the machine learning model for the enterprise chatbot.

Train the bot to understand relevant material.

• Entities – Specific terminology the bot can recognize for that industry
• Responses – The bots responses.
• Context – Maintaining the conversation with the ability to answer follow up questions in the context of the conversation.

Create conversational context.

• Enterprise chatbots with AI need to be trained to have a conversation.
• Develop a continuity of context within the conversation when users, customers or clients ask the bot follow-up questions.
• Program the ability to respond to “small talk”. The bot must have the ability to handle random questions.
• Train the AI to understand general conversations as well as more specific questions.
• Depending on the complexity of the conversation, the chatbot needs to be developed with many types of contexts and have the appropriate responses.

10 Requirements of a GUI Chatbot Platform for Enterprise

Enterprise organizations utilize a complex technology stack to complete various tasks; this, plus the constant change and emergence of new tech and tools, leads to employees constantly having to switch between different apps and software.

Therefore, care and intention is required before new technologies are designated a good fit for the organization.

Customers.ai’s graphical interface chatbot platform has been specifically designed to eliminate the need for multiple apps and software, to integrate data with other business systems and to make more efficient key customer experience channels in a way that is usable by technical and non-technical staff.

Here are 10 key requirements an enterprise organization will need to evaluate a chatbot solution, which Customers.ai has been intentionally designed to solve.

1. Multi-collaborator Management

Large-scale organizations frequently have large teams that require access and various permissions for its chatbot development and management platform.

With Customers.ai, it’s far easier to collaborate with the people on your team, as well as control which team members have access to which tools.

If you need to restrict permissions for certain employees, it’s as simple as doing it right through the multi-bot, multi-user chatbot dashboard in Customers.ai.

In organizations with multiple bots, such as large agencies or multi-brand enterprises, Customers.ai also allows businesses to control which employees have access to or editing abilities for certain accounts.

In addition to collaborating within a team, agencies can collaborate with clients by inviting them to view and edit bots, eliminating the time-eater of back-and-forth email communication.

2. Intuitive Bot Building Platform

With Customers.ai, it’s easier than ever to create a chatbot for your enterprise. Just use the intuitive, visual chatbot builder.

All new tech comes with an onboarding and training period, but Customers.ai is the most comprehensive user-friendly chatbot application.

With this incredibly friendly bot creation platform, it takes as little as five minutes to create a chatbot to use for an enterprise.

3. Lead Generation & Lead Qualification Tools

Customers.ai chatbots are an incredibly easy way to generate and qualify leads.

There’s a number of ways that you can use Customers.ai for chatbot lead generation, and then collect lead information to build out detailed, personal user profiles.

Businesses can even create a bot to automatically qualify leads, eliminating time-consuming manual analysis for lead scoring and qualification.

This activity is implemented by creating a bot to ask lead-qualifying questions such as company info, budget, goals, and more.

4. Sales & Conversion Tools

Chatbots are utilized by ecommerce and retail enterprises to engage customers, drive leads and traffic, make sales and drive repeat customers.

Use Customers.ai chatbot conversion tools to create a chatbot that displays products and makes it as easy as clicking a button to make a purchase.

It’s also possible to create recommendation chatbots, which engage customers by using a guided question funnel that will lead users to the perfect product for them.

Chatbots simplify and optimize the shopping process for customers, helping ecommerce enterprises drive sales.

5. Multi-Channel Integration

Customers.ai integrates chatbots with a number of other commonly used tools for enterprise. Customers.ai also allows for implementation of chatbots on various platforms, including Facebook Messenger and webchat.

For example, use a chatbot with Facebook Ads so that you can drive users who come across ads to your chatbot instead of a website. This tactic has been proven to increase leads, increase conversions and decrease the cost of lead acquisition.

Install a chatbot on a website has been shown to increase conversions by 50% and higher.

Customers.ai also features a WordPress chatbot plugin for one-click installation of the chatbot on WordPress websites.

6. Seamless Live Agent Hand-off Protocol

Chatbots are great for automating time-consuming day-to-day tasks for your enterprise, but sometimes you need a live operator to speak with clients.

Customers.ai simplifies combining 24/7 chat automation with the personal touch of speaking to a human via Live Chat inbox within the enterprise chatbot solution.

Simply employ the Live Operator Takeover feature of Customers.ai and receive push notifications to let you know when it’s time for you to jump in via Facebook Messenger.

7. Audience Segmentation

Customers.ai is incredibly useful for enterprises with large audiences and client bases because it makes it easy to segment audiences based on customer interest and behavior.

You can decide on a number of different attributes to use to categorize your audiences into specific segments.

Chatbots excel at gathering additional user attributes such as emails, phone numbers, or interests to narrow audiences even more.

Once you have segmented audiences, those audiences can be nurtured, increasing conversions by providing them with relevant content.

Then, you can use these segmented audiences and attributes to remarket to qualified leads.

8. Advanced Scheduling & Automation Features

With Customers.ai, not only can you use chatbots to automate scheduling for your enterprise (i.e., appointments, etc.), but you can also schedule and program chat automation sequences for marketing.

Organizations can design automated campaigns for customer engagement and retention in a simple programmable interface.

Easily design chat blasts or chat drip campaigns to engage your audiences by creating the content, and scheduling it for a time in the week or via trigger in the customer journey that is likely to reach the most people.

Customers.ai’s campaign scheduling and automation features help enterprises achieve more while doing less.

9. Chabot Analytics

It’s important to gain insight into your marketing campaigns to see how well they are performing and find ways to improve.

Customers.ai offers chatbot analytics tools that display the efficacy of Messenger contact list growth and conversion campaigns from chat blasts, drip campaigns, Messenger Ads, and conversions in chat.

With Customers.ai’s chatbot analytics you can measure the performance of your chatbot campaigns, monitor your chat marketing growth, and understand how the chatbot contributes to these metrics.

10. Dedicated Account Manager

With Customers.ai Enterprise Solutions, businesses have access to a dedicated account manager.

Support for strategic and tactical decisions and implementation issues increases enterprise efficiency and success.

Getting Started with Chatbots for Enterprise

Begin your enterprise organization’s journey adopting chatbots for leads, sales and customer support with a one-on-one consultation to design your custom solution.

Create your free Customers.ai account to get started.

The post Considerations for Evaluating Enterprise Chatbot Solutions & Recommendations for Chat Marketing Virtual Assistants at the Enterprise Level appeared first on Customers.ai.

Halloween is just around the corner. 

There’s a number of fun ways to celebrate this spooky season.

Neighborhood houses have begun spinning spiderwebs around their landscaping and hanging lights from their porches. 

Folks of all ages are planning out chilling costumes to wear to petrifying parties. The horror movies are screening and the faint-of-heart are screaming.

And one of my personal favorite ways to celebrate the season … 

Sharing Halloween chatbots to help you get into the spirit — and maybe find inspiration!

We know this:

Chatbots are a key tool for businesses and marketers to help them increase reach, acquire new customers, reengage and retain customers and increase sales, while dramatically reducing customer support costs. 

But let’s not forget:

Chatbots are engaging, interactive and entertaining! 

And Halloween chatbot offer a festive display of engagement that slays.
Read on for Customers.ai’s list of 5 harrowing Halloween chatbots to spice up your season!

1. BooBot – Costume Store Customer Service

We’ve all been there — the Halloween party is tomorrow and you haven’t found a costume yet. BooBot will come to your rescue by helping you find the perfect costume at the price you need.

BooBot is a cute and spooky Halloween chatbot for sure, but it’s also a customer service chatbot that has a lot of features. 

Beyond simply finding you a costume (which it’s great at!), this fun Halloween chatbot can assist you in your money-saving and find you the best sales and coupons or let you know when the price drops on an item you want.

Or, chat with BooBot to save some creepy costumes to your favorites collection so that they’re easy to pull up again at a later date!

BooBot is available on Facebook Messenger and on Google Play. 

2. CryptTV – Video Recommendation Messenger Bot

CryptTV is a Halloween chatbot that provides you with scary videos and short horror films to watch.

And who doesn’t love getting scared during Halloween time?

This Halloween chatbot experience will direct you to some of the spookiest videos on the web (including short films of a fearful nature!), pull up a window, and allow you to watch them right within the Messenger app. 

This unnerving use of Facebook Messenger automation makes it even easier to scare yourself silly every night this October.

3. ScaryBot – Scary Meme Messenger Bot

So you’ve watched all the movies, you’ve been on all the haunted hayrides and through all the haunted houses. You’ve attended parties and decorated your house to it’s appalling potential. But you’re still craving some spine-tingling scares! 

ScaryBot is a unique Facebook chatbot that provides the user with the best Creepypastas on the internet. 

If you don’t know what a Creepypasta is, then you’re in for a treat. 

Creepypastas are stories, myths, or images, usually of a terrifying nature, that are copied and pasted throughout the internet – essentially becoming digital legends.  

First, you can tell ScaryBot what you’d like to see.

The Halloween chatbot will then bring up a scrolling menu of options for you to choose from. You can choose to view them or save them to your favorites to view at a later time.

Finally, the chilling chatbot will pull up a window right within Messenger so you don’t have to wait for a separate webpage to load, open a different application, or ever leave the chat at all!

Enjoy losing sleep over these terrifying tales!

4. Escape from Ghost Treasure Mansion – Skype Game Bot

Our fourth Halloween chatbot example is a Skype bot.

Skype actually has a number of chatbots for users to interact with, but this particular Halloween chatbot hosts a peculiar puzzle game that can be completed through chatbot dialogues. 

In Skype, search for the bot in contacts to start the game.

Begin the Escape from Ghost Treasure Mansion game by approaching their late rich uncle’s spooky mansion. The bot provides options to move the game forward.

As the game continues, the user finds a ouija board, which will come in handy later on during some of the puzzles. 

That’s when the game really gets started. You find yourself locked in the rickety old mansion and your only option is to move through the puzzles to reach your uncle’s treasure at the end.

The game provides a puzzle and then asks the user to send a picture of the answer. 

It can be difficult to get the Halloween chatbot to recognize the pictures that the user sends, so luckily, there is also an option to type the answer. 

Once the user solves 3 puzzles correctly, they are allowed to claim the treasure.

But if you want to continue on with the grisly game, you may complete the last two puzzles — but only at your own risk!

5. The Digital Ghost – iOS App Bot

The final Halloween chatbot on our list strays slightly from the spooky fun nature of the previous four. 

Now we take a look into some truly spooky tech, and consider the implications of such intriguing inventions and AI.

After Eugenia Kuyda’s closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, died in a car accident, she decided to commemorate him by building an artificially intelligent chatbot.

Using years of text messages and emails as example content to train the AI, the conversational chatbot learned how Roman spoke, and used this knowledge to imitate him to users who wanted to speak to him post-mortem.

The app, named simply after its deceased counterpart, is free to download in the Apple Store. 

Once opened, the chatbot leads the user to form questions and conversational pieces, to which the digital ghost of Roman responds with his opinions, ideas, and sometimes, pictures from his life.

Roman Mazurenko’s digital ghost makes us feel a number of emotions that often come with the Halloween season as its macabre themes mix with shortening days and colder weather.  

But the digital ghost of Roman Mazurenko brings up other things as well; particularly the future of chatbots and artificial intelligence. 

Halloween chatbots are festive and fun, but the digital ghost of Roman Mazurenko shows us that these are powerful examples of artificial intelligence. 

AI chatbots have been used for so much already, and there is still so much uncharted territory. 

Halloween Chatbots: Tricks and Treats, or Hair-Raising Robotics?

Chatbots are extremely versatile pieces of technology. 

There are marketing chatbots, ecommerce chatbots, customer support chatbots, chatbots to have fun and play games, and even chatbots to memorialize. 

Chatbots are being utilized more and more by businesses and marketers, but they are also expanding into the world of the day-to-day person.

Anyone can build a chatbot, and for that reason, the uses that we see for these little artificially intelligent bots are ever-expanding.

Important Next Steps 

• Interested in creating your own chatbot for Halloween? Get Customers.ai for free and try out the easy-to-use bot builder! 
• Want to learn more about how chatbots are used? Join Customers.ai Island, a Facebook group of over 25k people that are ready to support you! 

