The Problem

A KPI to track your unique visitor-to-lead rate. A key tenant of increasing this rate is personalization of the user experience on your website. A common issue of any website is that the content is static. You can use popular marketing automation platforms, but using personalization on these platforms is often time-intensive due to: a.) creating the content, and b.) requiring heavy on design assets--which takes time to produce.

The Solution

Leveraging chatbots allows you to increase personalization in a low-cost and easy-to-manage way. Chatbots allow you to carry consistent messaging from your ads, e-mails, and other marketing campaigns straight from your site. For example, if you are a home alarm company and your Google ad talks about safety for children, as your user clicks on the ad and goes to the website, a chatbot will immediately pop-up and say, “Worried about your children’s safety? Here are some ways we can help..”

By carrying consistent messaging, you’ll be able to get to the core issue for which your user initially clicked on the ad, and persist this messaging as it relates to your product or service. This type of personalization all happens as your website content stays the same. Moreover this can increase your visitor-to-lead rate.

How This Works on Instabot

We implemented this very strategy on our own Instabot Blog as part of our Content Marketing Campaign. When users clicked on a link generated in one of our Marketing Emails, they were brought to a blog post about the “death” of Facebook’s Virtual Assistant. Within a few seconds a personalized chatbot appeared addressing the reader by name, referring the reader’s company name, and offering more information to enhance their experience!

How do you do this?

While building your Instabot to have tailored messaging, it’s important to have a two things in mind:

1. Custom Properties - Within the Instabot portal, user information is easily stored as custom properties and can be viewed as well as utilized whenever you want! For our personalized bot, we want to use information such as NAMES, COMPANY, and even EMAILS within our bot flow.

2. List of Recipients - This is simply a database of contacts that you will be sending your marketing or sales campaign to! Whether it lives within an existing platform such as Salesforce or Mailchimp, or as a sign up list that came from your website, contact information of prospects will be used as custom properties for your chatbot!

To create unique custom properties, under the USERS tab on the Instabot Portal go to:

Settings → User Properties → Click New Property → Name your property with the type set to “String” → Save.

You can now use the Custom Property you just created on your bot!

Now that you have your bot built and recipient list ready to go, the next step is to upload that list to the Marketing Automation Platform of your choosing!

For this tutorial, we’ll be using Mailchimp. By uploading a list, you are giving Mailchimp the data it needs to automatically fill in its own custom properties (aka Merge Tags) to create personalized, dynamic content.

Connect User Information on Mailchimp to Instabot

You now have the custom properties created and built into your Instabot AND you’ve uploaded a list of people you will be targeting with information appended to Merge Tags on Mailchimp.

The next step will be to marry the two so that when a user clicks on a link in your campaign, the user’s information, previously saved within Mailchimp, will then automatically be passed off to Instabot so that it appears seamlessly within the conversation you built!

All this requires is adding a snippet of custom text to the end the Instabot URL you’ve built which looks like this:

?ib:first_name=MERGETAG&ib:company=MERGETAG

Let’s break this down:

?ib:first_name= → This tells Instabot that there will be information to be filled into the “first_name”, which is the custom property created previously in the Instabot Portal.

MERGETAG → This will be the Merge Tag that has been assigned to a certain property on Mailchimp, which you will have to edit based on what information you are passing to Instabot!

So the final string will look like this:

?ib:first_name=*|FNAME|*&ib:company=*|COMPANY|*

And when the string is added to the end of the Instabot URL it will look like this:

blog.instabot.io/instabot-blog/alphago-man-vs-machine?ib:firstname=Timothy&ib:company=Tim%27s%20Treats

*note that the “?” should only go at the front of the string once and every new parameter after the first must have an ampersand, “&”.

Put It All In Motion

Now all you need to do is hyperlink that URL to an image, text, or button in your email campaign and the recipients of your marketing email will see a bot just for them upon click!

From the eyes of a user, the entire process should look like this:

Using bots that are tailored to each individual user can make the experience more personal and encourage users to engage, ask questions, and ultimately convert. These campaigns open up many opportunities to test content, copy, and engagement! Instabot offers versatile ways to take your marketing and sales campaigns to the next level as well as make your campaigns really stand out!

If you have any questions about creating Personalized Instabots or if you would like to build one, please reach out to [email protected] and we’d be happy to get you started!