8 Proven Ways to Use Chatbots for Marketing (with Real Examples)

AI-enabled chatbots are gaining more and more popularity in automating repetitive tasks across different businesses. The global chatbot market is expected to reach USD 1.25 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.3%.

With the rapid adoption of chatbot technology, marketers need to keep up the pace as it impacts marketing strategies. Chatbots for marketing is becoming an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses to improve customer engagement and qualify leads with dynamic conversational capabilities.

What is chatbot marketing?

Chatbot marketing refers to the approach of promoting your products or services with targeted messaging to increase brand visibility, boost customer engagement, or automate lead generation processes.

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Businesses using chatbots for marketing should know its three key components.

• Understand the context of every conversation to make it effective.
• Personalize every conversation to make customers feel connected to your business.
• The concept of chatbot marketing is to engage with customers in real-time either a human or a bot.

Key benefits of conversational marketing

53% of buyers would probably buy from a business that they can communicate with, via message. Messaging as a channel is not just fast, but a whole lot easier. If you, as a business owner, are looking for ways to scale your marketing strategy, chatbot marketing is the way to go.

A well-configured chatbot marketing campaign helps in accentuating the capability to engage prospects browsing through your website or social media, converting them to marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) at scale.

And the best part is that you can achieve all this without increasing headcount.

The advantages of deploying chatbots for marketing are as follows:

• Increase lead generation — Bots promptly answer sales queries and filter prospects by asking questions when your sales team is busy or not available. Deploying a lead generation chatbot is one best strategy businesses can follow.
• Boost customer engagement — With messenger bots for Whatsapp allows you to communicate with a bigger targeted audience and enhance engagement.
• Time and cost-efficient — You can easily scale your marketing conversations with minimum resources and efforts. Bots require one-time investment and are available 24×7 to engage customers with real time responses.
• Provide faster responses — Prompt responses help users to resolve queries faster and deliver a positive user experience. Eventually, it helps to improve your brand credibility.
• Collects data for analysis — Chatbots can be the best source to collect data from customers that provide crucial insights into the needs and preferences of your targeted audience. The data also helps to adapt your chatbot marketing strategy to achieve better communication results.

8 ways chatbots enhance digital marketing strategies

Businesses that successfully engage with their customers were able to increase the customer spend by 20% to 40%. With AI conversational chatbots as part of marketing initiatives, it helps to push your customers seamlessly through the sales funnel.

Here are some areas where chatbots can fit into your marketing strategy.

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1. Auto qualify and lead generation

Lead qualification is an important part of the lead generation process. Typically qualifying leads are done by sales representatives. Businesses can deploy chatbot automate lead qualification processes that can bring you a good number of leads.

Chatbots ask relevant pre-qualifying questions to the visitors and customers. They can quickly make choices by simply selecting the option most relevant to them. It can be more engaging for customers to submit their contact information instead of the traditional method of filling forms.

How chatbots take the lead generation process to the next level?

• Drastically reduces the sales cycle and improves the entire process.
• Saves the agent’s time to focus on important teams and filter out junk leads.
• It happens in real time. Customers do not have to wait for days.

2. Send high quality leads to sales instantly

Conversational bots qualify the high intending leads and increase your lead database providing you with greater possibilities to generate new sales. Whether you sell a product or service online, use the information gathered regarding your customers’ needs, behaviors, and preferences to get to know them better and help them convert.

Instant nurturing of the captured leads is highly effective. Once chatbot filters out the sales prospects, it can schedule a meeting or transfer the high intent leads to the sales team in real time for instant closure.

Here is how transferring leads instantly to the sales team to help your business?

• Increase sales conversions and business revenue significantly
• Real time assistance boosts customer satisfaction
• Improve brand image and credibility

3. Schedule meetings

When it comes to sales and lead generation, booking appointments is really a time-consuming task. Chatbots are the best in managing time and arranging meetings. With bots, you can schedule, modify, and cancel meetings, or to look up your schedule.