The post 5 Halloween Chatbots to Try This Season appeared first on Customers.ai.

Using a marketing bot for your business is guaranteed to give your business a better ROI. The #1 chat app in the U.S. is Facebook Messenger, and automated Messenger marketing has all-star engagement, beating engagement of Facebook Newsfeed, ads, and email marketing by 10X and more.

There are only 400K Facebook bots in the wild today, yet over 10 billion messages are sent over Messenger every month. That gives businesses a big opportunity to leverage bots to scale customer communication.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to build a bot for business and when these bots come in handy. 

The instructions for how to build a bot for business are as follows:

1. Decide what the bot will do for your business.
2. Navigate to the Customers.ai bot builder.
3. Select “Chatbots” from the sidebar.
4. Select “Dialogues” to start building your bot.
5. Add your dialogue options.
6. Add your Q+A triggers.
7. Test your bot! 

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How to Build a Bot for Business 

Before we get started learning how to build a bot for business, consider trying out Customers.ai’s customer survey bot to see for yourself how business bots work in real-time.

Now, let’s get started!

1. Decide what the bot will do for your business.

So you’ve decided to learn how to build a bot for business. That must mean you’ve got a business, and you want a bot to do something for it.

But what do you want the bot to do?

There are many types of bots for business. For example, bots can assist with B2B lead gen. Some businesses use bots to perform customer service tasks. Others use bots to perform ecommerce tasks. 

Your bot is going to be used to save you time and revenue while improving your ROI, so think about what services and tasks you want the bot to perform for your business. 

For the sake of this tutorial, we will pretend like the objective you’ve chosen for your business’s bot is to help your customers learn more about bots and your product. The examples in the following steps will reflect this objective.

2. Navigate to the Customers.ai bot builder.

The most business-friendly visual bot builder today is Customers.ai. Sign up for a free account or log into your existing account. 

Looking to learn about effective bot marketing strategies for your own business?

Customers.ai has resources where you can learn more about bots, how to build a bot for business (or pleasure), and Facebook Messenger marketing through our blog and help docs.

You can also easily access specific information about bots through our Chatbot University page. Sign up for a summit where you can participate in a webinar and learn firsthand how to build a bot for business or more exciting things in the marketing industry. In addition, see how bots are successful by reading some case studies. 

3. Select “bots” from the sidebar.

Once you’ve signed up for a free Customers.ai account and gone through our resources to learn more about Facebook Messenger marketing and how to build a bot for business, you can get started creating your first chatbot.

Go ahead and select “Chatbots” from the sidebar. 

4. Select “Dialogues” to start building your bot. 

Once you’ve navigated to the bot builder, you’re ready to build a bot for business! 

Now you have to select the “Dialogues” option. 

These two options actually go hand-in-hand, but in order to build a bot for business, you need to start with the “Dialogues” option. The dialogues are how the user and your bot interact. They will drive the conversation.

5. Add your dialogue options.

This is where you really start to build a bot for business!

When you go to the toolbar on the side of the bot builder, you will see all of your dialogues. These are the conversations that your bot will have with the user interacting with it. 

Start with your welcome message. 

It’s best to include an image or GIF with your welcome message. This makes the user feel like they’re having a more personalized conversation with a more human-like bot.

You can add a list of answer options for the user to select from. This is how the conversation moves forward.

In order to direct the user to different areas when they select answer options, you have to create more dialogues in the sidebar and use those as the response dialogue.

In addition to text and more button options, you can include a URL in your response dialogue.

Then, you have to make sure that the response dialogues actually lead your user somewhere. You set up the response dialogues using various widgets that are provided in the bot builder.

For example, in the “Learn about Chatbots” dialogue, I decided to include some text widgets that give a little more information about bots. 

Then, I give the user another option of what they’d like to do next. 

There’s a lot of different options for how to build a bot for business. You can use various different response dialogues to engage your user. You can also use some to gather user information.

Here, I added a “form” widget that will pop up if the user requests a Customers.ai demo.

This form causes the bot to ask for the user’s phone number so that they can be contacted to set up a time to receive a demo.

You don’t have to ask for a phone number in this case. It really depends on your bot’s objective. If you’re looking for email addresses to add to an email list, this might be a great spot to ask for the user’s email, because then the bot will grab that information. 

6. Add your Q+A triggers.

You’re really on your way to learning how to build a bot for business! 

Once your dialogue options are all set up, you can make it even easier on the user by entering Q+A triggers.

These are trigger words that will result in the dialogues that you set up before without the user having to go through the entire dialogue process. 

For example, I thought it might be likely that a user would contact my page simply to request a demo. 

In that case, the user would choose to message the bot and might just type “Demo.”

So I set up a trigger word, “demo,” to trigger the form dialogue that asks for the user’s phone number.

7. Test your bot! 

Ah, you’ve done it! You’ve learned how to build a bot for business. 

The last step, however, is to test your bot to make sure everything works properly. 

Here you’ll see that when I go to message my page, there is an option that says “Get Started.” That’s how you know you’re about to interact with a bot. 

When I click “Get Started,” the bot responds with the welcome message. I’ve changed it up a bit to give me two options: “Learn about bots” or “Show me a unicorn!”

I decided to go with “Show me a unicorn!” first (for the sake of joy & happiness, of course). The bot responds with a GIF of a unicorn and the option to see another (if you’ll remember, you can set up these options in dialogues).

That’s enough unicorns for now, though. So I select “No!” which I decided would bring me back to the first message, inviting me to choose an option.

This time, I choose “Learn more.” The bot responds with the first part of the “Learn more about bots” dialogue that I previously created.

I decided to try interrupting it, however, so I type “Demo” before it can finish. 

Note the typing icon here on Facebook Messenger. That’s a widget that you can add to your dialogues to make your bot appear more human, as if it is typing.

Now, the bot responds with the form dialogue that I set up before. In my case, Facebook automatically loads my phone number (which I’ve blocked out!) so I can easily click on it to provide to the bot.

And, wah-lah! You’ve tested your bot and officially learned how to build a bot for business. 

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How to Build a Bot for Business: A Refresher 

That was a lot of information, so maybe we should quickly review the steps on how to build a bot for business. 

First, in your quest to learn how to build a bot for business, you’ll want to decide what the bot is going to do for your business. Will it answer user questions? Will it gather lead information?

Then you want to go to Customers.ai and sign up for a free account. It takes no time at all, and then you have access to the many free features Customers.ai offers! 

Next, you want to select “Chatbots” from the sidebar and choose between the “Dialogues” and “Q+A” bot options.

Now you’ll want to design your different dialogue options. This is how the user interacts with the bot and how the conversation with the bot moves forward. With these options you can include answer options, URLs, contact forms, and different widgets that personalize the experience for the user. 

After completing your dialogue options, you’ll want to add your Q+A triggers so that a user can easily access your dialogues by typing simple words or phrases instead of going through the conversation with the bot. 

Finally, once you’ve learned how to build a bot for business and completed your first bot, you’ll want to test the bot to make sure it’s functioning properly.

And there you have it, you’ve learned how to build a bot for business and you can now add them to your Facebook page, website, WordPress, and more! 

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How To Build a Bot for Business: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Can you make money with chatbots?

Yes, you absolutely can make money using chatbots for ecommerce. Learning how to sell products online using chatbots requires only minor trial and error with your own products or services. And chatbots are a hot marketing tool in online business because a well-programmed chatbot is a 24/7 sales assistant for your business.

Chatbots are also one of the most popular ecommerce marketing tools to boost direct response marketing campaigns. This is especially true for affiliates, as chatbots have become a must-have affiliate marketing tool in general.

Engagement is the name of the game in today’s world of fast-paced digital marketing, and selling with web chat can give you an edge, as there is nothing more engaging for your customers than having a live chat widget to engage with.

Adding a web chat for customer support component to your website and other channels opens up the doors to many new sales opportunities.

How do chatbots help businesses?

The list of chatbot use cases and web chat examples grows by the day. For business, it’s important to know when and where to use chatbots to your advantage. Chatbot software for business is most commonly used for marketing, customer support, and sales. Plus, chatbots can be used across different marketing channels, such as Messenger for Facebook and Instagram, SMS text marketing, and live chat (also referred to sometimes as web chat) for your website.

Chatbot platforms, such as Customers.ai, work across all of the aforementioned channels, and are considered cross-channel marketing tools.

Some of the most common use cases for chatbots include drip campaigns, automating the distribution of content, and growing email contact lists.

Chatbots are also often used for customer support chat as well as ecommerce marketing tools to sell more products online.

Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messenger chatbots have their own use cases as well. There are many Facebook Messenger chatbot templates to choose from when it comes to Facebook Messenger marketing, such as Customers.ai’s Free Facebook Lead Generator.

Even more recently, chatbot platforms have increasingly adopted SMS marketing tools, which can perform tasks such as sending text message blasts and appointment reminder texts, using SMS keywords as triggers. You can even use your SMS chatbot to get more SMS subscribers.

What are the best chatbots?

There are many great chatbot platforms to choose from. To determine the best chatbot for your business, you need to consider what you need to use chatbots for. For example, are you looking for the best marketing bot, the best SMS marketing tools, or maybe the best chatbot for customer service? 

Regardless of your use cases, you’ll also need to consider cost and educate yourself on chatbot pricing. Furthermore, if you’re looking for an easy to use chatbot service, you’ll want to find chatbot software with a drag-and-drop chatbot builder.

As one of the overall best chatbots for business, Customers.ai has its own proprietary OmniChatⓇ technology. OmniChatⓇ by Customers.ai connects chat marketing solutions from Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, live chat software on websites, SMS text message marketing, and other top performing marketing channels, all from one platform. 

If your goal is to build advanced bots with lots of customization, Customers.ai also has an advanced chatbot builder, as well as powerful marketing automation tools.

Where are chatbots used?

Due to chatbot software being relatively new to the business world, some fundamental questions still persist, such as where and when is it best to use chatbots? 

There are a handful of common places to use chatbots:

• Live chat on your website for lead generation and customer support. 
• Online orders and product suggestions 
• Web chat apps, such as Messenger for Facebook and Instagram. 
• And SMS text message marketing.

Adding live chat to your website is fairly simple and has many benefits. Additionally, multi-channel chatbots exist where you can use a single chatbot platform to connect all of your chat marketing channels. For example, your website chatbot can be a Facebook live chat widget. Meaning you can use the same chatbot on your web pages as you do for Facebook Messenger for business.

Many businesses do this to use a universally known chat application like Facebook Messenger for customer chat on WordPress and other websites.

Speaking of Messenger, there are multiple places on Facebook and Instagram for business where you can use chatbots as a powerful social media marketing tool. For example, you can add bots to all of your posts on Facebook or Instagram to use as a Facebook comment autoresponder.  

The places to use chatbots continues to grow rapidly. From traditional free advertising sites to new use cases, such as using chatbots for Zoom conference calling.

What is Customers.ai?

Customers.ai helps businesses automatically connect with customers in the messaging apps they already use.

Businesses use Customers.ai to instantly nurture and qualify leads, support customer care, and convert and re-engage customers using real-time, one-on-one messaging in an all-in-one live chat and automation platform for SMS, live chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Customers.ai is the best chatbot platform for marketing, sales, and customer support, unified across messaging apps powered by OmniChatⓇ technology.

The post How to Build a Bot for Business appeared first on Customers.ai.

B2B (that’s business-to-business) marketers have a seismic new tool for boosting awareness, acquiring new leads, nurturing relationships and, at the end of the day, selling more.

Slash cost per lead (CPA) and quadruple lead volume?

I jest you not; thank you, bots.

In this post, you’ll learn the top-to-bottom of funnel methods of using a Facebook Messenger bot that supports B2B marketing objectives:

• 3 B2B lead generation chatbot examples you can copy
  • Content marketing and Facebook ads
  • Webinar sign ups
  • Booking meetings/scheduling demos
• How to use easy-to-use chatbot tools you can use to build effective lead generating B2B bots in minutes, without coding
  • Chatbot form builder
  • Facebook post auto-responders (Comment Guards)
  • Running click-to-Messenger Facebook Ads
  • Adding the chatbot to your website
  • Integrating user info to your other business apps (like email marketing or webinar platform)
  • Setting up hot lead alerts from your bot
• How to nurture MOFU leads for engagement and conversion using Messenger bots
  • Creating Facebook bot drip campaigns
  • Running Sponsored Message ads

Here we go, bb.

