Benefits of chatbots: Hello, How May I Help You? It doesn’t sound strange anymore when a computer asks this question. Yes, we are now becoming used to such artificial intelligence-based responses online. With the advancement of technology, the active use of AI chatbots is one of the essential trends in social media marketing and the key role of chatbots in e-commerce.

Chatbots provide many advantages to online stores. Here, we will highlight some of them and explain why you need to include them in your social media marketing strategy. But before diving into this topic, let’s briefly understand what an AI chatbot is? 

What are AI chatbots? 

A chatbot or bot is a special kind of program implemented as a dialogue interface between humans and computers. Internet users most frequently encounter a bot when a window pops up on the site page asking how may I help you, and they are always there to solve your query. 

There are mainly two types of chatbots used by companies: 

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bots: They self-teach, analyze the context of the dialogue, and can answer any questions with increasing accuracy. Perfect examples of AI chatbots are Amazon Alexa and Siri from Apple. 

2. Fixed Chatbots: They respond to the predetermined set of replicas. Their responses are fixed. You need to update these manually, and it is easier to configure but can’t answer questions outside the script. 

All chatbots are more advanced, but they are more expensive to develop and maintain. In this article, we’ll talk about simpler but time-tested fixed chatbots for your digital marketing strategies. 

Benefits of including chatbot into your social media marketing strategies

1. Offloading support and ordinary employees

Chatbots answer simple and program to respond to frequently repeated questions. For example: check the order status, an appointment with a doctor, loan repayment, etc. If the question is complex, the chatbot transfers it to the call center employee. 

According to LiveChat, a chatbot reduces the number of calls to a live employee to 28.6%. This freed up the time employees spend on more complex tasks. 

2. Fast response and availability 24/7

The best part of a chatbot is it works 24/7 round the clock. Usually, the support team works at fixed hours, though you hire them for full time, and the client has to wait if a question arises early morning or late in the evening. The client usually doesn’t like to stay and move to competitors. Unlike regular employees, a chatbot is always there to solve your clients’ queries 24/7 round the clock, even at 4 am in the morning or in the middle of the night. According to chatbot.com, around 67% of customers put queries in the night, and they found that the 24/7 availability of chatbots is the most productive feature of the chatbot for businesses. Many top intercom companies use chatbots to handle their clients and increase productivity two to three times. 

3. Promote conversations

Conversations via email are pretty time-consuming, whereas conversations through chatbots are quick and take place in the form of dialogues. You can program a chatbot to understand multiple languages in the form of text or voice messages and respond accordingly. It encourages users to participate in the conversation by asking relevant questions and conducting polls, quests, and quizzes. It also helps to collect client’s personal details and feedback to make conversations more personalized. You can link chatbots with your favorite social media profiles such as Facebook, Telegram, Instagram to handle clients online and solve their queries. 

4. Increase conversion 

Chatbots are much more effective than email marketing. Chatbot assists businesses in collecting customer’s personal information, including contact details, address, date of birth, preferences, and choices, to attract clients and motivate them to make purchases. Chatbots ask relevant questions to automate the process and provide the right information. This speeds up the whole buying process and lets customers complete the entire procedure without any complexity. It will increase conversions and help build a solid client base. 

5. Improve customer engagement

Results show that the website that uses chatbots makes more profits and builds a solid client base. The chatbot indicates that you care that the visitors leave happy and receive answers to their questions. It provides complete support to your clients and makes sure that they will find the correct information. It also helps navigate visitors on your website or social media pages and provides the information they are looking for. It will improve customer satisfaction and motivate them to visit again on your site. 

Step to create a chatbot for your social media pages: 

Now you know how chatbots are helpful, so let’s move further and see how you can create chatbots for your social media pages step by step. 

1. Creating a chatbot for social media pages to respond automatically and automate the process is very easy. You can use various chatbot tools, including Botsify, Chatfuel, etc. 
2. The first thing you have to do is create an account or these tools. 
3. Login with the credentials you have created and click over “create new chatbot”.
4. Select a template and edit it according to your preferences. You can add names, customize questions and responses which you want your customers to receive first.
5. Now click on the “create a chatbot”.
6. Next, click on “connect to facebook” to connect the chatbot with your Facebook business page. 
7. You can connect chatbot with your existing Facebook page or create new where you want to connect your chatbot. 
8. Now click on the “build” to build a chatbot for your Facebook page or other social media pages.  
9. Select a message card according to your business, or create a message you want your customers to receive. Add buttons like “Call”, “Send” or “Block”’, etc. 
10. Once you get satisfied with all the features, click on “Test this Chatbot” to proceed further to save the changes. 
11. The final step is to click on “view on messenger” to test your chatbot.

Conclusion

Chatbots are interactive interlocutors who can communicate with a client on almost any site or in any messenger. The more often you are approached with simple, similar questions, the more valuable the chatbot will be. One of the obvious disadvantages is that a chatbot requires more thoughtful configuration than regular mailings. In addition, its relevance must be maintained.

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