11 Ways to Gain Organic Traffic with Your Chat Bots

If you haven’t noticed recent social media trends, chatbots are the hot new thing to implement into your marketing efforts—and for good reason!

Chatbots feed the preferred communication styles of many that like text and chat while also providing the personability and attention potential clients expect from businesses these days. In response, businesses are using chatbots to provide instant customer service, product recommendation and, believe it or not, advertising!

Although chatbots can be intimidating, they create huge opportunities for nurturing and closing leads! So, if you’re the person in charge of leading your social media marketing efforts wanting to zero in on the organic traffic opportunities that are opening up for lots of businesses this is the article for you!

Below we will discuss ways to send more organic traffic to your site with chatbots and how you can optimize your customer experience to increase conversions and brand awareness. Let’s get chatting!

Why Do You Need Chatbots?

Simply put, to be competitive in today’s modern business world, you need to automate.

Look around. Over the past 5 years, businesses have transitioned their self-checkout options and kiosks to automated services. In fact, Amazon has even opened a store without any cashiers or self-checkouts, limiting human interactions to those only absolutely necessary.

Messenger bots can be a great way to take advantage of the AI trend and make the biggest changes in the lives of your customers.

The value in chatbots comes from their ability to automate conversations throughout the shopping experience, therefore making interaction with your business convenient. To add to this simple truth, here are a few more benefits chatbots and messenger apps bring to businesses:

They Use Marketing Budget and Time Efficiently

In a world of instant gratification and busy schedules, it’s important more than ever for businesses to help customers save not only time but money, any way they can.

By automating conversations with chatbots, you can eliminate your need to hire an employee to handle those conversations (therefore using marketing budgets more efficiently).

The amount of time you save increases as your inbound message quantity increases. And since Sprout Social research shows the number of social messages requiring a response from a brand increased by 18% from 2015 to 2016, you save countless hours by automating responses with a chatbot!

They Generate Better Leads

Chatbots use direct messages to gather information necessary to provide effective support to potential customers they interact with. For example, if a person contacting a business for shipment tracking updates an initial question asked by a chatbot would be to collect their purchase confirmation number and their name.

By automating these types of interactions, a business can quickly gather information needed for a human agent to better serve them. Like this example, there are ways you can initially qualify incoming contact interactions to better serve your audience as well as use your employees time more efficiently.

Typically, you’ll find the sales team is happier with more quality leads and time to spend on more meaningful work by chatbot automation.

They Create Better User Experiences

Believe it or not, your website or Facebook page might not be 100% effective, leaving potential customers unable to find information. Sometimes people might just stumble across your page online and just you with questions about your business.

If those people interact with a chatbot, they can be asked a series of qualifying questions that route them to the best place for the information they are trying to find, therefore creating a wonderful and informative experience with your brand.

Some of these questions can easily include:

• What problem are you trying to solve? What can we help you with?
• What are your goals?
• Where are you located?
• What industry are you in?
• Are there products you are specifically interested in?
• Have you visited XYZ part of our website for more information?
• Would you like personal support?

By personalizing the questions a chatbot asks even further than the ones above, you can best ensure they have the best user experience. Again, being helpful is the new viral and chatbots can definitely help you in that business goal!

They Offer 24/7 Help

Unless you are a huge corporation that can afford to have employees working 24/7, it’s unlikely you will be there for your potential and current customers at 3 AM.

Chatbots to the rescue!

The most popular use of chatbots is to provide quick answers in an emergency or offline situation. By using a chatbot when your business is closed, customers still gain access to the information they need all while feeling heard and taken care of.

Since customers expect to be responded to between 0-4 hours typically, chatbots can help you fill in the gaps and log interactions during off hours!

They Create Unique Experiences

Sure, you could use chatbots in the traditional way of routing people to business emails and phone lines, but chatbots have come such a long way in what they can do!

By being creative and branded in your experience, you offer a new, fun and interactive way to engage with your business, therefore setting your business apart from the competition!

Getting Started With Chatbots

If you got a bit excited about the possibilities and benefits of chatbots for business above then let’s get started!

Once you get over your initial fears of chatbots and understand the true benefit they can bring to your business, the efforts will be well worth it! The great news is, we can make it even easier to set up using the steps below!

Let’s walk through the most important things to consider and the steps you need to take to get started setting up a Chatbot system.

Define Your Goals and Purpose

Before you get into any of the technology you need to map out an interactive and useful plan on how you will want to use chatbots. Be sure to also think about all of the “must have” features it needs to contain.

Spend time defining your goal and consider some of the following uses:

• Do you want to resolve customer service issues?
• Do you want to promote new products?
• Do you want to generate better leads?
• Do you want to share out a poll to collect audience information?
• Do you want to share content?
• Do you want to have interactive ways people can preview your products and services?