3 B2B Lead Generation Chatbot Examples You Can Copy Today

When you’re marketing to an audience of business folks, you typically have a few powerful offers in your funnel like:

• Content marketing: Connect prospects with your content, often aimed at securing an email address in order to regularly deliver helpful content to deepen brand affinity and strengthen the relationship.
• Webinars: Host a public event to educate and showcase your unique solutions and answer audience questions in an interactive, scalable format.
• Meetings or demos: Host a meeting with an individual or team to pitch your offering, demonstrate its value, and help your business and your prospect evaluate if a partnership is a good fit.

When you use a chatbot to help your prospects sign up for your content updates, register for your webinars or book meetings, that’s less things that you, or you know, a person, needs to do.

And you can use Customers.ai to build bots to do all the above and more.

How?

If you have the skills to build an email campaign in your favorite email marketing platform or a landing page using a web page content builder, you can use Customers.ai’s coding free chatbot building and Facebook Ads tools.

We’ll do step-by-step tutorials on how to execute, but first, the real-life B2B bot examples.

Content Marketing and Facebook Ads

Content marketing is a classic B2B inbound marketing technique.

Step 1: Get into the head of your customer, publish content that helps them learn what they need to achieve their goals, do more with less effort, and live a better life.

Step 2: Use excellent content marketing as a magnet for growing your lead list.

Invite readers to sign up for your content updates by capturing their email address.

Step 3: Add targeted ad spend to the equation to boost the reach of top-performing content.

If you’ve got a B2B content marketing engine roaring, brilliant. You can add gas with a Facebook Messenger bot and Facebook Ads.

Customers.ai runs Facebook click-to-Messenger ads to promote top-performing unicorn blog content to remarketing audiences.

Here’s why the Facebook ad type with a click-to-Messenger objective works so well:

• Facebook Messenger ads provide businesses with instant lead capture. When someone clicks the “send message” button from the ad and hits the “get started” button in Messenger, the business automatically receives the person’s name, location, language, and gender.
• Facebook Messenger is not only a lead capture channel, it’s also a channel where a business can send follow-up messaging to its audience.
• A business can invite the person to sign up for email updates (a blog feed or newsletter, for example) by collecting their email address in a very low-friction sort of way; because Facebook has all its users’ email address, it can be auto-populated in Messenger in a one-tap button. (I’ll show you more in the how-to tools section on Chatbot Forms).
• The email collected can be automatically sent to the email marketing platform with a Zapier integration and zam, a B2B bot turns a blog post and Facebook ads into a growing email marketing asset.

Get the full 411 in the guide including a step-by-step how-to in How to Promote Your Blog Posts with Facebook Messenger Ads.

A B2B chatbot funnel like this is really simple to set up using Customers.ai. It all comes down to creating the post-click Facebook ad experience (what the user sees after clicking the “send message” button and saying hi to your B2B bot) within Customers.ai.

B2B chatbot tools needed (jump on to these tools below):

• Chatbot forms
• Click-to-Messenger ads

Signing Up Webinar Registrations

Webinars are a time-tested B2B marketing activity because they give businesses a way to offer training and education to decision-making teams in a scalable way.

What a B2B chatbot adds to the webinar registration equation is:

• Fewer steps to sign up …
• Resulting in higher registration rates and
• More visible event notification reminders …
• Resulting in higher attendance rates

Customers.ai uses our chatbot to sign people up for upcoming webinars. You can experience a registration via chatbot yourself here.

Using a chatbot form instead of a web form, we’ve removed a couple steps from the registration flow (first and last name, and easier email capture).

It’s lifted our results an average of 40% and resulted in a higher attendance rate.

Have budget to promote the webinar with ad spend? Click-to-Messenger ads offer the lost CPA of any digital ad available (93% lower CPA).

Here’s why chatbots are a next-level optimization for B2B businesses running webinar marketing campaigns:

• Chatbot forms are more engaging and interactive. The interactivity makes chatbots less likely to be abandoned than a web form, and if the user doesn’t complete the form, the bot can even nudge them for free within the first 24 hours.
• A Facebook bot form is smarter than a web form. Facebook automatically gives the business a user’s name, and it makes it really easy for the user to provide their email with a pre-populated email button. This means less steps to sign up for a webinar, which typically increases conversions.
• When people sign up for a webinar via chatbot, the business can send event reminders through the Facebook bot. These reminders give businesses a second channel (next to email) to send a reminder, increasingly the likelihood that the user will attend the event.
• The email collected can be automatically sent to the webinar platform with a Zapier integration, a priceless efficiency for the business.

The all-in-one guide to How to Do Webinar Sign-ups with a Messenger Chatbot with step-by-step how-to.

A B2B chatbot webinar registration form can be set up in just a few steps using Customers.ai. It all comes down to creating the registration form in the bot builder and connecting this form to your webinar platform with an integration.

B2B chatbot tools needed (jump on to these tools below):

• Chatbot forms
• Zapier integration

Booking Meetings/Scheduling Demos with SQLs

B2B marketers can enrich the sales team’s calendar with meetings with SQLs using a Facebook Messenger bot.

A lead-qualifying, meeting booking B2B chatbot is the secret to how Cat Howell (Facebook Ad Hacks founder) scaled her marketing agency to 6-figures a month.

Here’s how a B2B chatbot does the heavy lifting to scale up scheduling meetings with qualified leads:

• Use entry points to your bot (like embedded on your website, in your Facebook posts and ads) to create new Messenger bot contacts.
• Use the bot to ask lead qualifying questions of your new contacts. Design a “decision tree” that ultimately matches leads with the appropriate offer based on their needs, customer journey, or budget.
• Use the bot to give sales qualified leads a link to book a meeting on the sales team’s calendar.

You can experience Cat Howell’s lead qualifying bot example in Messenger here. Customers.ai’s even turned that B2B chatbot funnel into a chatbot template you can copy.

Here’s why chatbots are poised to up your game for B2B marketers in the business of generating meetings and demos for sales:

• Facebook chatbots have multiple entry points — a fancy way of saying, your leads may end up chatting with your Messenger bot in any of many convenient ways, whether browsing your site via SEO discovery or through a targeted ad.
• A chatbot can strike up a conversation with a prospect, a conversations are infinitely more engaging than a static web form. The chatbot can have a 2-way conversation in which it learns about the person that’s talking to it. This makes a B2B chatbot a scalable support staff for a sales team.
• As people answer a series of lead qualifying questions (what are you looking for, what’s your experience, what’s your budget, when are you looking to start) the chatbot is programmed to provide them with the best fit offer your business provides (a free on-demand webinar, an invitation to a Facebook group, a link to an affiliate partner, or the almighty link to a calendar.)

Read how to execute this exact B2B chatbot funnel in How to Scale Your Business & Schedule Meetings with a Lead-Qualifying Facebook Messenger Bot.

The tools you’ll need to create a SQL meeting scheduling B2B bot funnel include:

• Chatbot entry points (website chat, Facebook ads and Comment Guards are gucci)
• Chatbot forms
• Hot lead alerts if you’re extra

Easy-to-Use Chatbot Tools for Building B2B Bots in 15 Minutes

Now you know the B2B chatbots you want to build, here are the tools in Customers.ai you’ll use to build them.

Chatbot Form Builder

In the B2B chatbot examples above we saw how chatbots can qualify leads in interactive chat forms.

One of the big advantages of chatbots is that conversations are interactive and more engaging than other lead gen tools like web forms.

Where it’s easy to click away from a web page or decide not to submit info, a B2B chatbot collects info as part of a conversation, making it much less likely to be abandoned by prospects.

Don’t forget the other key advantage: Facebook Messenger already provides a lot of the contact info a business needs to capture:

• First and last name
• Email address
• Phone number

… And the chatbot makes it easy for a business to collect email and phone number using Customers.ai chatbot forms and pre-populated buttons.

When you create a Customers.ai chatbot form and require an email or phone number validation, your prospect can submit these fields with one tap.

In this real-estate bot example, see how easy it is for potential sellers to give you their property and contact info by testing out a chatbot form here.

• Step 1: Go to the Customers.ai Bot Builder.
• Step 2: Create a new dialogue to contain your chatbot form.
• Step 3: Add the content widget called “Form”.
• Step 4: Add the questions your bot will ask, marking any key fields as conversions if you want to track conversions in bot analytics.
• Step 5: Use the “email” or “phone number” validation type if you want Facebook Messenger to pop that answer into the conversation for the user to tap and provide.

This B2B bot funnel will take less than 10 minutes to build.

Facebook Post Auto-Responders (Comment Guards)

Another great option for earning new Messenger contacts is Comment Guard. This Customers.ai feature lets you create autoresponders that automatically messages users who comment specific posts.

For example, users who commented on Larry Kim’s post below (left) were automatically sent a message relevant to that post (right).

If a user clicks a button in one of these messages or otherwise responds, they’re automatically added as a contact.

If have a Facebook post that’s racking up solid engagement metrics on, this is an excellent way to grow your Messenger contact list and create new leads at the top of your B2B marketing funnel.

Want to see a comment guard in action? Give one a spin by commenting on this Facebook post. A chatbot will greet you with a prompt.

To set up a comment guard in Customers.ai follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Create Your Autoresponder Funnel

Step 2: Create Your Comment Guard

Select the post to guard from the drop down selector:

Step 3: Craft a Greeting for the Autoresponder

Step 4: Choose your frequency cap.

Read the full tutorial on how to set up comment guard Facebook post autoresponders here.

Running Click-to-Messenger Facebook Ads

Click-to-Messenger Ads appear in users’ news feeds, much like standard impression- or click-based ads.

The main difference is that instead of directing users to visit a website or like a page, the call to action button instructs them to contact the business via Facebook Messenger.

After clicking this CTA, the user will receive a message from the brand in the Messenger interface. Test it for yourself by clicking the ad above.

When you’re setting up a click-to-Messenger ad with a Customers.ai bot, follow these video tutorials:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Step 1: Create the ad in Facebook Ads Manager, choosing the placements, audience targeting, budget, schedule, and ad creative as you do.

Step 2: Use the Customers.ai Bot Builder to create the bot response AFTER the user initially interacts with the opt-in message you’ll create in the next step.

Step 3: Use the Customers.ai Facebook Click-to-Messenger ad builder to create the initial bot response after someone taps the “Send Message” CTA button from the ad. Pick the bot dialogue created in Step 2 as the follow-up response.

Step 4: Automatically sync your Facebook bot flow to your Facebook ad created in Step 1 by picking the ad from a drop-down selector.

I’m going to go ahead and say it. Facebook bots are the most exciting technology to hit the digital ad scene in the last 5 years.

There is nothing else that comes close to the interactivity, ability for story-telling, and (as of this writing) best in class CPA, as you see with bot-powered click-to-Messenger ads.

Adding the Chatbot to Your Website

Did you know that chat on your website can increase conversions and grow your lead list?

When you use a Customers.ai Facebook bot for your site chat, it does.

Everyone who messages you on your website becomes a contact in your database you can send future messages to.

Businesses get all the advantages of Facebook bots that we’ve previously discussed like instant lead capture and the ability to collect email and phone number with friction-free buttons. You can answer the questions of your site visitors at critical points in their buyer’s journey with automated FAQs.

Here’s how to set up a Customers.ai bot on your site — there are a couple options.

If you’re running a WordPress website, get yourself the free and easy WP-Chatbot plugin by Customers.ai.

It’s a WordPress chatbot plugin that you customize for your business. Not too much more description needed here…

Option 2 is going to work for everyone, regardless of what platform your site or application is built on. That’s trusty Google Tag Manager.

Simply create the chatbot dialogue in Customers.ai’s bot builder that will greet your page visitor, and then go to Customers.ai Lead Magnets to create the copy-and-pasteable code to paste into your Google Tag Manager.

