Posted by: ClickZ
Posted on: 9/13/2019
What message did you send? How did it resonate with the customer? Was the message sent in real-time? Was the message personalized? These are questions you have to grapple with if you want to be an effective marketer in today’s world.
Marketing is going through a very serious revolution, with all eyes now turned to the customer. It’s now more message-driven than ever before — and this is where live-chatting comes in.
In a world of a projected 8.55 billion people by 2030, how do you ensure that your message is personalized, at scale, and in real-time? The answer is chatbots — particularly AI chatbots.
The tons of data you have gathered on your customers amount to garbage if you are not able to meet with and engage them in their journey, when, and how they want. Customers want to be addressed based on their individual as well as personalized pain points. So the time for a generic, one-message-fixes-all is evidently gone.
Why care about AI chatbots for your business?
A 2019 report from Smooch found that 44 percent of consumers used chatbots to carry out purchases with 75 percent messaging businesses to do likewise.
Similarly, a report from Gartner found that 85 percent of all customer interactions with brands will be automated by 2020.
Yet another report from Servion predicts that, by 2025, AI will be handling 95 percent of all customer interactions.
There’s no doubt that AI chatbots are set to transform the marketing landscape
AI chatbots seamlessly infuse NLP (natural language processing) and AI into conversational marketing which delivers a secure and personalized customer experience at much-desired convenience.
Against the odds of being constrained to a series of possible paths, they amazingly have the ability to instantly come up with relevant, contextually informed responses to varying degrees of prompts.
Here are three exceptional ways that AI chatbots have positively impacted marketing.
1. Natural language understanding (NLU)
Natural human language enables chatbots to understand commands without the formalized, systematic arrangement of computer languages which lets computers chat back to humans in their own languages.
NLU is intended to communicate with untrained individuals and understand their intent and purpose, meaning that it goes beyond merely understanding words and interpreting meanings.
The most spectacular aspect of the advancement in technology as is seen with AI chatbots is the ability of a single chatbot to completely comprehend not just a few but hundreds of different languages. They go on to effectively as well as instinctively communicate in each one of these languages without sounding mechanical.
For a brand that aspires to expand outside its local boundary and possibly into other countries with completely new customer bases and possibly new languages, an AI chatbot is an indispensable arsenal.
If you have a conversational AI chatbot ready to chat with new clients in their native language and at the luxury of their own time, you can save time, overhead cost, and undue irritations for your customers, employees, and even yourself.
2. Scalability
Perhaps one of the most disturbing areas of marketing that AI chatbots have been able to address is the size of your business. This is no longer an issue in conversational marketing. They are not there just to answer questions from customers but have the ability to use data around the questions to channel leads through the purchase funnel by creating scalable, personalized one-to-one recommendations.
1-800-Flowers’ 2017 first-quarter results showed total revenues had increased 6.3 percent to $165.8 million, as a result of the use of GWYN. GWYN is able to interpret customer questions about a product or service, by making use of natural language.
GWYN goes ahead to find out from the customer about the audience the gifts are meant for, the occasion, and sentiment with the view of suggesting the most appropriate gifts.
To showcase the effectiveness of GWYN, CEO Chris McCann says,
“Business recorded positive same-store sales as well as solid ecommerce growth, reflecting the success of the initiatives we have implemented to enhance its performance.”
Though McCann didn’t specifically mention GWYN, however, a CB Insights’ finding revealed that 70% of customers ordering via chatbot were new 1-800-Flowers customers as of June 2016.
As most of us well know, most customers are not interested in the number of people a rep might have to attend to. Rather, they care about satisfaction in real-time. AI chatbots are capable of operating around the clock and can attend to any number of customers without any sign of irritation.
3. Conversations at the customer’s comfort
Brian Bagdasarian puts it aptly,
“Businesses should strive to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person, with the right information, on the right channel, every single time.”
Where traditional marketing tended to be interruptive, conversational marketing shouldn’t be.
With the emergence of AI chatbot technology, conversational marketing as a live chat, the always-on opportunity has been taken to a new dimension. Customers can live chat with ease and comfort, whenever they have time to spare.
For instance, RapidMiner has done away with its traditional lead capture form, using a chatbot from Drift that has influenced 25% of their open sales pipeline — worth “well over” one million dollars.
With so many visitors coming to their site, it was clear they couldn’t afford to talk to everyone, and shouldn’t try to.
Their time was best spent focusing on conversations with the people who were most likely to buy. RapidMiner succeeded in getting across to those people through their intelligent LeadBot, which allowed them to automate the lead qualification process by asking the same qualifying questions a sales team would ask.
Conclusion
AI chatbots enable your business with an added benefit by making it possible for your brand to easily finish a conversation at whatever pace the customer wants.
They will save you dejected customers who would take their deals to competitors with the aim of getting better service. It’s, therefore, to your brand’s strength and competitive advantage that you integrate AI chatbots into conversational marketing to deal with your customers.
The new form of marketing is all about building around the needs and perspectives of the customers.
John Ejiofor is a digital marketer, SEO specialist, freelance content writer, and Founder of Nature Torch.
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