How to Get Started Using Chatbots

Chatbots are the future of online business and they’re becoming smarter each day. Thus, it’s wise for any online business owner to invest now and build a quality chatbot that engages their target market and boosts sales. Here’s how to get started with chatbots.

Choose a Platform for Making Chatbots

Choosing a platform such as Chatfuel is the easiest way to create a fully functional chatbot.

Chatfuel is a chatbot builder for Facebook Messenger that’s designed to make chatbot-building easy. You don’t need any programming or coding knowledge to use this platform. The free version offers you access to almost every feature for up to 5,000 subscribers; however, your customers will see the Chatfuel branding on your bot.

Chatfuel makes managing and reusing messages easier than most bot builders.

The paid version starts from $15/month and this gets you more subscribers, priority support, audience insights, and some extra data management features.

Botsify and ConversioBot are another simple bot builder platforms. Using this platforms, you can create chatbots for your website or Facebook Messenger easily. Also, they have some great integration features that you won’t find with other builders.

For instance, you can integrate with WordPress, Shopify, and Alexa to create conversion forms in your chatbot or allow human agents to take over the conversation.

Define Your Goals and Expectations

The easiest way to set yourself up for failure is by overloading your chatbot with too many features. So you shouldn’t try to get your chatbot to master all the tasks from the start. It’s better to design a chatbot that can master one task to its full capability than having a chatbot that can handle 5-10 tasks half-heartedly.

Always remember that quality trumps quantity.

Approach Your Audience with the Chatbot

Many consumers still find chatbots a bit confusing, so approach your customers directly to get their feedback and make sure they have a positive experience interacting with your brand. When designing your chatbot:

• Use buttons on your Facebook page and website
• Inform your customers how you can assist them through a welcome message
• Add a “Get Started” button that’s well-positioned
• Incorporate a greetings message that’s efficient

Map a Natural Conversation Flow

Make sure your chatbot is conversational, because a conversational chatbot will make the conversation between your customers and the chatbot more honest. This’ll help you understand the needs of your customers better and you’ll gather valuable data.

Remember, the goal of the chatbot is to answer your customers’ questions, so it shouldn’t impede the conversation. A great chatbot should facilitate the conversation.

Start Simple and Small

Besides keeping the functionalities of your chatbot limited in its beginning, here are some more tips:

• Avoid using complex words when communicating with customers
• Keep the bot’s conversation understandable and short
• Remember that the chatbot is a representation of your brand

Keeping your chatbot small and simple will help you learn from the behavior of your audience. And slowly you’ll be able to develop a better version with more functionalities.

Optimize and Test Your Chatbot Regularly

You can extend the features of your bot by creating new and improved versions of it.

Since a chatbot is a tool for digital marketing, it’s important to evaluate it regularly and optimize it accordingly. Chatbot technology is relatively new, which means that new features are being introduced regularly.

When testing your chatbots:

• Identify the best ways to drive your audience to the target outcome
• Optimize your chatbot depending on your goals and expectations
• Establish what you should optimize it for

Introduce One Feature at a Time

When launching your chatbot to the public, all the features must be perfect. Also, it can overwhelm your customers if you introduce many features in one go. Thus, it’s crucial to unveil one feature at a time, when your audience needs them.

8. Determine the Data You Would Like to Collect

Chatbots are powerful tools for data collection. However, the data you collect will largely depend on your goals.

Start by thinking about the information that you’d like to collect from your audience and then customize the chatbot conversation flow to ask the right questions to collect that data. For example, you can:

• Ask for a customer’s postal code if you want to know their location
• Ask customers about their eating, shopping, or exercising habits to push the right offers and deals to them in the future
• Ask about the customer’s shopping preferences to push valuable and relevant information in your subsequent interactions with them

Stay-Up-to-Date with the Competition

Since chatbots are relatively new, it means there’s more room for improvement. So the best approach to getting started with chatbots is by monitoring the progress of your competitors regularly. To do this, make sure you track:

• What your competitors are doing badly to avoid making the same mistakes
• What your competitors are doing well and implement it in your chatbot strategy
• Any innovative features your competitors use that you aren’t aware of

Today, the best and most innovative way to reach your audience is by launching a simple, easily accessible, easy-to-use, and effective chatbot. And by providing your audience with a conversational chatbot with a bit of personality, you can keep them engaged.

Where Should You Put Your Chatbot?

Think about the webpages that receive the most traffic from your website’s intended audience. For instance, your homepage may be one of your most trafficked pages, so this would be a great place to place a chatbot to help general site visitors.

Also, if your service pages are some of your next most impactful pages, create a chatbot for each page. And as you continue to learn what works for your brand, you can continue to add additional, more targeted chatbots across your website and improve your conversational marketing skills.

By leveraging chatbots, your brand will have a more informed support team with social and website interaction, which will reduce customer effort and lead to superior customer experience.

NOTE: This is the last series on basic information about chatbot features. You may view live demo on how chatbot work by clicking ‘Can I help you‘ featuring myself as a chatbot at the bottom right corner of this page. This demo was created using ConversioBot. If you need more information, please email your enquiry to services@ads.my