Yep, it’s that easy.

Full-on tutorial for installing a chatbot via Google Tag Manager is available here.

Integrating User Info to Your Other Business Apps

As you integrate B2B chatbots into the marketing mix, you’re going to want to connect Customers.ai to other applications you use for your marketing stack.

Take these common uses for example:

• Send a lead from website chat into your CRM solution for someone to follow up with.
• Automatically send webinar registration data from the chatbot to a webinar platform.
• Automatically send new email subscribers to an email platform.

Customers.ai is an official Zapier integration partner and you can fire up zaps that connect Customers.ai to your other systems from within Customers.ai.

Step 1: Create the bot that collects an email address.

Step 2: Set up a new Zap via Customers.ai Marketing Automations.

Step 3: Add the Zapier connection widget to the dialogue from Step 1 to trigger the Zap.

For the detailed step-by-step guide, head over to Getting Started with Customers.ai + Zapier Chatbot Integrations.

Setting Up Hot Lead Alerts from Your Bot

One red-hot B2B feature of a Facebook bot is the ability to receive an email alert when a hot lead is talking to your bot.

Step 1: Just add the email widget to any Customers.ai bot dialogue when it signifies a hot lead.

Step 2: Set up the reply-to email.

Add the email address of the person or team who will receive this alert (typically a sales team or sales person) in the to line, an email subject, and then the email body.

There aren’t any other steps … except for your sales team receiving the alert when a prospect is on the line looking to talk.

How to Get an Email Alert When a Hot Lead Is Talking to Your Bot has some extra pointers for how and where you may want to use the hot lead alert B2B bot feature.

Give the hot lead alert bot a spin here.

How to Nurture MOFU Leads for Engagement and Conversion Using Messenger Bots

At this point you’re a B2B marketing power house with a butt-kicking bot sidekick.

You’re acquiring new top of funnel leads, and you have the skills to qualify them, and send that lead info off to the next step of the funnel, whether on to a sales person or an email list or an event.

Still, we’re not done yet, B2B friends. There’s more you can do at the middle of the funnel to deepen your customer relationship and send your messaging to contacts using your chatbot.

In fact, there are 2 big tactics here for B2B communications:

1. Drip campaigns (free)
2. Sponsored messages (paid)

Creating Drip Campaigns with a B2B Bot

Drip campaigns are a great way to keep your contacts engaged with content that’s relevant to their stage in the buying process.

If you’ve ever used drip campaigns for email, Messenger campaigns follow a similar setup. You can use them to send a series of messages to your subscribers, timed out at specific intervals.

HubSpot, for example, used this type of campaign to engage users who’d signed up for a four-day webinar series.

The first message thanked users for their interest and gave an overview of the series.

Then, the day before the event, the company sent a reminder message encouraging users to add workshops to their calendars.

During the event, they sent a new message each day with a link to the latest video, along with a summary of what it included.

After the workshop series ended, they followed up with a survey asking for feedback.

This is an extremely effective way to prevent keep users engaged — and you can use the same strategy with the Customers.ai Chatbot Builder.

Each of the messages you send will include a page from your chatbot. This means that before you create your drip sequence, you’ll need to create new pages with all of the content you want to include.

The best way to do this (and keep the process organized) is to create a new group for each drip campaign. To create a drip campaign to promote an event your business is hosting, you could create a new group for all of the content related to that event.

Then, you could add these pages into a drip sequence. Select Drip Campaigns from the left menu and click “New Campaign.”

From there, creating your campaign is as easy as selecting each page from a drop-down list:

Then, set the time delay between each of your messages. For example, you might choose to send your first message a few seconds after a user opts into a campaign, then send follow-up messages each following day.

These campaigns can include as many pages as you want, with time delays ranging from one minute to one month.

These campaigns are a great way to stay on users’ radars and make sure they don’t fall out of your sales funnel — without requiring you or your team to manually contact each of your leads.

Drip campaigns with Facebook chatbots are free to run within 24 hours of the last time someone contacted your bot.

For the complete guide, look to How to Do Drip Campaigns in Facebook Messenger.

Send Follow-Up Messages with Sponsored Messages

Which brings us to Sponsored Messages, Facebook’s provided method for reaching Messenger bot contacts outside of the 24-hour window.

If it’s been more than 24 hours since a contact has talked to your bot, you can pay to send a message to these folks using the Facebook ad called Sponsored Messages.

A business with an existing Messenger contact list uses the Sponsored Messages ad to connect with contacts to offer promotions, business updates, and announcements.

To create a Facebook Sponsored Messages ad campaign in Customers.ai follow these steps:

Step 1: Create a new campaign in Advertising > Promo Blaster in Customers.ai.

Step 2: Choose the custom audience of your Messenger contacts from the drop-down menu.

Step 3: Set up the ad creative as a question with quick reply buttons. Add an image if you want. Give the campaign a budget.

Step 4: Set the start and end date of the campaign, then hit “Send” to run the Facebook Sponsored Messages ad campaign.

Our guide How to Create Facebook Sponsored Messages Ads: What They Are, When to Use Them & Performance Tips has more detailed info and best practices for optimizing this ad type.

B2B Chatbots: Your Businesses Best New Marketing Tool

What do you think of all that B2B jazz?

Chatbots that increase content marketing reach, deepen customer relationships, grow email lists, make lead capture interactive and easier, integrate seamlessly with other business applications, and give businesses another channel for communicating with customers and leads.

Get yourself a B2B chatbot today. Get Customers.ai free and start building awesome bot funnels.

Important Next Steps

• Get Customers.ai for FREE and build your B2B chatbot today.
• Join the 25K chatbot builders, B2B marketers and agencies in Customers.ai Island where we share what’s working in chat marketing right now.

The post Chatbots for B2B: How to Launch a Facebook Bot for B2B Lead Gen in 15 Minutes appeared first on Customers.ai.

Efficiency and automation are the keys to scaling. If you aren’t around 24/7 to answer questions from new leads and process orders around the clock, you get some software to do it for you.

Enter chatbots for business.

Chatbots are seeing the fastest rate of new technology adoption today, with 27% of SMBs reporting they use chatbots in their business.

So how much will it cost a small business to invest in a chatbot?

What does a chatbot for marketing and sales or customer service chatbot for an SMB cost?

If you’re an SMB looking for answers to the questions of chatbot pricing, here is everything you need to know.

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If you want the one-minute version, jump to the end of the article where we dish up exactly what you need to know and do. Spoiler: It starts at $0/month.

Here’s what we cover in this article:

• How Much Does a Chatbot Cost?
• Chatbot Pricing Depends on Your Business Goals
• Two Chatbot Price Models — Agency and In-house
• In-house Chatbot Prices
• Agency Chatbot Prices
• Sample Agency Chatbot Prices
• FAQs about Chatbot Pricing
• The Simple Solution to Affordable Chatbots

How much does a chatbot cost?

Chatbots cost from $0 to $1,000/month or higher, depending on all the things you program them to do.

That’s as simple an answer as we can give in one sentence. (Read the rest of this article and you’ll have a much more nuanced understanding.)

Here’s a 3-tier way of understanding chatbot pricing. Again, simplistic, but tl;dr:

• Free + Your Time – Create a chatbot in-house and have a basic, functional chatbot for responding to customer inquiries and questions.
• $0/mo-$49/mo for Software + Your Time – Use visual chatbot building software to create a chatbot in-house and have a powerful, robust chatbot to generate new business, do instant lead capture, upgrade Facebook ads, and boost sales. Customers.ai’s starter plan for a chatbot that works in Facebook Messenger and in native website chat (hello, OmniChat!) is free for unlimited contacts.
• $500-$5000/month – Hire a chatbot agency to create and maintain chatbots that do lead gen, execute sales funnels and do customer care and remarketing for you.

Now, let’s get into the all-important details.

Chatbot pricing — it all depends on your business goals

Before you can get an accurate estimate of how much your dream bot will cost your business, you need to answer this question:

What do you want your chatbot to do?

It’s important to decide on the purpose and functionality of your chatbot.

Here are some options for small businesses investing in chatbot technology:

• Customer service chatbots – Customer support chatbots can serve a variety of purposes — FAQs, store hours, and directions, services, etc. Many times, these chatbots look act a lot like a phone menu, except they’re way more interesting. Think gifs and stuff.
• Website chatbot – One of the best uses of chatbots is providing user support and steering prospects toward what they’re looking for while potential customers are on your website. A simple plugin plus a chatbot makes it happen.
• Scheduling or registration chatbots – Want to take the busywork and hassle out of setting appointments for your beauty shop, coaching sessions, or dentist office? A chatbot can handle all of this, saving your office team time to work on more strategic initiatives and saving your business cost of staffing for this administrative task
• Transactions chatbots – Chatbots can support ecommerce transactions, including providing discounts and coupons, receipts, shipment, tracking information, etc.
• Lead generation – Lead generation chatbots are marketing-focused chatbots that usually involve prospecting and lead capture plus lead nurturing tactics like drip campaigns.

It’s worth mentioning at this point, that you can create all of these chatbots using Customers.ai and chatbot templates.

Using a template can save dozens of hours in labor and setup, and is an easy way to jump into the chatbot game with very low costs.

These Customers.ai chatbots work in both Facebook Messenger as well as for folks who aren’t using Messenger but are visiting your site (we call it native web chat).

You can also create chatbots for chat messaging services such as Slack, Kik, Viber, Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, Skype, and other platforms.

Facebook Messenger is the platform of choice for most SMBs for a few basic reasons — the target audience uses it.

Chatbots like those created with Customers.ai provide a powerhouse of functionality for chatbots across all small business use cases. If you’re just starting out with chatbots, you would do best to start with an OmniChat chatbot that works simultaneously on native web chat and Facebook Messenger created on Customers.ai because:

• The majority of customers are accessible via Facebook Messenger (there are 1.3 billion active users on Messenger)
• Facebook bots get access to a lot of useful customer data and businesses get the benefit of obtaining this data automatically on first connection
• Facebook Messenger bots integrate directly with Facebook ads and are shown to reduce Facebook Ad CPA and increase AOV
• With Customers.ai OmniChat, any website visitor who is NOT a Facebook Messenger user can still talk to your bot through native web chat
• And the price tag is most affordable building a bot on a platform that simultaneously works on the most popular chat app in the U.S., Facebook Messenger, as well as for non-Facebook users visiting your website

There are two main ways to calculate chatbot pricing — doing it in-house or hiring an agency

Broadly speaking, the next decision you’ll need to make is this — do we create the chatbot ourselves (i.e., in-house) or hire an agency to do it?

That might be the literal you as owner or “marketing person” of your SMB. Or, you can have an employee create the chatbot, your tech-savvy kid, or an intern.

Total transparency, making a chatbot is very easy.

Yes, I speak from the perspective of an elder Millennial who works on a computer all day. But if you have a working knowledge of computers — think Facebook Messenger or a basic SaaS — then whipping up a chatbot is quick and easy if you use a chatbot builder like Customers.ai.

By “agency,” I’m referring to hiring an outside business that specializes in marketing and chatbots.

This is an estimation of how pricing would work based on which route you go.

What’s involved in those:

• Chatbot software platform – At the most basic level, you’ll need a chatbot builder. Sign up for Customers.ai to get a robust multi-channel chat marketing automation and Facebook advertising bot solution.
• Chatbot development and setup – This is the work of making the initial chatbot that answers commonly asked questions about your business and collects useful info about your new contacts that you can use to qualify them, identify what they need, and enter them into a marketing sequence or sales funnel. If you do this in-house, you’ll expect to spend a certain number of hours to learning the software and making the chatbot.
• Ongoing chatbot support and maintenance – Once your chatbot is up and running, expect some ongoing tweaks. Agencies do this for a fee, or you could spend a few hours a week doing it in-house. If you’re running a simple chatbot like an FAQ bot, this may require zero to one hour weekly just to review unanswered questions and see if your bot should have any new Q&A responses programmed. If you have several chatbots doing several things — drip campaigns, Facebook click-to-Messenger ad bots, etc. — it might take more time.

Here’s the basic idea. Doing it yourself usually allows smaller dollar amounts are drawn from your account but it requires you to invest that other limited resource, you or your team’s time.