Having an AI enabled personal assistant bot can schedule appointments, meetings, and generate more leads automatically. Bot enabled with your calendar schedule and meeting preferences, helps in sending you the invite as well.

Scheduling meetings with a bot is great for:

• Saving time looking up everyone’s schedules automatically.
• Getting meeting schedules in an instant.
• Allowing participants to vote on the best time for a meeting

4. Enabling making orders

Chatbots are designed to communicate in a meaningful manner with customers. They can be integrated with any interface such as Facebook, Slack or Telegram. For e.g., the pizza bot from Domino’s takes delivery orders directly from Facebook Messenger with a mere emoji.

How bots help in placing orders?

• With chatbots, customers no longer need to make a call to reserve a table, wait for staff to attend to them, or wait in line for tables to free up.
• Bots can be programmed to carry out a myriad of tasks ranging from answering FAQs, making a reservation, ordering food or processing payment.

5. Tracking orders and notifications

With chatbots integration, businesses can meet their customer’s expectations by resorting to an improved way of interaction. Hence, businesses in logistics are adopting chatbots to increase efficiency across the entire logistics value chain.

How do conversational chatbots help to improve business and customer engagement?

• Bots avoid the long offline queue and provide real-time tracking of the order. Instead of offline walking to places, the customer can simply use the messenger and ask the chatbot, “Can you share the shipment status now?”
• The chatbot helps to book the place for shipment, time, and tracking map online. Users provide all information regarding items to transport, make payments online and the courier just takes the pack without filling any papers.
• Bots create the possibility to leave feedback or send a request to improve the product or service by showing its status.

6. Personalized recommendations & discounts

Personalization has a great impact on user experience whether in a chatbot conversation, on a website, or in email. Chatbots allow your business to have two way conversations at scale. These two way conversations give you the opportunity to collect the information needed to create a valuable personalized experience, which benefits the user.

When a user has a customer care inquiry, the chatbot can answer it accurately and take the conversation a step further by offering personalized shopping advice based on the customer’s purchase history and preferences.

• By using chatbots, you can incentivize customers to make purchases by offering discounts when they interact with the bot.
• Personalizing helps to make your user feel more valued and understood.

7. Widen your brand reach

Chatbots found on social media messaging platforms have the capability to reach out to a bigger audience. They can reach a new customer base for your brand by tapping into new demographics.

• Bots can be integrated across multiple messaging applications, thus making you more readily available to help your customers. It opens new opportunities for you to increase sales.
• With chatbots, you can grab your audience’s attention and learn from the interaction, allowing it to send relevant information regarding your products and services.

Hence, it is able to upsell and cross-sell in a personalized, conversational, and engaging way.

8. Sharing updates, news, releases

Bots help to get instant access to important breaking news and frequent updates and highlights via Facebook Messenger. You can share the top news and stories with Messenger subscribers. Chatbot sends personalized notifications to keep users up-to-date with the latest stories

BBC Politics is a branch of the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) that’s dedicated to intense political coverage. The BBC Politics chatbot allows you to get instant access to important breaking news and frequent updates and highlights via Facebook Messenger.

Chatbot marketing examples

“Be where your customers are” is more than just a basic principle of digital marketing, it is the reason that compels businesses and the customers to meet with each other. Here are some examples across different industries used chatbot for marketing and increased sales revenue significantly.

Let us discuss the various ways businesses used chatbots for marketing.

1. ECommerce — H&M

Chatbots are being widely used by eCommerce businesses and are creating a better experience.

H&M, the well known global fashion brand developed an interactive bot. The purpose of H&M’s chatbot was to help mobile customers navigate their search through outfit possibilities and guide them to the online store areas that align with your purchase desires.

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H&M’s consistent increased sales revenue and its announcement to launch an eCommerce presence in Canada and South Korea during, along with 11 new H&M online markets, signifies positive results for its chatbot implementation.

