More and more businesses today are embarking on a path of digital transformation. Naturally, there is no lack of technology solutions out there to meet this demand. If you’re a marketer or business owner exploring the possibility of implementing a marketing chatbot, you probably know that there are tons of options at your disposal. The question is how you can go about choosing the right one.

In this guide, we share with you how to decide what’s the right marketing chatbot solution for you. If you still aren’t entirely convinced on what a marketing chatbot can do, we’ve highlighted several key benefits you can expect.

Before we dive in, let’s share more on the concept of chatbot marketing.

Chatbot marketing is a means of promoting products and services through the use of a chatbot.

A chatbot is essentially a computer application that converses with users based on predetermined scenarios or with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

As a type of marketing automation tool, marketing chatbots are used to help businesses get better lead generation, offer personalized discounts, and perform other marketing automation tasks.

Need a refresher on how chatbots work and what they’re capable of? Head over to this article here.

Your prospective customers will naturally have different goals and preferences when it comes to your products. Thankfully, marketing chatbots can segment these leads accordingly based on their interactions and other variables.

A chatbot can identify a warm lead based on the questions asked. For example, if the lead has requested for the pricing details, the chatbot is able to detect them as purchase intentions. Your chatbot could then suggest the user to make an order or share other personalised offers.

In a nutshell, a marketing chatbot can help you categorise your potential customers to make interactions more personalised. This customised messaging can then guide them towards conversion.

It isn’t easy deciding which leads are worth pursuing. Furthermore, filtering leads can involve a significant amount of time performing different levels of screening.

Marketing chatbots can be enlisted to ask important questions to qualifying the leads, which will save your marketing team precious time and resources. In addition, warm leads can be identified based on the questions they ask and actions they perform.

For example, users will be assigned lead scores if they have viewed a broadcast message, enquired about price, requested or downloaded a brochure, or subscribed to updates. Higher lead scores can be assigned even if they provide their contact details, complete a quiz, or share the chatbot.

Conversely, negative points will be assigned to users if negative sentiments such as complaints are detected.

After helping to qualify leads, your chatbot can direct them to the most qualified sales people for next steps, thereby facilitating quicker sales conversions.

Sales often don’t come after your first interaction with a customer. It requires consistent communication and follow-ups. When you send follow-ups manually, you risk sending them after it’s too late or never sending them at all. With the support of a chatbot, your marketing team will be able to trigger a series of personalized follow-up messages, helping you to the move potential customers through their buying journey and convert more subscribers into qualified leads.

Retargeting ads personalize the customer’s shopping experience by taking the conversational data and converting it into ads on other platforms (eg. Facebook and Instagram). It drives lead generation by targeting old visitors and encouraging them to return to your chatbot or website to complete the purchase.

Let’s say a potential customer is looking for a new leather jacket. He chatted with your chatbot to ask for jacket recommendations and added one to the cart. Then, for whatever reason, he decided to hold on before purchasing the item. Later on, when started browsing on Facebook or Instagram, he see an ad for the same leather jacket he added to cart. When he clicks on the ads, it leads him back to the chatbot to complete the purchase. This retargeting can be done through a Click-to-Messenger ads or a Sponsor Message Ads.

Facebook Click-to-Messenger Ads

Facebook Sponsored Message Ads

Before deciding on a marketing chatbot, it’s crucial to define the marketing goals you want to achieve and the specific KPIs involved.

Are you intending to sell an existing product, promote a new one, or simply generate good leads? In addition, what metrics will you use to determine whether you’ve met your goal?

Spending some time figuring out the answers to these questions can help ensure you generate maximum returns on your investment further down the line.

After all, technology should be leveraged to provide tangible results for your business—not simply for the sake of jumping on the bandwagon.

Next, you’ll need to consider which channels to deploy your marketing chatbot in. This could be WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, your website, or other messaging channels.

You can then decide on the right marketing chatbot solution and programme it to function optimally on your chosen channel. After all, social demographics along with audience awareness and interest generally differ across channels.