Now for disclaimers and tips:

• Hiring an agency to create chatbots frees you and your team up to do what you do best. In the long run, that might lead to optimal revenue.
• If you run a tight, lean team of highly-compensated employees, hiring an agency might work best. For example, if you’re a small law firm, brokerage, or real estate agency, outsourcing the job to an agency makes more sense from a cost perspective.
• Alternately, if you have a team of 5-20 employees, including some tech-savvy specialists or a marketing department, consider doing it in-house. This marketing team (or individual) may be able to make the time and have the technical chops to create your chatbot.
• Consider hiring contractors to do the work, too. An agency-alternative is the contract model, in which you might hire someone to do the setup and development and train your team to do the ongoing maintenance.

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Consider these costs for accurate in-house chatbot pricing

Obviously, there’s more to chatbot pricing than just the software, even if you do it in-house. Here are some costs to factor in:

Chatbot Platform – $0-$500/month

First, you’ll need to get a chatbot platform. Customers.ai is one of the most robust and competitively-priced chatbot builders available. Heck, it’s free. Get it. Use it. Do it.

Although we have a vested interest in recommending it, we are also aware of the market and

Pricing starts at $0 and goes up for full-fledged, high-octane chat marketing automation software with all the bells and whistles.

Check out all the details on our Customers.ai pricing page.

Employee time – $50+/hr

If you assign this task to your team, make sure you understand

• What they won’t be doing as a result of taking on this job. Will it hurt the business or lead to a loss in revenue?
• How much they cost per hour. Making chatbots is a high-value job, but it does not require a highly-trained or highly-paid person to do it. It involves more experience than mopping the floors but doesn’t require an advanced degree or years of experience.

Those who are often tasked with the job of creating chatbots are in the “marketing specialist” job level range — someone with 2-5 years of experience, a bachelor’s degree, and some technical ability.

According to Glassdoor, marketing specialists earn, on average, $50,528/year.

For an hourly rate, that’s about $100/hr. The overhead for this employee (equipment, vacation, insurance, etc.) is presumably 1.4x higher. So the hourly cost for this employee is about $140/hour.

With that number in mind, if your marketing specialist spends 10 hours to create a chatbot, the cost to you is $1,400.

Consider these 3 costs for accurate agency chatbot pricing

Here is an overview of the kinds of costs associated with hiring an agency to create your chatbot.

One-Time Development Fee for Basic Chatbot Development – $500-$1000

An agency often prices bots based on their functionality. Basic bots include the following:

• FAQ bot for customer support, often embedded on the business website
• Bot for acquiring new customers and more leads
• Bot for reducing the cost of Facebook Ads, and increase leads and sales from Facebook Ads
• Bots for showcasing or recommending products for ecommerce or retail

The agency will usually do the setup and implementation of the chatbot for anywhere from $500 to $2,500 as a one-time fee.

This setup costs usually includes things like basic chatbot creation, chatbot implementation, chatbot troubleshooting, and even training you or your team on using the chatbot.

One-Time Development Fee for Advanced Chatbot Development – $1,000-$5,000

If you have a specific, one-time campaign in mind, you might be looking for chatbot development priced by the project. As long as the deliverables are defined, you can go this route. Of course, the more functionality and more integrations to other business systems that your chatbot needs, the more it will cost.

Ongoing Chatbot Subscription, Maintenance, and Support – $50-$5,000/month

Agencies usually offer ongoing support and maintenance for the chatbot. Many agencies, in fact, require this as part of the contract for chatbot creation.

Chatbot support is a good option and something that you should invest in. Unless you are experienced in creating chatbots, this support comes in handy.

Far from being wasted retainer costs, the monthly chatbot fee often covers the subscription price for the chatbot platform that the agency is using. In addition, you may receive on-demand support, troubleshooting, and enhancements.

If you discontinue agency support from your chatbot, you may lose various chatbot features such as integrations or monthly reports.

Additional landing pages, campaigns, opt-in points, etc. — additional charges.

Chatbot agencies often price their chatbots based on the quantity of certain things like landing pages or campaigns.

You may find that agencies will customize these prices, or they may have different pricing tiers that address the specific needs you may want.

Keep in mind, agencies do most of the work, but they will require your time. Your time is another “cost” that you’ll need to factor in as you consider chatbot pricing.

Sample Agency Chatbot Prices

This agency uses a tiered pricing structure based on things like the number of landing pages, campaigns, and connections.

For this company, each bot setup is priced at £500.

The ongoing chatbot support package is £250/month.

FAQs about Chatbot Pricing

What factors determine chatbot pricing?

Chatbot pricing can be determined by several factors, including the complexity of the chatbot’s functionality, the level of customization required, the number of supported platforms, the size of your audience or user base, and the provider or development agency’s pricing structure.

What are the common pricing models for chatbots?

Common pricing models for chatbots include one-time licensing fees, monthly or annual subscription plans, and usage-based pricing where you pay based on the number of interactions, messages sent, or API calls made by the chatbot.

Are there free or low-cost chatbot options available?

Yes, there are free or low-cost chatbot options available. Some chatbot development platforms offer free plans with limited features or usage. Additionally, there are open-source chatbot frameworks that allow you to build and host chatbots without incurring any direct costs.

What additional costs should I consider when budgeting for a chatbot?

In addition to the chatbot platform or development costs, you should consider any ongoing maintenance or support fees, integration costs with other systems or APIs, and potential costs for natural language processing (NLP) services or third-party plugins required to enhance your chatbot’s functionality.

Can I get a customized pricing quote for my specific chatbot requirements?

Yes, many chatbot providers or development agencies offer customized pricing based on your specific requirements. Contact the chatbot platform or service you are considering to discuss your needs and get a tailored pricing quote.

Are there any hidden costs associated with chatbot pricing?

While chatbot pricing varies depending on the provider, it’s essential to inquire about any potential hidden costs. Some common hidden costs could include charges for exceeding message limits, additional fees for advanced features or integrations, and costs for technical support beyond the basic level of service.

Can I upgrade or downgrade my chatbot plan in the future?

Yes, most chatbot providers offer flexibility to upgrade or downgrade your plan as your needs evolve. It’s advisable to review the provider’s terms and conditions to understand their policies regarding plan changes, any associated fees, and the process for making adjustments to your chatbot subscription or licensing.

Are there any discounts available for long-term commitments?

Yes, some chatbot providers offer discounts or special pricing for long-term commitments. They may have annual plans that provide cost savings compared to monthly subscriptions or offer discounts for extended contracts. It’s worth exploring these options if you anticipate using the chatbot for an extended period.

Is it possible to build and deploy a chatbot without hiring a development agency?

Yes, it’s possible to build and deploy a chatbot without hiring a development agency. There are user-friendly chatbot platforms available that provide no-code or low-code interfaces, allowing individuals without extensive programming knowledge to create and launch their chatbots. These platforms often offer various pricing plans to accommodate different user requirements.

The post Chatbot Pricing: Everything You Need to Know About Chatbot Prices for SMBs appeared first on Customers.ai.

And, most importantly, you’ll have a clear action plan for using chatbots to help your business succeed in sales, marketing, and customer service.

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that can simulate conversation and interact with humans.

That’s a pretty simplistic definition. Chatbots are enormously powerful, scalable, and can do so much more than just “talk.”

You’ve used a chatbot before. I almost guarantee it.

Look in the lower right corner of your browser. There’s a chatbot.

Hop in there and you can be interacting with our chatbot in just a few seconds. (You should try it out.)

Here is Fandango’s chatbot and I having a little convo.

Want some news? Hop over to CNN’s chatbot for that.

Chatbots, of course, work on other platforms than just Facebook Messenger.

You might order coffee using the Starbucks chatbot in an app.

Or Slack. Slack has all kinds of chatbots.

There’s this classic chatbot if you’re an Apple device user.

Chatbots are kind of everywhere.

And, if Google Trends is any indication, the past couple of years have seen a massive increase in general interest in chatbots.

Why the popularity in chatbots?

Apart from the obvious — it is an emerging and expanding technology — chatbots are both incredibly useful and easy to create.

And that’s exactly why cutting-edge marketers and forward-thinking professionals are creating sales chatbots, marketing chatbots, and customer service chatbots.

How Do Chatbots Work? The Different Types of Chatbots

How do chatbots work?

From a high-level view, it looks like this:

• A user — you, a person, your aunt — communicates with a computer program. Maybe you type. Maybe you talk. Maybe you smile and wave.
• The computer program responds to what you’ve said based on how it has been programmed. Perhaps you typed “price,” and the chatbot has been programmed to serve up information about product costs.

The idea is simple.

Chatbots can take different forms, depending on how they’re used.

For example, some chatbots use AI (artificial intelligence) and NLP (natural language processing) to simulate human conversation.

AI technology allows these chatbots to better understand, adapt to, and respond to a conversation.

Chatbots with advanced technology like NLP are certainly useful, but for the day-to-day use of sales, marketing, and customer service, basic chatbots are perfect.

Chatbots also differ according to where and how you interact with it.

For example, you can build chatbots to work on Skype, Slack, Kik, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and just about anywhere else that messaging is permitted.

Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular chatbot platforms because of its sheer size — 1.3 billion users as of mid-2019.

Creating a chatbot on Messenger is very simple.

All you need is a Facebook Messenger chatbot builder.

What is a Facebook Messenger chatbot builder?

A chatbot builder for Facebook Messenger is an app that allows you to build chatbots that work in Facebook Messenger. Anyone can make them because most chatbot builders are straightforward and easy to use.

For example, creating a chatbot in Customers.ai, one of the premier Messenger chatbot builders, is a simple drag-and-drop job.

Take a look at that screenshot above one more time.

You don’t see any of this, do you?

To make a Facebook Messenger chatbot, you don’t need to know any code.

That simplicity is one of the big reasons why chatbots are soaring in popularity among salespeople, marketers, and customer service professionals.

How Do Chatbots Work in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service?

Imagine the following scenario.

You’re in business selling a product or service.

And one of your biggest pain points is customer service.

• Where’s my order?
• How much does this cost?
• Do you have that shirt in robin’s egg blue?
• When will my shipment arrive?
• What are your hours?
• Can you send me directions to your store?

The customer service requests are never-ending. So you consider expanding to something like this.

Which is expensive, by the way. And complex. And goodbye profit margins.

What if you could replace all of that, with a customer support chatbot?

The bot handles inquiries, schedules appointments, gives store hours, sends directions, provides coupons, and handles all those details of customer service.

(You, by the way, may choose to sleep while all of this goes down.)

When you use a chatbot for customer service, everyone wins — the customers, the customer service team, you, your aunt, everyone.

Let’s spin another use chatbot use case.

How do chatbots work in marketing?

This is huge.

Facebook Messenger Marketing is the panacea to the death of email marketing, the bane of cold-calling, and the misery of expensive Facebook advertising.

As Larry Kim and I have been asserting, “Facebook Messenger marketing is the hottest opportunity in digital marketing today.”

Facebook Messenger marketing uses Messenger to reach and connect with potential customers. Your Messenger chatbot performs the tasks and responsibilities of a high-octane marketing team. (Without the high-octane costs.)

For example:

• Your Messenger chatbot sends a drip campaign to 19,019 users automatically.
• As the users respond, your chatbot is seamlessly hypersegmenting them into specific groups based on demographics, psychographics, specific responses, and even how much they spend on makeup each month. (Seriously. There’s no limits on what you can do.)
• The chatbot automatically pings these customers 24 hours after their interaction to remind them, invite them for a chat, or simply to provide another offer.
• Your chatbot even facilitates a webinar — getting signups, checking schedules, and providing access codes.

This is only the toenail of the colossus that is Facebook Messenger marketing.

Here’s an example of how it might look in real life.

Say you want to run a contest to attract new leads and engage existing leads. No problem. Your chatbot is up to the task.

Messenger chatbots are also enormously beneficial for Facebook advertising. Using Messenger ads you can lower advertising costs, increase conversions, and gain more leads.

To run Messenger ads, you have to build a Messenger chatbot.