Whatever you decide, be sure to include your sales, social media and content marketing teams to ensure you are choosing the most effective use for chatbots. A holistic marketing strategy around chatbots typically work best!

Build Out Your Content Strategy

Once you have a business goal for your chatbots, you will need to write out content you would like your potential chatbot users to engage with throughout their experience.

To start, look at answering or addressing:

• Frequently asked questions
• General information
• Purchase information
• Contact information
• Learning and content opportunities

To be effective with content, think about the user experience and journey your potential customers might go on. Think about what questions customers are likely to ask your chatbot. That way, you build out the proper flows to guide users to the best possible answer.

In Messenger marketing, you want to ask open-ended questions that get people interacting and engaging. Ask questions that inspire long-form answers that give you (in their own language) the hopes, fears, and desires of your best customers.

If you are stumped on things to address, involve some of the teams like sales, marketing, customer service and social media to give some insights as to things they feel are pain points, problems or frequent concerns people have. Outside of your internal resources, look to the internet for answers! Platforms like Quora and looking to your social media page comments are great resources as well! Look to what existing content you have that best supports your goal before creating new content as well!

Craft Your Bot’s Voice

Once you have the general gist of what you want to say and what you want customers to do during their chatbot experience, you need to draft content further with branded voice and personality!

There is nothing worse than a generic, ineffective chatbot where you know it’s not a person…it’s a robot!

Giving your bot a personality humanizes the experience and allows people to better align your brand with the experience.

To let customers know they are talking to a bot, many brands also choose to give their bot a name. This gives them the opportunity to be transparent with customers while creating a fun tone to interact with. Be sure your voice is consistent and clear throughout the experience you mapped out above.

However, don’t draw so much attention to the character that it overshadows the service—always put functionality first.

Write a Well-Crafted Welcome Message

Once you determine function, purpose and voice, it will be important to craft a “welcome” message to introduce people into the chat experience. This step is incredibly important for engaging users and getting them to respond to your bot (I mean, who also hates terrible open liners or pickup lines?).

The best opening messages are compelling, set expectations, personable and ask questions!

Create Your Chatbot Decision Tree

With your general voice and messaging in place, it will be time to start mapping out what the conversation journey may look like. You can do this with building paths using shapes and arrows in Google Drawings.

Sprout social shares an awesome example that looks at a fictional restaurant which needs to communicate things like store hours, specials and loyalty programs.

For each of the questions that they asked, they needed to figure out the best responses users can choose. By creating multiple responses, like they did, for every question asked you’re more likely to satisfy the user’s needs.

Expect questions and conversations to build from each other, so think about possible directions and responses users might have! Spend time making sure that all conversations fully satisfy customer needs. When the conversation gets several layers deep, it may be time to push that user to a live representative.

Once you do these things, you are ready to get started!

11 Ways to Drive Organic Traffic With Your Business Chat Bots

Now that you are ready to roll with your chatbots, below are some tips and tricks on how to effectively use Chatbots for leads.

1. Drive Traffic with a Chat Blast Message

Email marketing is the name of the game for most marketers—especially when it comes to driving website traffic—but did you know that you can create “email blasts” within chatbots? In fact, most studies found that with chatbots there is even a better open rate than email!

Just as email marketing platforms allow for email list segmentation, Facebook Messenger platforms allows for advanced contact segmentation. Whether it is a new guide, a webinar invite or a simple “thank you”, you can schedule a bulk and engaging chat blast campaign that sends engaged traffic to your site!

When you create blasted messages, be sure to link to your site to audience segments by defining unique demographics. Doing a Facebook Messenger chat blast is free if you follow certain guidelines.

2. Be Entertaining

If you want to build and nurture relationships with your customers, you do not always need to give information or be on the track for a sale. Sometimes, it’s okay to just give them a laugh, inspiration or smile.

Entertaining your potential customers is a high-funnel tactic to engage with them, but it’s definitely effective.

Users can opt to receive future messages from you, but as a business, you can send fun facts, inspirational quotes relating to your business or games meant purely to entertain.

The Trivia Blast chatbot, for example, focuses only on entertainment. Once people send their first message, the chatbot will regularly send messages to them with game suggestions and calls to action to play them. Users can sort the trivia games by topic and some games even offer the option to “see how it works” or “challenge a friend,” inviting more users to the chatbot.

Like them, you too can create a fun interaction with your target audience as long as you always give them the option to opt out.

3. Offer Exclusive Content

Lots of businesses have mobile apps that offer automated services, but you can create chatbots that offer these services in the Messenger App itself! As some businesses are dabbling with this, you too can be competitive and even that much more convenient!

For example, RemitRadar‘s money transfer service is one of the best examples of this type of chatbot. Chatbot users can use automated services to send money, pay for international mobile while abroad, request exchange rates, and find other money transfer locations. All of these services are streamlined and easy to use.

