Since Facebook and Kik have opened their platforms, inviting members to build chatbots, there has been a positive and optimistic sentiment around chatbots. Gartner has predicted that by 2020 chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions. Many other marketing tasks will be delegated to chatbots as we run into the future.
Chatbots, computer programs that simulate conversations are applied to business and marketing functions that require interactions. Instead of interacting with a human, chabots are used to resolve a query while being able to save cost, add convenience, enhance experience and scalability and be available for 3.a.m requests too!
Chatbots emerging for Marketers
Here, we would like to throw some light on the usage of the term ‘chatbot’. ‘Bot’ is an old technological hack used to apply automation for complex tasks with little or no human intervention. Over time, bots are used in an interactive manner to solve many business problems, especially those that are consumer facing. They came to be known as ‘chatbots’.
Chatbots have already proven their charm in the B2C scenario. They are now proliferating in the B2B space. Though it has been a relatively slow adoption in the B2B space, techno marketers are picking up fast.
The variety of cases to which chatbots are being applied to are seeing success when integrated with artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).
Use Cases & Inspiration: Chatbots used in Marketing
Apart from being customer support assistants, chatbots are also helping with product recommendations, schedule automation, search and more. They have been successfully implemented across a variety of industries. We have captured some of the most interesting chatbot use cases for marketers.
Leadbots: Lead Conversion and Referral Marketing
RewardStream
What is the Solution?: RewardStream builds platforms that help companies encourage their existing customers to refer friends – mostly for enterprise businesses. They used an inhouse owned enterprise Leadbot that invested in engaging with website visitors at an opportune time and converted them into customers.
What did it achieve?: Leadbot steadily converted a higher number of leads as the days rolled by. It rolled off 30% of all conversions within the first month and a half.
Rapid Miner
What is the Solution?: Rapid Miner also used a Leadbot called Marlabot developed by Drift to convert sales. However, they used it in a slightly different manner. Marlabot was more of a Sales Assistant which also involved employees into the conversation. Where the bot was out of answers, employees jumped into the conversation, to bring it closer to conversion.
What did it achieve?: Marlabot accomplished the objective of creating a better customer experience through the sales process.
Content Creation & Content Marketing
Call of Duty – Content Gamification
What is the Solution?: Call of Duty, a shooter video game, used a chatbot to create personalized and interactive to enrich the relationship between the brand and its users. They used this to launch their new game called Call of Duty: Infinite War.
What did it achieve?: Call of Duty’s chatbot received over 6 Million messages in the first 24hrs! This Messenger content campaign directly lead to sales of the new Call of Duty game!
Rocco – Social Media Assistant
What is the Solution?: Rocco can create content and post it directly on your social media channels at the most optimal times. It uses machine learning algorithms to achieve this. This is available for Slack users. It also helps the marketing team with brainstorming and content strategy.
What did it achieve?: It has been able to save time in training people and also relying on scheduling tools. It has recorded increased in productivity of marketing teams.
Leading marketing brands like Hubspot also use chatbots to spread the word by sharing articles and training material to their subscribers through Facebook Messenger.
Mobile Monkey – Messenger Marketing Chatbot
What is the solution?
Mobile Monkey makes it easy for businesses to build Facebook Messenger chatbots. Without writing a single line of code, it enables marketers to set up automated campaigns to engage their audience. It comes equipped with tools that help with list building, chat blasting and setting up drip campaigns.
What did it achieve?
It has been able to help brands reduce their cost per lead from Facebook ads, growing their audience and customer base 10X faster. Businesses in both B2B and B2C industries are using the chatbot maker to increase brand awareness and boost their sales with hyper-tailored, automated campaigns.
Customer Interface
Domino’s AnyWare technology – Ordering Food
What is the Solution?: Domino’s AnyWare technology, is a pizza order processing interface introduced by Dominos, an international restaurant chain. This is being used to place orders using their menu and carry out the delivery. They have allowed users to access this chatbot via voice, Amazon Echo, Google Home, text messaging, Twitter, and even on smartwatches and television.
What did it achieve?: The chatbot was primarily introduced as a PR tool. The goal of the chatbot was to enhance the order placing and delivery experience of the customers of Dominos, but it also helped in adding more sales across the world.
BlueBot – Ticketing service
What is the Solution?: You would have already heard about voice assistants that prompt available flight options for a travel query. BlueBot got popular because it helped KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in completing a ticketing transaction. It helped passengers book a ticket. In addition, the chatbot is able to deliver booking confirmation, check-in reminders, boarding passes, deliver flight status updates, and answer passenger questions. Users could use Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger to purchase and track tickets.
What did it achieve?: KLM recorded more than 1.7 million messages sent by 500,000 passengers to BB versus what the company originally needed to help its human agents entertain 16,000 cases weekly.
Service or Product Recommendations
Winnie
What is the Solution?: Winnie helps website owners make better choices about which hosting provider to go with. Using information about the kind of website they’re setting up, Winnie points website owners to suitable providers hosting packages, using a chat interface.
What did it achieve?: It has opened first on Facebook Messenger, it has achieved an incredible 72% CTR of users clicking through to an affiliate hosting provider.
All- Rounder with marketing analytics
This is a category that we have created because it is hard to say what exactly these chatbots accomplish. They do multiple tasks as marketing and sales assistant.
Growth Bot
What is the Solution?: Growth bot is made available via Facebook Messenger, Slack and Twitter to assist marketing and sales team with information around the web and the enterprise database too. It not only interacts for search queries but also fulfils analytical reporting, connect to Google analytics, assist with FAQs and more.
What did it achieve?: It can access all public databases and provide search results for the team’s query in a few seconds and in an interactive manner.
Hunch
What is the Solution?: Hunch automates routine campaign management tasks, optimizes ad performance automatically and syncs data from multiple ad accounts to scale campaigns. It eliminates use of manual tasks and helps in managing and optimizing advertising data on Facebook, Instagram, Adwords, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can access this through Slack platform.
What did it achieve?: Right from answering AARRR(acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue) questions to automating weekly and monthly reporting, Hunch does all this in minutes.
Chatbots simplify, personalize and scale marketing operations that further minimize costs and optimize experience. Both as a customer interface and an employee’s pal, chatbots are achieving results. We would love to chat about how chatbots can help marketing your business.