What kind of tools do you need for all of this sales and marketing chatbot wizardry? It’s simple — a subscription to Customers.ai and grade-school technical chops. You’re set.

In summary, chatbots work for business by handling massive workloads in three major areas:

• Marketing — acquiring new leads, engaging with existing customers, etc.
• Sales — enabling transactions
• Customer Service — providing customer care, answers to questions, and other routine customer requests and needs

Why Chatbots Are So Important Right Now

Chatbots are crucial now for their bottom-line benefits.

• Chatbots provide individual connections to a limitless number of users at scale.
• Chatbots automate routine tasks.
• Chatbots facilitate superior customer care.
• Chatbots allow for a personalized experience.
• Chatbots are interactive, allowing for a back-and-forth conversation with feedback
• Chatbots are efficient.
• Chatbots save money.

Chatbots are basically unicorns — everything good about the Internet in one place.

There’s an underlying corollary to these benefits. Using chatbots is an imperative right now because of a timing issue.

Chatbots are easy to make and extremely powerful. But very few businesses are using chatbots!

If you choose to make chatbots now, you are effectively gaining first-mover’s advantage.

How to Build Chatbots. It’s easier than you think.

The next logical questions is this — how do I make one?

We’ve got you covered. The process is quick and simple and laid out in exacting detail right here.

In summary, it looks like this:

• Sign up for Customers.ai and open the app.
• Connect your Facebook Business Page with the Customers.ai chatbot builder.
• Click on Bot Builder and it’s go-time.
• 

If creating a chatbot from scratch is intimidating, don’t sweat it.

Customers.ai comes with a whole library of chatbot templates. Whatever your chatbot use case, you will find a customizable chatbot template that fills the need.

Select the industry you’re in or the chatbot functionality you want, and customize what’s already there.

How to Make Chatbots Work for You

Let’s wrap this up with a few hot tips on how chatbots can rocket your business to greater heights:

First, evaluate which of the three areas chatbots will have the biggest impact for your business.

Is it sales? Marketing? Customer service?

Pick an area that is taking up a lot of your time and effort. Your chatbot will instantly alleviate the pressure.

Second, come up with the specific angle your chatbot will address.

If the biggest impact is sales enablement, for example, create a bot that qualifies leads/guides shoppers through to find their perfect product/solution.

If the biggest impact is lead generation, create campaigns to acquire users at the top of the funnel or remarket to prospective contacts.

Third, create your chatbot using Customers.ai’s chatbot builder. Use a template to save time.

Fourth, segment your contacts, saving attributes or tags for questions you ask. These allow for personalization in follow up, and will serve as an outstanding asset for your future marketing and remarketing needs.

Finally, integrate chatbots with your other business systems. Customers.ai uses Zapier integration, meaning that your chatbot can plug into all your other business systems and apps.

Next Steps for Chatbot Success

• If you haven’t done it yet, sign up for Customers.ai. Everything starts there.
• Receive the occasional chatbot power tip by getting plugged into our Facebook Messenger channel.
• Join the free Facebook Group, where thousands of Facebook Messenger marketers pool their insights, hacks, and tips.

The post How Do Chatbots Work? A Practical Business Guide to Building Chatbots for Sales, Marketing and Customer Service appeared first on Customers.ai.

Want the truth?

Custom chatbots are present-day, ridiculously cheap, and refreshingly easy to create.

The fact is, if you’re in business today and not using custom chatbots, you have a bit of catching up to do.

That’s what this article aims to do — give you exactly you need to know about creating, deploying, customizing, and profiting from custom chatbots.

1. What is a Custom Chatbot?

A custom chatbot is a computer program that can interact with a human via chat technology.

The Facebook Messenger dialogue below is driven by a chatbot.

It looks and feels natural, but it was set up by a non-developer (me), launched, and deployed in 15 minutes. 

With that custom chatbot, I can collect leads in my sleep. 

Most chatbots that are developed today are customized in some way — whether that customization is something as simple as adding branding to the chat widget or developing a chatbot customized from scratch for the exact needs of a business.

Customers.ai’s chatbot maker allows marketers and business owners to create custom chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform.

These chatbots can be designed to cover a broad array of business needs — from scheduling appointments to launching a drip campaign.

For some reason, people tend to think that custom chatbots are the exclusive realm of enterprise businesses or larger corporations that need some advanced AI technology. The reality is, any business can create custom chatbots.

Chatbot makers have evolved to the point where creating a chatbot is no more complicated than dragging, dropping, and typing a few words in an easy-to-use chatbot maker like Customers.ai.

Marketing agencies, for example, are some of the most prolific chatbot creators, developing and selling chatbot services to their clients. With a few well-designed chatbot templates, they can essentially copy, paste, and customize a chatbot that is perfect for any of their client businesses — from a coffee shop to a CrossFit gym.

Custom chatbots aren’t rare, aren’t complicated, and certainly aren’t out of reach for today’s marketers, solopreneurs, and freelancers.

With Customers.ai, a Facebook Messenger chatbot platform, you can have a custom chatbot up and running in minutes.

2. What Can a Custom Chatbot Do?

With a custom chatbot, there is virtually no end to the level of functionality and creativity you can produce.

The concept behind chatbots is the simulation of a conversation or chat. In that context and with that technology, there is so much that can happen.

Here’s a quick flyover of some of the things that custom chatbots can do.

• Custom chatbots can intelligently answer and respond to customer service questions
• Custom chatbots can live on your website as a chat widget, inviting customers to chat at any time of day or night.
• Custom chatbots can schedule appointments, including phone calls, in-person events, webinars, concerts, trips, or flights
• Custom chatbots can display image galleries, such as a menu of your pastry selection or current homes for sale
• Custom chatbots can display emojis because we all love emojis
• Custom chatbots can switch up their approach and questions/answers, based on a user’s response to questions
• Custom chatbots can display gifs to add a little excitement to the chat conversation
• Custom chatbots can segment users according to answers to questions, storing each user group into a highly-specific segment — for example a segment might be “hot leads from the website” or “low potential – adspend under $10,000”
• Custom chatbots can send users surveys, including customer satisfaction surveys
• Custom chatbots can request and save user’s email address, phone number, and even their current location
• Custom chatbots can integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms using Zapier
• Custom chatbots can display store hours upon request
• Custom chatbots can provide directions to the store upon request
• Custom chatbots can provide downloads, like a whitepaper, or a vector file, or a free ebook,
• Custom chatbots can show videos
• Custom chatbots can send coupons
• Custom chatbots can transition to a live chat with a real human as soon as a user requests it
• Custom chatbots can be launched by scanning a QR code, clicking on a link, or confirming on a landing page
• Custom chatbots can message thousands of users simultaneously
• Custom chatbots can send Messenger drip campaigns
• Custom chatbots can automatically send users new blog posts as soon as the blog posts go live
• Custom chatbots can provide users with shipping information, receipts, order confirmation, or other types of updates

3. How Do You Develop a Custom Chatbot?

This question gets right to the point. If custom chatbots are this amazing, how do you make them?

There are five basic steps to developing a custom chatbot

1. Sign up for Customers.ai or an alternative chatbot builder.
2. Connect the chatbot builder to your Facebook Business page
3. Open up the Bot Builder
4. Customize the chat dialogue to your specific needs
5. Test and then launch the chatbot

For specific points of customization and screenshots for every step of the process, be sure to check out the article, How to Create a Powerful Chatbot in 15 Minutes.

There are three takeaways that you should keep in mind regarding how to develop a custom chatbot:

• Creating a custom chatbot is a quick process. You can go from none to done in 15 minutes or less.
• Developing a custom chatbot is easy. There’s no coding or technical backend stuff to mess around with.
• Developing a custom chatbot opens a lot of new possibilities for marketing. Powerful chatbot features can turn a simple custom chatbot into a paradigm-shifting marketing automation platform.

4. How Are Custom Chatbots Used In Business?

Thousands of businesses have discovered the untapped potential of custom chatbots, and are now using them in virtually every facet of their organization.

What types of businesses use chatbots?

Every type of business uses custom chatbots.

Because chatbots are so versatile, businesses in every vertical have found some use for them.

What do these businesses use custom chatbots for?

Everything.

Custom chatbots have such a wide array of applications that it can be kind of confusing as to where to start.

That being said, many businesses start using chatbots for customer service and marketing tasks. Customers.ai, for example, has a suite of chatbot marketing tools such as creating drip campaigns, creating RSS connections, adding customer chat widgets to the website, producing chatbot landing pages, creating Facebook Messenger ads, and much more.

Here are some examples of how custom chatbots are used in business.

• Employees use a custom chatbot internally to submit their time off requests
• Attendees use a custom chatbot to sign up for the dish they are bringing to the neighborhood block party
• Client prospects use a chatbot to schedule a call with a client manager at the Facebook ad agency
• A coffee shop uses a chatbot to give customers loyalty coupons for every beverage they purchase

These days, a lot of marketing agencies are creating chatbots on behalf of their clients. The process of launching a chatbot agency is relatively straightforward.

5. How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Custom Chatbot?

From $0 to $129

Developing a custom chatbot costs only as much as the chatbot builder. Price ranges from free to $129/month.

Most users of Customers.ai choose a $49/month plan which provides advanced Messenger bot automation and integration, custom branding, campaign scheduling, Messenger ad creation, and more.

Custom chatbots are not expensive.

Although some companies insist on spending tens of thousands of dollars for a coding-intense, proprietary, from-scratch chatbot, the fact is, more functionality and power are available for free or for a low monthly subscription.

6. Do Custom Chatbots Use AI?

Yes, many custom chatbots use artificial intelligence (AI).

The reason for integrating machine learning with chatbots is simple — the more a chatbot can learn, the better it can interact with human users.

Artificial intelligence and chatbots can get complicated. There is a learning curve to mastering the intricacies of natural language processing, named entity recognition, textual entailment, and distributional semantics.

Don’t have time to learn all that? Don’t worry.

Customers.ai’s chatbot builder distills it all into a really simple AI platform using Q&A prompts.

You can train the chatbot to respond to prompts in various semantic categories.

In other words, if a user says something like price, cost, how much, etc., then you can tell your chatbot to respond with some dialogue about pricing info.

It’s smart AI without the really long learning curve.

7. What Is an Example of a Custom Chatbot?

You can try out a huge variety of custom chatbot templates from Customers.ai.

For example, here’s a chatbot designed for fitness coaches to get more leads. (Click on that link to open up a sample Messenger sequence.)

These templates are all available for free in the chatbot builder under the templates category.

These chatbots are 100% customizable, meaning that you can fire them up in Customers.ai and change the details in order to make them useful for your particular business.

8. Do Custom Chatbots Require Coding?

No.

It’s tempting to think that chatbots are really complicated and require development skills. In reality, chatbots are super easy to make.

With Customers.ai, you can create a whole chatbot marketing arsenal with hundreds of custom chatbots, and never have to touch a line of code.

To create custom chatbots, all you have to do is drag, drop, type, and tap.

Simple stuff.

Don’t let the simplicity fool you into thinking these are puny chatbots.

The opposite is true. Custom chatbots like these are ultra-powerful, allowing you to bring in buckets of leads, segment users, build a Messenger contact list, remarket, and automate thousands of marketing tasks.

9. What are the Best Chatbot Makers for Custom Chatbots?

Customers.ai is the premier chatbot maker and the fastest-growing Facebook Messenger partner.

Customers.ai allows you to create custom chatbots quickly, easily, and with zero coding.

If you want to have your own custom chatbot fifteen minutes from now, sign up for Customers.ai and give it a spin.

Conclusion – Why Do Custom Chatbots Matter?

Custom chatbots matter because they provide one of the most robust marketing tools available to the modern marketer.

This information matters, because, armed with this knowledge you can go on to transform your business with the power of custom chatbots, answer your boss’s questions, revolutionize your marketing agency, or even launch a new career for yourself!

Now that you know all about custom chatbots, here’s what you need to do:

• Sign up for Customers.ai right away
• Get some training in your new and powerful marketing tool
• Join thousands of other Customers.ai users and custom chatbot fans in a private Facebook group

The post Custom Chatbots: 9 Important Chatbot Questions Answered appeared first on Customers.ai.

