Why You Should Be Using Chatbots

Chatbots are not the future of marketing, like many people are saying. They are the present!

Chatbots may seem like a bridge too far for some organizations. If you’re running a business by yourself, or trying to lead all of the marketing efforts, it makes sense to want to stick to the tried-and-true. Email marketing has a great track record, and it can definitely work, but…

Email is great, but…

The rates of return on email marketing are plummeting. Sure, it’s over the course of the past decade, so it’s a bit of a slow plummet. But if you look at the open and click-through rates on emails sent by some of the biggest aggregators like MailChimp, they clearly show a downward trend. People are sending more and more email, and people just don’t have the time for all of it.

Think about it. How many unread emails do you have in your inboxes? How many times have you entered a phony email address, or created a secondary email address for all of those opt-in forms you come across every day? Sure, if you have a great lead, who really wants to engage with your content, they’ll find a way to do it. But for the most part, people are looking for the easiest, quickest, and most convenient answer.

Chat bots allow you to meet people where they are

There are currently well over a billion people using Facebook’s messenger platform on a monthly basis. Not just over a billion who have signed up or used it once, but who actually use it month to month. Well over one billion people.

You can’t afford to not be reaching out to these users

The best part about connecting with people using chat bots, especially via Facebook, is that you are instantly connected to their Facebook presence. When someone opts in to your messages, you can leverage the immense amount of data, information and analytics that Facebook uses on a daily basis.

Consider this…

If you send someone to a landing page, you generally ask them to fill in their information so that they can get some offer from you.

With a messenger chat bot, your prospect doesn’t have to fill in any information. They’ve already entered their email address and possibly phone number and other data points into their Facebook account. You can send a Facebook message that pre-populates those fields based on their account info. All the user has to do is click a button.

Did you know?

Open rates on messenger chat blasts are nearly quadruple (4x!) the open rates for email blasts?

We’re talking 80% open rates—and then higher conversion rates on top of that!

And that’s just the basics…

Using messenger chat bots you can:

• Answer FAQs
• Provide information on products and deals
• Allow customers to order products
• Give prospects an easy way to schedule a call or meeting
• Blast new deals and products to followers
• Create loyalty programs for those who opt in

Using the MobileMonkey chat platform you can:

• Create comment guards that automatically message people who comment on your content
• Create “send-to-messenger” ads, that call on users to send your promo info directly to their messenger app
• Execute ongoing drip campaigns to walk prospects through their buyer’s journey right on their phone
• Create chat bot scan codes for people to easily enter into your chat dialogue through their phones’ cameras
• Embed your chat bot on both your Facebook page and your website!

Chatbot marketing is at the point right now that email was at before gmail even existed. People are spending exponentially more time on messaging apps than they were 10 years ago, and the trend isn’t slowing. People under the age of 30 spend much more time on messaging apps than they do on email. Even for people over 45, the amount of time spent on messaging apps is just about equal to the time spent on email. Connect with your prospects where they are.

You can use chatbots in so many different ways it can be hard to wrap your head around. Essentially, anything you can do with an email marketing campaign, you can do faster, and with better returns, through a chatbot campaign.

Sign up for MobileMonkey and get started building your own!

If you’re interested in learning more about building and implementing chatbots, I would love to share my expertise and experience. Get in touch!