The channel you choose may also depend on your business objectives. For example, if you are looking at generating more leads, pushing promotional messages and running retargeting messaging ads, implementing a Facebook Messenger bot instead of a WhatsApp bot could bring you closer to your goals. However, if customer support and data privacy are your top priorities, you could go for WhatsApp channel as it does not allow sending of promotional outbound messages and it is end-to-end encrypted to ensure that only you and the person you're communicating with can read or listen to what is sent, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp.

Learn all about getting your business up on WhatsApp here.Now, it’s time to choose a chatbot provider to equip you with the right marketing chatbot.

With the high and growing adoption of chatbots everywhere, the number of options in the market may feel overwhelming. However, narrowing your options should become easier if you’ve clearly determined your marketing goals and deployment channel for your marketing chatbot.

If you’re looking for a marketing chatbot that can help you meet your marketing KPIs, AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite is an option you can consider. Our solution is equipped to provide you all the marketing chatbot benefits shared previously, and more.

Here’s a quick rundown of the key features you can expect with AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite:

• Customer profiling and segmentation: Keep track of customer preferences, interests, sentiments, and intentions for better segmentation and profiling. This facilitates remarketing efforts.

• Easy lead identification: Automatic lead score assignment can be carried out on leads to identify warm ones. You can then go on to convert leads into customers by messaging them personalised content.

• Personalised messaging: Re-engage customers through targeted messages to maintain engagement.

• Retargeting campaigns: AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite is integrated with Facebook Ads Manager. This means you can create custom and lookalike audiences easily to re-engage customers through Facebook Click-to-Messenger (CTM) ads and Sponsored Messages.

• Drive footfall from online to offline: Push out coupons by running Click-to-Messenger (CTM) ads or acquiring new users from Facebook comments. These coupons can then be redeemed at physical stores.

• Gamified messaging marketing campaigns: Gain new leads through fun and interactive experiences like mini contests and giveaways over Facebook Messenger.

• Location-based recommendations: Allow users to obtain store directions and shopping directory information based on their physical location.

Let’s have a look at other marketing chatbot options out there.

Conversational marketing solutions for such businesses have several basic marketing features. Instead of being run by AI-powered software, these conversational marketing solutions are rule-based and rely on keywords to response to the inquiries. The main advantage of these solutions is that they are affordable and easy to set up.

However, a drawback is that they lack AI capability—functioning mainly by detecting keywords.

If a business wants AI functionality, it will need to integrate the solution with third-party natural language processing (NLP) engines such as IBM Watson or Google Dialogflow. The latter may not be easy to use for most since it is designed for developers.

In addition, these marketing chatbot solutions are not scalable when the knowledge base of a business grows. Relying solely on keyword detection, the marketing chatbot may be unable to understand context and user intentions. This could result in wrong responses to customer queries since keywords could overlap across multiple FAQs.

The next category of conversational marketing solutions is targeted at B2B businesses. These solutions usually have account-based marketing features and other B2B-focused benefits. Such marketing chatbots solutions are solely web-based—lacking functionality on social media channels.

AiChat’s Conversational Marketing Suite is specially designed for B2C enterprises, such as the Retail, FMCG, e-Commerce, automotive and hospitality sectors. If your business falls under one of these verticals, the onboarding process will be shorter since AiChat has pre-built domain knowledge in these business areas.

Here’s what else you can expect from AiChat’s conversational marketing solution.

Does your enterprise have a large knowledge base? AiChat’s conversational marketing solution can scale along with it as your business grows.

Our marketing chatbots are equipped with deep machine learning and NLP technology. In addition, they possess South-East Asian language capabilities and are able to understand local slangs and acronyms. All of this will help you understand your audience better. That way, you can better profile and segment them for remarketing and other efforts.

As a bonus, our conversational marketing solution is an end-to-end service. That means we provide consultation from start to end, design and implementation, performance analysis, as well as monitoring and maintenance of bots.

After your bot has gone “live”, the AiChat team can even train it to pick up new knowledge so you can focus on your business. What’s more, AiChat can perform detailed live hands-on training sessions at your place of business, as well as train your employees remotely.

More importantly, we’ll ensure a good return on your investment for lead generation and sales conversions.

Wish to learn more about our marketing chatbot solution? Drop us a message here and we’ll be more than happy to tell you more.