Key takeaways

• You can leverage chatbots for marketing opportunities to maximize customer engagement.
• Build a strong chatbot marketing strategy and increase your brand awareness.

2. Airlines — KLM

Improving customer loyalty and influencing their preferences is a priority for airlines. A Twitter study found that the faster an airline answered a passenger, the more that passenger was willing to pay for their next flight.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines handles more than 16,000 cases a week. So they built the BB chatbot to provide a personal, timely, and accurate answer. With BB, KLM is taking the next step in its social media strategy, offering personal service through technology, supported by human agents when needed.

The BlueBot (BB) helps customers to book customers in a conversational manner. It is supported by 250 human service colleagues, who are at hand if BB can’t help with a customer’s query. The impact of the bot was that it answered more than 60,000 questions, received around 100,000 mentions per week, and 15,000 conversations per week.

Key takeaways

• Bots ensure enhanced customers’ engagement with the brand even more than an app. In addition, chatbots by handling routine queries, save precious time of customer care service representatives, allowing them to perform more complex problems and tasks.
• It acts as an excellent profiling tool, by collecting data such as purchase history, they are able to personalize the travelers’ experience. This will bring the personal touch expected by travelers for a long time

3. Hospitality — Marriott Hotel

Personalized services in the hospitality industry are extremely essential. With chatbots, you can provide customized assistance to your customers.

Marriott Hotel introduced ChatBotler, available to guests through text messages. The bot helps the guests to request basic hotel services, essentially acting as an in-phone concierge. Thus, there is no need for a middleman and enables requests to be met quickly and efficiently.

Apart from that, Marriott rewards members can interact with chatbots on Facebook Messenger to research and book travel at more than 4,700 hotels.

Key takeaways

• Leverage chatbots for marking strategy along with the front desk and concierge services in your hotels to increase the visibility of your hotel business.
• Build a marketing chatbot to identify the repetitive tasks in your hotels such as concierge service or front desk and provide users a personalized experience to the users.

4. HR — FirstJob

FirstJob, an online-based recruiting firm created a chatbot Mya, in order to manage large candidate pools, giving the recruiters more time to focus on interviews and closing offers.

Mya asks prescreen questions to the candidates, responds to FAQs, delivers application progress updates, gives tips & guidance to candidates; notifies candidates when a position has been filled, administers assessments, and challenges.

Mya automates up to 75% of the qualifying and engagement process. It improves the recruiter efficiency by 38% and increases candidate engagement by over 150%.

Key takeaways

• Deploy chatbots for marketing strategies and save plenty of time for your agents to focus on priority tasks.
• AI bots can help in updating customers about all the process that assures hem of getting a faster solution.

5. Food & Beverage — Whole Foods

In the food and beverage industry, conversational chatbots are being used by top restaurants, grocery brands, etc to increase brand awareness and engage with more customers by providing exciting services with fun.

Whole Foods’ Facebook Messenger Bot is just as exciting, connecting with users by providing recipes, products, and cooking inspiration. It offers filters and options for different types of food, including international cuisines with each message. Whole Foods makes it easy for users to narrow in on the kind of recipe they’re looking for.

Whole Foods’ chatbot drives traffic to their site from a platform where users spend 50 minutes a day (on average). Additionally, with 60 million emojis are used on Facebook per day, Whole Foods’ bot replicates a typical (human-to-human) messenger conversation by allowing users to shortcut their way to specific recipes using emojis.

Key takeaways

• Leverage conversational chatbots for marketing and provide high level customer engagement.
• Ensure that your chatbot marketing strategy focuses on delivering a delightful user experience that will increase brand credibility.

Final thoughts on chatbots for marketing

To wrap up, conversational chatbots definitely have a huge impact on the entire business, especially marketing. Marketing strategies are significantly improving when using chatbots for different business functions. Therefore by personalizing the responses, you can get loyal customers to your brand.

For different businesses, the marketing objective can be different such as lead generation or customer engagement. So, by defining a clear objective it helps to build successful chatbots to scale your marketing strategy.

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