What would it mean for your brand if you were among the messages in your customers’ inboxes? What if they interacted with you like they interacted with one of their friends or family members? What if, when their phone pinged with a notification, it was from you?

You can accomplish this with chatbot marketing, a privacy-first, messaging-first, and customer-first marketing strategy that meets your customers on the messaging apps and platforms they use each day. And it’s where you want to be, too. 2 billion people across 180 countries use WhatsApp. Every month on Facebook Messenger, 20 billion messages are sent between customers and businesses. On Instagram, 130 million accounts interact with shopping posts to learn more about products each month.

Our team at Spectrm has helped our clients enable over 30 million one-to-one customer interactions in 2021 alone via our chatbot marketing platform. If you’re ready for this new marketing channel, here are five benefits chatbot marketing offers, and the questions we most hear from clients on how to get started.

5 Benefits of Chatbot Marketing

Customer-first, messaging-first, and privacy-first chatbot marketing offers a world of benefits for both marketers and customers, where personalized conversations have customers chatting with brands just like they do with their friends. Here are just a few detailing what it can do for your brand.

Benefit 1: Go where your customers are.

Users spend over four hours a day on their mobile devices, and 44% of that time is spent in social media or messaging apps. Instead of waiting for customers to come to your website, go to where they spend their time. By implementing chatbot marketing on channels like search, social, and display, you’ll meet your customers where they are.

Benefit 2: Reduce customer acquisition costs.

Chatbot marketing can improve your return on ad spend and your retargeting efficiency with its high CTR and conversion rates. According to our new report on the “State of B2C Conversational Marketing,” marketers said that the metric most positively impacted by their chatbot marketing efforts was their cost to acquire new customers.

Benefit 3: Increase customer lifetime value.

Customers are looking for brands who engage with them in unique, personalized ways — and brands who have poor personalization efforts risk losing 38% of their existing customer base. Chatbot marketing can help you build a high-value, directly-reachable audience where you sit in their inbox beside their family and friends.

Benefit 4: Own customer data.

Customers today are increasingly concerned about the privacy of their data, which is changing the landscape for marketers. Ad platforms are restricting data. Browsers are blocking scripts. Regulations are making privacy a requirement, not a nice to have. But chatbot marketing offers a privacy-first alternative by collecting information directly from the customer. Our “State of Social Conversational Commerce” report found that over three-quarters of customers would be comfortable giving information to a brand in a private and safe way, in order to receive more personalization.

Benefit 5: Personalize at scale.

Conversational AI offers responsive and personalized interactions in the moment with customers. All that data can be used to better personalize customer experiences — and 80% of customers say they are more likely to buy from a brand if it offers personalization. Because chatbots are easy to scale, you can reduce the operational complexity of personalization and remove your dependence on engineering resources, too.

5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Chatbot Marketing Platform

If you’re looking to implement chatbot marketing or are simply curious about the technology, here are some of the questions we hear the most, and why they matter.

“What messaging apps and ad platforms can I integrate with my chatbot? Are there easy ways to manage entry points to grow my audience?”

In order to build seamless, one-to-one experiences with customers, you need to be on the messaging apps and platforms where they are. Depending on your chatbot solution’s integration capabilities, you can be present on any social media channel where your customers are. That should include the world’s most popular channels, like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google’s Business Messages, and Google DV360.

That’s why growing your chatbot audience using paid, organic, and owned channels is essential. The ability to easily add new channels, integrate with your ad campaigns, and manage entry points allows you to create that seamless experience for your customers — no matter where they are coming from.

“Does the platform comply with security and privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA) when it comes to customer data?”

Keeping your customer data safe is essential for the survival of your business. Create a privacy-first setting for your customers so they feel safe and at ease talking to you. Ensure that the platform you want to use is GDPR-compliant and complies with other data privacy regulations. Having a security or data breach, or processing data in a way that goes against privacy regulation, will create massive liability for your company.

“What analytics, tracking, and retargeting tools are available to optimize performance?”

There’s no point in having a chatbot if you can’t analyze engagement at every step in your customer journey. This includes tracking conversion rates, optimizing your conversational funnel, and accurately attributing sales on your website from the chatbot. Make sure that you pick a platform that includes performance analytics and conversion tracking, so that you can measure the effectiveness of your chatbot marketing and optimize its performance.

Since it’s such a new space, look for platforms that come with a dedicated customer success team who are able to help analyze and optimize performance. Understanding industry benchmarks and best practices also helps you get started fast and optimize faster.

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“Does the platform make it easy to create and train my conversational AI?”

Being able to easily train your chatbot based on the messaging data you receive from customers is essential to optimizing your conversational AI. But marketers shouldn’t need to know how to code to develop successful conversational AI. This is why it’s key to build on no-code platforms, so you can easily identify customer intents, train your AI, and build response templates.

“Can I easily scale this experience into new channels, languages, and markets after my initial successes?”

You shouldn’t have to rebuild your chatbot experiences when you launch on new channels. Make sure the platform you choose integrates with all the major messaging platforms. Make sure it’s easy to duplicate conversations to new channels. And make sure the platform has validation for message types on each different channel so your messages are accurately delivered. You want to build your chatbot only once and then deploy it on all the channels your customers use.

First-Mover Advantage

As you consider launching your chatbot marketing initiative and which platform to use, just remember: First movers in the space have a lot to gain. Not only will messaging one-on-one attract new customers, but gathering data from customers and using it to improve your chatbot’s conversational AI will only be the beginning of the flywheel of your efforts. Get started today having conversations that will grow your customer base into the future.

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