Over the last week, Customers.ai’s generated over 40,000 sessions using this tactic:

If you’ve ever sent an email campaign, or run a PPC campaign, or promoted a blog post, you’ve been in the hot seat for generating targeted traffic.

It’s 2019 and it’s time to add a new tactic to your marketing Swiss Army knife: chatbot marketing with chat blasting in Facebook Messenger using Customers.ai.

What’s chat blasting? Chat blasting is a top-of-funnel lead generation tactic for messaging reach and customer engagement, similar to email blasting, but in chat.

Basically, with a chat blast:

• You send messages to contacts on your list.
• Messages drive traffic to your site or your conversion funnels.
• Messages are sent in the Facebook Messenger chat app with push notifications.
• Messages can be organic (free) or paid (Facebook Ads).

Good chat blasts:

• Tap into psychological principles of persuasion like curiosity, urgency, likability, consistency and social proof.
• Offer visually exciting and conversationally interactive messaging.
• Utilize list segmentation tools and message personalization to increase reader engagement.
• Offer users a clear way to unsubscribe from automatic messaging.

In this guide you’ll learn:

• Who should use chat blasts in their marketing?
• Who can receive chat blasts?
• How to send a chat blast
• What’s an unsubscribe message?
• What’s a promotional chat blast?
• What’s a non-promotional chat blast?
• How to check chat blast reports

This is part 1 of the Chat Blast Master series. See also: all about audiences and list building, advanced engagement tactics, and the chatbot analytics and reporting deep dive.

If you like keeping up with the latest strategies and tactics in digital marketing, sign up for chat updates from Customers.ai, where we always keep the freshest chatbot marketing tactics on your radar.

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Who should use chat blasts in their marketing?

If you’re doing internet marketing, you should add chat blasting to your marketing mix.

Chat blasting is a new tactic, but it’s also familiar because you use the same strategies for engagement and list building as you do for content, email, ads and social.

You’re probably doing email marketing today to drive traffic to blog posts and promote deals and offers.

You’ve got an email marketing platform you use to manage your campaigns, to:

• Build your contact lists
• Create the email content
• Send email blasts
• Manage unsubscribes
• Create list segments
• Automate email sequences and 
• Review campaign reporting

You do this for Facebook Messenger campaigns using Customers.ai’s Facebook Messenger marketing platform.

When you send an email blast, you send a message to your email contact list. The average open rate in email is 20% and click-through rate is 4%.

When you publish a Facebook post, you publish content to your Facebook wall which your followers might see in their Facebook News Feed. The average reach is 1% of followers.

When you send a chat blast, you send a message to your contacts in Facebook Messenger. The average open rate in Messenger is 80%. Response rate can reach 20% to 30%.

So who should send chat blasts? Any business or marketing professional looking for engagement, reach and traffic.

Who can receive chat blasts?

A Facebook page can send automated messages through Customers.ai to anyone who first messages the business page.

Like email marketing, you’ll build your list with a variety of tactics and entry points:

Facebook lists a number of entry points that make someone enter a Facebook page’s Messenger contacts, and they all start with someone messaging the page.

That initial contact might be on your Facebook page or post, or via your website chat, or with a checkbox opt-in.

Look for the all about audiences chapter in the Chat Blast Master series. We’ll cover contacts in detail, how to create audiences using system and custom variables, and how to get new contacts.

Join Today’s Webinar with Larry Kim!

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How to send a chat blast

In order to send a chat blast, you first need to build a chatbot.

Read “How to Build a Chatbot for Facebook Messenger in 5 Minutes” and see how to use the chatbot builder to design the content with images, text, GIFs, and other content widgets.

It’s key that when building chatbots for blasting, don’t forget to include an unsubscribe message in your chatbot. Read more here.

The tutorial “How to Chat Blast Your Facebook Messenger Contacts is a step-by-step guide on how to build your chat page, create the blast and blast it.

This guide goes into depth on the chat blasting settings.

After you’ve used the chatbot builder to create the content to blast, head to “Chat Blaster” under the “Old features” tools in the Customers.ai platform.

Click the “Create Chat Blast” button to load up your chat blast.

The first thing you’ll select after naming your chat blast is the Channel to send the blast to. 

(More on Facebook Messenger audiences in Customers.ai here.)

Remember the marketing engagement rule of thumb: The more you segment your audience, the higher the engagement and response rate you’ll see.

Next, you’ll pick the dialogue to blast from a drop-down of all your dialogues:

You’ll choose the category or type of blast you’re about to send: promotional message, notification/update:

You may naturally be wondering what’s the difference between these two or how do I know if the message I’m sending is promotional?

The difference is in the intent and language of the message you’re blasting.

What’s a non-promotional chat blast?

A non-promotional chat blast:

• Doesn’t promote a product or service.
• Doesn’t refer to pricing or cost, not even to say something is free.
• Doesn’t offer a deal, discount our coupon.

Some examples of a non-promotional chatbot marketing blast include:

• Sending updates or reminders for an event.
• Helping people manage the productivity of their businesses or related activities.
• Informing people about recent or important events.
• Providing information in categories such as sports, finance, business, real estate, weather, traffic, politics, government, non-profit organizations, religion, celebrities, and entertainment.

What’s a promotional chat blast?

A promotional chat blast is a marketing tactic intended to sell a product or service.  

Facebook gives this example of promotional content in a Messenger blast:

Examples of promotional blasts include:

• Informing people of a sale or discount offer on a product or service
• Introducing a new product, service or offering
• Favorably comparing your product or service to competitors

What message can I send using 1-time Notification tag?

Facebook’s 1-Time Notification feature allows your page to request permission to send users a follow up message after the 24-hour messaging window has ended. Once a user opts in for the 1-time notification, you reserve the right to send them one promotional message within the next 365 days.

Finally, to send the chat blast, you’ll pick when to send it out. 

Setting a future time or time based on the recipient’s time zone is an advanced scheduling feature available in Customers.ai Startup.

So schedule the chat blast to send immediately or pick the time of the chat blast.

See what’s possible with chat blasting. Join Customers.ai’s +50K Facebook Messenger subscribers and sign up for chat blast with tutorials, news and Facebook marketing strategies each week.

What’s an unsubscribe message?

The unsubscribe message for a chat blast is a short description of how a recipient can opt-out of automated messaging.

It should be as simple as including this line of text at the end of your text field or quick question: “Type ‘stop’ to unsubscribe any time.”

Let your contacts know that they control the messaging they receive and that they can turn off messages from the business.

Including the unsubscribe message in your chat blasts will help you maintain high chat blast engagement rates and low block rates.

When someone types “stop” to your bot, then Customers.ai’s unsubscribe process kicks in and that individual can confirm that they want to opt-out.

How to check chat blast reports

Stay tuned for the in-depth look at chat blast reporting metrics to pay attention to in a future article in the Chat Blast Master series, but in the meantime, here are the basics.

From the same Chat Blaster section of Customers.ai, you’ll see statistics from your chat blasts.

Right from here you’ll see how many contacts were sent the blast, and the number of responses received. Click on a specific Chat Blast campaign to view a detailed report.  

The read rate is the open rate — what percent of everyone who was sent the blast read it.

The response rate is like the click-through rate — what percent of everyone who was sent the blast took an action, whether clicking on a button or sending a reply.

We share 9 tips for getting top-tier engagement with your Facebook Messenger chat blasts and you’ll also want to check out an upcoming article in the Chat Blast Master series on using psychological principles of persuasion in your chat blasts.

That’s it for this overview on what the heck is a chat blast and why you’ll be adding them to your marketing mix in 2019. 

Join Today’s Webinar with Larry Kim!

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What is a Chat Blast: Important Next Steps

The post What’s a Chat Blast Anyway? Chatbot Marketing Basics [2023 Update] appeared first on Customers.ai.

20? 50? 100?

Probably a lot and that’s typical.

Since 2014, we’re using chat apps more than social networking apps. On Facebook Messenger, more than 8 billion messages are sent around the world daily and Customers.ai‘s Facebook Messenger marketing platform is responsible for millions of messages around the world every day!

Connect the dots and the Customers.ai data won’t be a marketing news flash:

Chatbot marketing is the BIGGEST growth opportunity of the next few years.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, has even pivoted the Facebook empire’s future around private messaging. Case in point, Facebook Messenger marketing, Facebook’s Instagram-WhatsApp-Messenger integration, and all the messages-centric news out of F8 2019.

But chat marketing is bigger than Facebook. Chatbots like the ones built with Customers.ai are software that interact with people in a chat interface. Customers.ai chatbots are used on websites and mobile apps in every industry, for marketing, sales and customer service.

Chatbots are expected to save businesses $8 billion within the next 5 years!

Considering there only 300,000 Facebook Messenger bots, that means only 1-2% of the 30 million businesses around the world are using chatbots!

What other critical-to-know chatbot marketing statistics and trends are in the Customers.ai knowledge vault? In this mega massive chatbot marketing statistics infographic of my dreams, Customers.ai has included chatbot stats and trends including:

• Chatbot worldwide market worth
• Chatbot statistics
• Top platforms to build chatbots
• History of chatbots
• Top industries benefitting from marketing with chatbots
• And a ton more from Customers.ai’s statistics vault

Feel free to share this Customers.ai chatbot marketing statistics infographic, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

The post The Mega Massive List of Chatbot Marketing Statistics: Trends, Stats & Infographics appeared first on Customers.ai.

At the same time, your customers get instant answers and support in a mobile-optimized experience.

Today I’m going to show you how to add a Facebook Messenger chat widget to your website in three easy steps using Google Tag Manager.

You can use Customers.ai’s free chatbot builder  and these Facebook Messenger templates with Google Tag Manager to add a Facebook Messenger chat widget to your site no matter what platform it runs on — including CMS platforms like Joomla, Magento, Shopify, WordPress and more. We’ll use a WIX website to illustrate.

(For another way to add a Messenger chat widget to WordPress site check out this tutorial.) 

You can interact with Customers.ai’s website chatbot marketing widget by clicking the Messenger logo in the lower right corner of this window, or any other page of the site! Then build your own free chatbot with Customers.ai.

3 Easy Steps to Add a Facebook Messenger Chat Widget Using Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a free tool that lets webmasters quickly and easily add snippets of code, or “tags,” to a website.

In a single container controlled from the Google Tag Manager interface, you can manage tags you might need for a variety of reasons, from analytics tracking to a website chat widget, without the help of an experienced developer.

So how can you add Facebook Messenger chat to a WIX website? With Google Tag Manager! Just:

1. Install Google Tag Manager on your website.
2. Set up your website chat widget in Customers.ai.
3. Create a new tag for your customer chatbot in Tag Manager.

Ready? Go!

1. Install Google Tag Manager on Your Website

First, head to Google Tag Manager and either create an account or log in to your existing one.

Once you’ve created your account, copy the ten-digit ID from your Tag Manager dashboard. This ID is located at the top of the page in blue text:

This next part will vary slightly based on your CMS, but the process of adding integrations is similar for most CMS platforms.

Log into your WIX account and navigate to “Marketing Integrations”.

Find the integration for Google Tag Manager and click “Go For It.”

Then, select “Connect Google Tag Manager,” paste in your ID and click “Save”.

If you’re using a different CMS and aren’t sure how to enable Google Tag Manager, search your CMS provider’s website for instructions for adding third-party integrations in Google or YouTube, or get in touch with their support staff to help you out.

2. Set Up Your Website Chat Widget in Customers.ai

Once you’ve installed Google Tag Manager on your website, you’ll need to connect your Facebook Messenger chatbot to your domain.

In Customers.ai, select “HTML Elements” from the left sidebar and click the button to “Add HTML Element”:

Select “Customer Chat Widget” from the options:

Give your customer chat widget a descriptive name so you can recognize in a listing of all your Customers.ai Messenger HTML elements. “[Domain Name] Website Chat” is a good name, for instance.

Because you can add different bots to different pages of your site, you might design a different bot for blog than your shopping cart.

Keep these things in mind when you’re giving your website chat widget a name.

