Fara Rosenzweig has been in the marketing industry for several years and is currently working as the Head of Marketing with ManyChat. ManyChat is a chat marketing platform where marketers, agencies, and business owners can come and create conversation utilizing messenger marketing, SMS, and email. It’s a great opportunity for businesses to connect with their customers and have a meaningful conversation with them on the customer’s preferred channel.
In a tête-à-tête with Fara, Jagruti Bhargav, Marketing Strategist at SocialPilot, had an in-depth understanding of chat marketing along with a few tips to use it for business expansion and growth.
Listen to the insights shared by Fara Rosenzweig.
Q: During the holiday season, when brands are trying to onboard customers, drive conversations, and increase conversions, how can they leverage chatbots to their benefit?
A: Holiday season can be overwhelming, as you have deals coming through from everywhere. However, for retailers, it’s one of the best seasons to make sales. Since customer buying behavior is shifting to online, therefore retailers need to prepare themselves for fulfilling the demands of their customers immediately. Chat marketing is all about providing the required service to your customers right away.
Facebook ads costs a huge amount, especially during the holiday season.
Therefore,
- Brands should start planning weeks before how they would use the FB ads and generate traffic to their website, re-targeting them to the bot. Eye-catching and engaging ads provide a unique experience to people and encourage them to start a conversation.
- Let your audience take a quiz and understand their needs to offer them exactly what they are looking for.
- Be creative in creating the ad copy. For example, instead of mentioning a 20% off for the holiday, be direct and say ‘Get 20$ off’. Studies have shown that people are more prone to click on such an ad to avail your offer. It helps create a fun and engaging shopping experience.
- People look for special deals during the holiday season. Provide them value, teach them through a video on how to use a product or how to make a purchase, and let them know what they should do next with a proper call to action.
- Be prepared for any questions that might come from your audience and let your chatbot answer those queries. When you understand your audience well, you know what they might ask you. Therefore, you can instantly communicate with your customers while providing them with the required solution. It deepens customer’s understanding of your product and offers them complete satisfaction, which drives quicker purchases when compared to getting a coupon that requires thinking about it for a day or two.
Q: I understand that knowing your audience well helps you know the questions that they might ask and how their buying journey will be. But how can brands reverse the possible negative effect on engagement that arises due to the customer feeling unimportant when a machine answers instead of a human?
A: Earlier, businesses used to keep a generic autobot which had a high probability of turning out a blip. So we recommend personifying your bot.
- We encourage our chat users to let the customers know that they are speaking to a bot. We make sure that the bot has a personality, with a name and character of its own. It helps create an experience that you are talking to a human.
- Understand the brand and brand’s style, voice, tone, and mission. Figure out the personality and language for the bot and create the copy accordingly. Let the bot talk to your customer like their friend. Use emojis, video, slangs, and quirky lingual-whatsoever fits the bot’s personality, without worrying about using proper grammar.
- If the person engaging with the bot wants to talk to a human being, give them the option of Livechat typing in a question.
ManyChat users have this option, where they get a notification right after which they can start Live Chat.
Q: When interacting with bigger brands, the audience mostly knows that it would not be possible to talk to the Head of Marketing or Head of Customer Service directly. So adding a personality to the bot seems to be a great idea. But to what degree does it nullify the negative effect that the person is talking to a machine?
A: Your chatbot is part of your marketing strategy, so everything from your website to social media to email to the bot is in unison. You must stick to your brand’s mission, value, style, and voice because your bot represents your business. It’s more of an employee that gives voice to your brand. Therefore, you need to appoint a human to create this human-like bot.
- Hold a brainstorm session to work out the phrases your bot will use while chatting. It’s more like a TV show character that uses a phrase repetitively in each show, which gets registered in the subconscious of the audience.
- Let your bot use that phrase every time it chats so that people know it as a unique personality.
Your marketing chatbot is an opportunity to create an experience that’s not boring or aggravating.
Q: Would you like to share any successful campaigns with us?
A: Companies are increasingly using chat marketing to scale and grow quickly. We have had a restaurant that, within 4 months of creating a bot with a personality, gained 4000 subscribers and earned $17000 in sales with an ad spend of $2500. How did they do it?
- They created a simple campaign and offer ‘Buy one pizza, get one free’, which people could redeem through FB messenger. Then they created a segmented, engaging FB ad, in which they used captions like ‘Get your free pizza’ and used pizza emojis.
- Also, they were clear about their Call to Action. They got numerous comments and used ManyChat tool to start an opt in process to deliver the offer. This way they could direct people to the bot and setup an autoresponse which their subscribers could quickly follow to redeem the offer.
- When people redeemed offer, they also sent a Thank You message and ask them to stay tuned for more.
- They used Zapier integrations that we offer, which helped them create a friendly experience.
Q: As you mentioned, chat marketing is not a strategy since a long time. Is it the right time for businesses to start leveraging it before the competition kicks in and it starts getting expensive?
A: Absolutely, chat marketing is a new space. You should get on it early and have time to perfect it.
- See what works and doesn’t for your business, or what or what not your audience resonates with. Do it before the opportunity gets saturated.
- With chat marketing, you can go from the messenger to a text message conversation and to an email quickly. Tie it all together and bring it back to the messenger.
- Chat marketing is cost effective, because it is new. Not a lot of businesses are doing it as yet, which makes it a great opportunity for you to become the first company to engage with your customers on the channel of their choice.
Statistics say that 2.5 million people today are communicating on mobile messenger apps. So it’s your chance to communicate with your customer where they are most comfortable and fine tune your strategy as the chat marketing industry grows.
Read the full interview and more actionable insights from other marketing experts and influencers in our Ebook – Actionable Strategies for Your Holiday Campaign. Click here to read the Ebook.