Offering automated services through a chatbot can boost business, but just make sure security measures and other safety features are in place if the required information is personal.

4. Grow Email and Subscription Lists

Like most things in marketing, your email lists are your lifeblood and chatbots can be a great way to manage and add to your email lists.

There are a few ways to get new subscribers with chatbots:

• Give people options to subscribe within the chat conversation
• Give already subscribed individuals the option to get subscribed to your messenger updates
• Have third-party integrations with a newsletter subscription like Mailchimp
• Have a button that directs people to your website newsletter integration

By allowing people to access exclusive information directly from Messenger or to make getting information easy, you allow them to follow you in a more user-friendly way!

BONUS: Invite Engaged Traffic via Chatbot Drip Campaign

Did you know you can set up automated sequences of messages that send your audience relevant links to a sales funnel content piece on your website?

Welcome, Facebook messenger drip campaigns!

Automate 1-5 messages to send to customers, each pointing to a link on your website with more information. You have the ability to nurture audience segments ensuring that each segmented group gets the relevant content they need to see!

7. Sell Products Directly

Believe it or not, you can sell products within chatbots!

Chatbots have wonderful options for robust ecommerce abilities and you can have it both done by a developer or a chatbot service like ChattyPeople or Chatfuel.

8. Place Your Business Chatbot in the Messenger Discovery Section

Discover is where people can browse and find Messenger bots, nearby places and businesses to message. Organized by category, recent activity and featured experiences, Discover complements existing entry points, including advertising to Messenger Codes, me.me links and plugins.

Discovery section in Facebook Messenger is currently available to US-based users, but this still will add to your chatbot’s visibility.

To submit your bot, go to Messenger Platform tab in your Facebook Page Settings and scroll to Discover Settings section at the bottom of the page.

Click “Set up” button to configure the categories where the bot will appear, customize how it’s described in search results, and decide which languages you’d like to support.

9. Share Out Social Contests

Like entertainment, social contests can be deployed as chatbots and they can definitely help get the word out quickly!

On a chatbot, you can ask for users to contribute content, photos, video or answer questions! After a contest is over, you can use the broadcast tool to announce the winner.

10. Drive Traffic from Comments

This is one of the easiest ways of driving users from Facebook news feed is to just comment like crazy on people’s stuff.

This functionality enables your bot to send an automatic private message to a user who comments on a post on your Facebook page.

The message can be triggered every time a user comments on a specific post or any post in the feed. You can also set up a list of trigger words to be identified in a user’s comments before sending him a message.

11. Create Messenger Codes for Your Chatbot

A Messenger scan code is similar to a QR code. You can generate a unique scannable code for your chatbot. When someone scans this code using the Messenger app on his phone, it will automatically open a conversation with your chatbot on Messenger.

This is great for traditional businesses like restaurants, gyms and retail stores to convert their customers into chatbot users. It can also work well for people who are regularly getting in front of prospects, face to face. A Messenger Code can be scanned by camera in Facebook and Messenger mobile app to instantly lead a user to your bot.

To help with this learning curve, show people how to exactly scan the code so you make the process seamlessly easy for them instead of having them figure it out! It is kind of tricky!

Create regular and parametric Messenger codes for both digital and offline marketing opportunities (leaflets, flyers that can be spread at events, parties, etc.).

Read here how to get a regular Messenger code that redirects a user to the default welcome message of your chatbot.

BONUS: The 24 Hour Rule & Email Signatures

Sending out promotional stuff is fine coming from chatbots, but there are specific rules on Facebook you need to follow:

• Promotional messages may be used as a response to someone opening a conversation with you: someone has shown some kind of intent, which means they’re interested in hearing from you about something.
• Once the conversation has been opened, you have 24 hours to send a promotional message. This is called the 24-Hour Rule.
• According to Facebook, any message that takes someone out of Messenger is considered promotional, whether it has a sales intent or not. Just 24 hours from that initial contact.

Chatbots and Traffic: You Got This

It’s easy enough to build a chatbot with today’s technology builders, but creating one that works is far more challenging. Hopefully, this article gave you steps to consider in your planning process which will make the actual setup more effective and easy!

I hope you will try to use at least three marketing tactics out of this list to promote your bot, as I am sure this will be very helpful. The best chatbot experiences are driven by creativity, strong marketing planning and correct technology.

In today’s fast-paced world, being able to provide instant solutions to your customers is where it’s at. Employing a chatbot strategy that’s carefully constructed with your customers’ needs will take your business to the next level!

If you want help planning out a strong chatbot marketing strategy, or need further help in building one out for your business, contact me here! I would love to help!

What do you think of chatbots? Are they annoying or helpful? What services do you like using to set them up and how have you seen them used? Comment and share below!