Next we’ll pick all the chat widget settings including:

1. The text on the chat widget box
2. The color of the Messenger icon

And when someone clicks “Chat Now”:

3. The chat page that responds to a user

A closer look at these three selections to customize…

Text on the chat widget box

To customize the text on the chat widget box, enter text here in Customers.ai:

You can say something different to someone who is logged into Facebook and someone isn’t logged into Facebook.

Messenger icon color

Want to customize the color of the Messenger logo that appears in the lower right corner to match your site theme?

Enter the hex color code of any color into the Plugin Color field!

Chat page that responds to the user

What will your bot say when the user clicks “Chat Now”?

By default, your Welcome Page bot is selected. But you can use the drop-down selector to pick the chat page that responds to your website visitors.

Here’s a quick primer on how to build a chatbot page in Customers.ai.

Use your standard welcome page bot or design a bot to greet your website visitors. Help a user out!

Next white list all the domains you’ll be using this website chat widget on.

Under “Add Domain to Whitelist,” enter your domain name, like https://domain.com, and click “Add.”

With all the settings customized, click the “Copy” button to paste the website chat widget code to your clipboard:

This is what we’ll add to Tag Manager next.

3. Create a New Tag for Your Chatbot in Tag Manager

Head back to your Google Tag Manager dashboard, and click “Add A New Tag”:

Give your tag a descriptive name like “Facebook Messenger Chatbot Widget.”

From the tag type menu, select “Custom HTML”:

An empty text box will appear. Paste the code you copied from Customers.ai into this box.

Then under “Triggering,” select “All Pages” to tell Google Tag Manager to deploy your chatbot widget on every page on your site:

And if there are pages on your site where you don’t want your chatbot to appear customize the triggering settings.

Click “Save” and your chatbot widget will be live on your website!

Here’s our quick video tutorial on installing a Messenger chatbot to your site through Google Tag Manager:

Adding a chatbot widget to your website is an excellent way to help your site visitors find what they need AND BECOME NEW MESSENGER CONTACTS who you can send hyper-relevant and personalized follow-up messaging to!

How to Add a Facebook Messenger Chat Widget to Your Website: Next Steps

Important next steps:

The post How to Add a Facebook Messenger Chat Widget to a Website via Google Tag Manager appeared first on Customers.ai.

Over half of the tickets have been claimed, and we want you to get in on the action before they run out.

Leveraging the platforms with the most impact, reach, engagement and performance for your dollars and efforts is key. The wide-open window of marketing opportunity today is Facebook Messenger, and this conference is going to get you going from zero to 60.

Spend a few hours with the marketers and advertisers who have mastered the medium to learn how to craft your message and offer for your audience on Messenger.

We designed the chatbot conference to take you from entry to expert as you follow along with the top minds who share:

• How to ensure your branding is authentic with the use of automation tools.
• What strategies and tactics to implement that are proven effective.
• Companies and case studies that showcase your own path forward for chat blasting, list building and advertising best practices in Facebook’s newest and growing platform, Messenger.

Facebook Messenger Marketing Conference Speakers & Sessions

Here’s the full run-down of our scheduled speakers and sessions. But take note — we’re inviting more! Check out our call for speakers at the end of this post.

MARI SMITH

7 Steps to Relationship Building and Boosting the Bottom Line with Facebook Messenger Bots

The Queen of Facebook, Mari Smith, has demonstrated how marketers can develop the quality of online customer relationships to see business-boosting dividends. A champion and educator of the art of social media engagement, Mari provides the ultimate guide to personalized and intimate communication when employing chatbot automations. If you’re ready to get people to notice you, fall in love with your brand through your chat marketing content, and increase your profit at the end of the day, Mari’s essential template for influencer marketing with chatbots is your next step.

LARRY KIM

Intro to Chatbots and Facebook Messenger Marketing

Class is in session! Welcome to chatbot building 101 — your primer to getting started with lead generating, list building, chat blasting, advertising, and lead nurturing automations with Facebook Messenger marketing. Dr. Bot Larry Kim guides you through the basics to see 70%+ open rate and 20% CTR immediately!

VIRGINIA NUSSEY

9-Point Guide to Chat Blasting Like a Master Blaster

You may have never heard of Virginia, but chances are good you’ve been visited by bot girl. The world-record holding chat blaster by sheer volume, no one has been responsible for as many chat blasts as her. Use Virginia’s 9 battle-tested secrets for chat blasting for maximum engagement. And don’t take her word for it as she shares data analysis of 10,000 chat blasts across Facebook Messenger to learn what are good open rates and response rates, what content gets opened and what gets the dreaded unsubscribe.

ISAAC RUDANSKY

15 Foolproof Facebook Messenger Chatbot Use Cases

Chatbots are the biggest tech to revolutionize marketing and advertising since email or search. Learn from the professor, Isaac Rudansky, creator of Udemy’s top digital advertising course. Isaac is bringing his ad man chops to chatbots in this session dedicated to outlining the 15 high-impact lead gen tactics that will drive crazy ROI out the gate!

DENNIS YU

10 Real-World Chatbot Case Studies from Trendsetting Brands

Facebook marketing expert Dennis Yu shares real-world case studies from brands leveraging Messenger marketing tactics for commerce and lead gen. See 10 examples of how companies are using chatbots, chat blasting, and advanced chat marketing tactics for fun and profit!

SAMIR ELKAMOUNY

Scale Up! 3 Real-World Strategies to Get More Customers Through Facebook Ads & Messenger Bots

Forward thinking businesses are crushing it on Messenger. Get ready to take a dive into real-world strategies that Samir and the team at Fetch & Funnel are using to generate superior results and drive Facebook ROAS to new heights. Convert more customers and dominate your competition by combining Facebook advertising and Messenger chatbots.

DAN GOLDER

How I Got 10 Million Facebook Messenger Marketing Contacts

Dan Golder has helped thousands of companies generate millions of Facebook Messenger contacts. In this session he’ll reveal the top 10 very best real-world, unusual strategies and tactics used by his most successful chatbot clients. Use his secret contact generating playbook to grow your account’s contact list like crazy, right away!

Call for Chatbot Marketing Expert Speakers

There are already 3000 marketers registered for the chatbot conference on Sept. 20 and I couldn’t be more excited!

But I’m afraid there might be something missing. It might be you. That’s why we’re doing an open call for speakers.

Apply to speak at the summit by submitting your pitch here.

Come to learn from the experts and, if you’ve got stories of your chatbots driving major ROI, you absolutely must share with us.

Thanks and hope you join me and Customers.ai as we revolutionize digital marketing on Sept. 20. Get your free ticket to the summit here!

Be a Unicorn in a Sea of Donkeys

Important next steps:

• Get Customers.ai for FREE (non-expiring, UNLIMITED contacts).
• Get your free ticket to the Facebook Messenger & Chatbot Marketing Virtual Summit on Sept. 20.
• Sign up for occasional Facebook Messenger Marketing tips via Facebook Messenger.
• Join the Customers.ai group on Facebook and share your ideas and questions.

The post What You Get with Your Free Ticket to the Chatbot Conference, a 1-Day Deep Dive into Facebook Messenger Marketing, the Most Engaging Channel Today! appeared first on Customers.ai.

• Virtual assistants, which help you find information, remember stuff, or buy things. Think Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant. These are powered by machine learning, meaning they rely on artificial intelligence to learn and figure out what you want.
• Messaging apps, which essentially allow businesses and brands to be online 24/7 providing customer support (e.g., instant responses, quick answers, complaint resolution). Think Facebook Messenger, Kik, WeChat, and Slack. These types of chatbots are only capable of interacting with users by following pre-programmed rules.

What you see and experienced so far is just the beginning of what is forecast to be a billion-dollar industry in less than 10 years. Many top brands, including Uber, Sephora, and CNN, have already adopted chatbots.

Still wondering what is a chatbot? Here are 11 amazing facts that might help explain what really it is and how it’s changing the world of digital technology.

Fact 1: 1.4 Billion People Use Messaging Apps

The top four messaging apps are bigger than the top four social networks, according to BI Intelligence. More than 1.4 billion people used messaging apps in 2016, according to eMarketer. By 2019, more than 25 percent of the world’s population (roughly 1.75 billion people) will be using mobile messaging apps.

Fact 2: People Are Ready to Talk to Chatbots

According to a report (Humanity in the Machine) from media and marketing services company Mindshare, 63 percent of people would consider messaging an online chatbot to communicate with a business or brand. A survey conducted by myclever Agency found that they would use chatbots to obtain “quick emergency answers.”

Fact 3: People Want to Contact Retailers via Chat

Online chat and messaging apps are the preferred way for 29 percent of people to contact retailers when making a purchase decision, according to [24]7. That means people are equally likely to contact a retailer by phone or use a chatbot and more likely to use a chatbot than to contact a retailer via email (27 percent).

Fact 4: There Are More than 30,000 Facebook Chatbots

As of September, there were 30,000 chatbots on Facebook. Those chatbots have been used by millions of people in 200 countries.

Fact 5: Most Chatbot Conversations Start With “Hi”

“Hi” and “hello” are the two most popular ways to start a conversation with a chatbot, according to Dashbot.io, a bot analytics provider. Other popular messages included a question mark, “hey,” “help,” “yes,” and a thumbs up icon.

Fact 6: Consumers Are Ready to Buy Things via Chatbots

Thirty-seven percent of Americans say they are willing to make a purchase through a chatbot, according to DigitasLBi. On average, consumers would spend more than $55 per purchase. If a chatbot were available, 33 percent of UK residents would buy basic items like clothes and food, according to myclever Agency

Fact 7: Consumers Won’t Put Up With Bad Chatbots

One bad chatbot experience could be costly. According to the DigitasLBi report, 73 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t use a company’s chatbot after a bad experience. According to Mindshare’s report, 61 percent of people would find it more frustrating if a chatbot couldn’t solve a problem vs. a human.

Fact 8: Consumers Want Recommendations From Chatbots

Thirty-seven percent of all consumers–and 48 percent of millennials — are open to receiving recommendations or advice from chatbots, according to DigitasLBi. Breaking this down further, consumers are interested in recommendations for products from retail stores (22 percent); hotels/accommodations (20 percent); travel (18 percent); products from a pharmacy (12 percent); and fashion/style (9 percent).

Fact 9: Don’t Blur Lines Between Bots, Humans

An overwhelming majority of consumers (75 percent) said they want to know whether they are chatting with a chatbot or a human (48 percent considered chatbots pretending to be human “creepy”), according to Mindshare. The robotic and artificial nature of responses clued in 60 percent consumers that they were interacting with a chatbot, according to DigitasLBi.

Fact 10: Chatbots Will Be Indistinguishable From Humans by 2029

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist, and engineer at Google (who has a pretty good knack for making accurate predictions) predicts that chatbots will have human-level language ability by the year 2029. “If you think you can have a meaningful conversation with a human, you’ll be able to have a meaningful conversation with an AI in 2029. But you’ll be able to have interesting conversations before that,” according to Kurzweil, as quoted in The Verge.

Fact 11: People in China Seriously Love Chatbots

Xiaoice is a ridiculously popular chatbot in China, according to Engadget. The average conversation length is 23 conversations per session (CPS). The average CPS for pretty much every other chatbot: 1.5 to 2.5.

Bonus fact: Pretty soon chatbots will be ridiculously popular in the U.S. as well. Are you ready for the amazing chatbot revolution?

Originally posted in: Inc.com

FAQs about Chatbots

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program or artificial intelligence that is designed to simulate human conversation through text or voice interactions. It is used to automate tasks, provide information, and engage in real-time conversations with users.

How do chatbots work?

Chatbots work by utilizing natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand and interpret user inputs. They analyze the input, identify the intent behind it, and generate appropriate responses using pre-defined rules or machine learning models.

What are the types of chatbots?

There are several types of chatbots, including rule-based chatbots, AI chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice assistants. Rule-based chatbots follow a set of predefined rules, while AI chatbots use machine learning algorithms to improve their responses over time.

Where are chatbots used?

Chatbots are used in various industries and sectors, including customer support, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and entertainment. They can be deployed on websites, messaging platforms, mobile apps, and voice-based devices.

The post 11 Amazing Facts You Might Not Know About Chatbots appeared first on Customers.ai.