Marketing trends are constantly changing and the latest entrant into the scene is chatbot marketing. Chatbots are taking their place in business and brands use them for customer service and effective communication in order to improve their sales and marketing. They lessen the workload of customer service agents and reduce the resolution time vis-a-vis customer queries. As businesses seek to improve their customer experience, it is estimated that chatbots will take up almost 25% of the share by 2020. The market for chatbots is forecasted to be worth $1.25 billion by 2025. It is up to you to decide whether your business will leverage chatbot marketing for better sales now or wait and play catch-up in the future. How could chatbots help your business grow?

Types of chatbots

First of all, it is important to understand the different types of chatbots. They are all different in terms of processing of workflow. Depending on your business needs, you would need either basic chatbots or advanced bots. Meanwhile, chatbots are of three types and they are as follows:

• Menu-based chatbots: They have a multilevel, hierarchical structure of responses where the next option depends on the user’s selection from multiple menus. Menu-based chatbots are simple and ideal for e-commerce websites with simple needs such as answering presale queries and helping users navigate through the online store.
• Keyword-based chatbots: They capture and process keywords in the user’s query to provide pre-loaded answers. The problem is that they are highly contextual and won’t catch misspellings.
• Natural language processing chatbots: They make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver the best user experience. These bots are able to remember specific user conversations and user experiences for improvised service delivery.

How chatbot could help your business grow

The screengrab above from Google Trends shows how interest in chatbots has been growing since 2016. It is quite easy to integrate chatbots into your business. Most business websites are already doing so. Chatbots could revolutionise your business in the following ways:

Enhance user experience on your website : Chatbots offer a simple and unique customer experience to your website visitors. In fact, 34% of your web visitors would prefer a chatbot answering their questions according to a 2017 research by Statista. It makes online shopping a little easier for them. Customers can also avail assistance round the clock. Since every business priorities customer experience, chatbots could help improve the client satisfaction rate. It is estimated that chatbots have a 73% satisfaction rate for customers.

Access to quality customer data: Most businesses are unable to carry out functions such as marketing automation because they don’t have access to quality data. Chatbots will provide your business with quality customer data so that all you have to do is use them to improve consumer interactions and sales.

Automated lead generation and qualification : Chatbots help customers to easily find what they are looking for on your website. This is beneficial to your customers and your business as well. Since they are able to answer the queries of clients faster and direct them to the appropriate pages, chatbots are better at lead generation than sales agents. Chatbots can also gather, store and automatically transmit customer information to the sales team to enable them to act on the leads.

There are a lot of other benefits chatbots could bring to your business including rewarding customer loyalty, improving customer engagement on your website and segmenting your web traffic. If you feel that the time is right for the integration of chatbot marketing on your website, get in touch with us.