While the initial wave of Chatbots (2015-2016) were mostly customer-service or “conversational commerce” focused, the bot landscape since then has rapidly evolved, encompassing many use cases. Below are 10 bot uses that I believe businesses will benefit from most this year.
1. COLLECTING USER INFORMATION AND PREFERENCES
Bots can ask your users which of your products they prefer most and incentivize a response through personalized coupons and discounts. In addition to helping you better understand customers’ needs and wants (great for overall marketing efforts), collecting user preferences is also helpful to the customer on a granular level. For instance, if you have integrated a bot into your eCommerce app, asking a customer which laundry detergent brand they prefer most can ensure that they only see search results from that specific brand of laundry detergent in the future.
2. USER ONBOARDING
Bots can help simplify the onboarding experience for new users by guiding them through the signup process in real-time. If a user forgets to complete part of the signup process — i.e. doesn’t upload a profile photo or billing information is missing — send a friendly reminder with your bot, directing them to that specific part of the app.
3. ENHANCING APP NAVIGATION
When there are UI/UX difficulties (i.e. complex menus), a bot can help simplify navigation for users based on their preferences and behavior. Let’s say you have an app that sells photography equipment, and a user is thinking about purchasing a DSLR camera body. Based on their browsing behavior, a bot can suggest that they visit the compatible lenses section of your app, so that they don’t have to go hunting through menus — potentially increasing your conversion rates.
4. IMPROVE APP STORE RATINGS
You can launch a bot within your app to ask if users like your app, and if they do, ask them to rate the app in the app store and have the chatbot send users to the app store to do so.
5. SURVEY USERS / GET NET PROMOTER SCORE
Most apps and websites collect user contact informations, wait until they use the service and send them an e-mail after asking for feedback or information. However, by the time the user has exited the app or website, they often will not go back and engage with the company unless they have received an extremely good experience. Chatbots make the process more seamless by integrating short surveys throughout the user experience and collecting thoughts and feelings in real-time as people are using the process.
6. MAKE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS MORE ROBUST
Push notifications are great for messaging your users outside of the app, but typically, users close them or they land on a page with no more guidance. You can attach a chatbot to your push notifications, such that they become an interactive experience, not only sending information to users, but also gathering data at the same time. This can also lead to creating dynamic segments based on how users respond to push notifications, which allows you to better personalize your app and target messaging.
7. A/B MESSAGE TESTING
When you want to test different messaging in your app or website, there is often a process for doing so, which includes updates to content and redeployment of the site, which may lead to other issues. Performing A/B testing in chatbots allows you to send different messaging to segments of users for advertising, product updates, calls for conversion, etc. all on the fly, and then to compare the results in real-time. What would take e-mails and optimization software days, can be done in minutes with chatbots.
8. MONETIZATION—USING CHATBOTS FOR AFFILIATE MARKETING/MEDIA PROPERTY
Chatbots are ideal as a media property or as a vehicle for affiliate marketing. For example, if you are a content provider, with a chatbot, you can ask if people liked the news story they read or the video they watched. If they do like it, you can serve them a chatbot asking if they’d like to see similar videos. If the user responds that they would, it can push the user to a link for another video. These chatbots can be sponsored by other content creators.
In addition, you can use it for affiliate marketing. If you have a website about interior design and home building, you can ask users via chatbot if they’d like to learn more about the supplies you used, and then send them to the websites to buy similar couches, lumber, etc.
The Casey Neistat Bot for Facebook Messenger not only allows users to be notified of his latest videos, but also to see and purchase the video gear he uses. By simply asking “What gear do you use?” you get served a categorized list of Casey’s favorite gear, with each item linked to an Amazon affiliate link. So while the bot is a great way for Casey to drive traffic over to his YouTube channel, what’s most interesting is that he’s generating additional income by using the bot as an engaging channel for affiliate marketing. Marketers can create affiliate marketing for their own brands by adding a chatbot into their web or mobile platforms that sends users to partner sites, and track partnership marketing using deep links.
9. MAKING LIVE-CHAT MORE EFFICIENT
Nowadays, app users may access the app from different time zones all over the world, making live chat support difficult for many companies. One way to keep live-chat more efficient is to use chatbots as a first line of defense. You can use chatbots for more common questions, such as: What is your pricing? What are your hours of business? Where can I make a reservation? Etc. If the chatbot doesn’t know the answer, then they can kick the question to Intercom, Zendesk, or another live-chat provider. This helps make your teams more efficient, and gives the best response to easy questions instead of relying on training all customer support people perfectly.
10. SEND MORE PERSONALIZED PROMOTIONS
You can use behavioral information such as products purchased, articles read, etc. or you can use directly asked information from chatbots such as: What are you looking to buy for the holidays? Once this information is gathered, you can create dynamic segments from the information and instead of sending a 10% off coupon to a generic audience, you can send this promotion to people who are looking to buy men’s pants, or people you know to be men. By personalizing promotions, your app or website becomes more engaging and promotions feel less like spam because you’re giving people what they want, and more importantly, what they need.
If you feel as though your app or website needs to improve in any of these areas, check out InstaBot. For more information, or to book a demo, email us at [email protected]