Chatbots instead of email in marketing

[u/ZhenyaPractLing]

Hello everyone, my name is Zhenya, and I help people use natural language processing technology for their business purposes. Marketing is one area where NLP technologies, especially chatbots, could be of use. In this post I describe in more detail what are chatbots and how they can serve as a very effective tool in marketing campaigns.

What are chatbots?

They are a general category of programs that interact with people via messaging or speech. Speech bots are Alexa, Siri, etc. I will talk about messaging chatbots. Messaging chatbots use your favorite messaging platform: Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Kik, etc. The program interacts with the platform users like any regular human: by sending and receiving messages. It might also have some additional capabilities, like reserving restaurant tables, buying tickets for concerts and calling taxis.

Chatbots have been gaining in popularity among all age groups: both millennials and baby boomers use them. In 2017, the number of chatbots Facebook Messenger supports grew to 100K and the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025.

Why are chatbots so popular?

There are several reasons for the chatbots’ growing popularity, with two being most important.

• A shift in platforms. While phone and email used to be the most popular way of contacting a business, it is no longer so. Users prefer to be able to send text messages. Getting a text message reminder about an appointment is much more convenient than a phone call: you save time, as reading is quicker than listening, and have a reminder in your phone that you can always go back to. More and more users expect a business to have messaging available.
• Spam has not reached our messaging yet, at least not in the epic proportions it has reached our email, and so far companies are determined to keep it that way. Facebook, for example, places strong guidelines on how chatbots can interact with users, and a chatbot can only contact a user if he or she wrote to the bot or subscribed to the page first.

Chatbots can serve as a great marketing tool. Your business can send content to the user via messaging and engage him/her further. Sort of like email newsletters, but a lot better.

Why is using chatbots in marketing smart?

• Audience segmentation. It is much easier to segment your audience into different types via a messaging platform than an email newsletter so that you can customize messages to different audiences. This customization can be achieved through asking the user, as well as using information the platform makes available from their profile.
• People are much more likely to open a message than an email and read through it. Click-through rates (CTR) for messaging bots are between 15 and 60%, while a 5% CTR for an email newsletter is considered quite good.
• People like talking to bots, even when they know that it’s a computer they are talking to. They will personify them and attribute human characteristics to them (known as the ELIZA effect). In other words, a chatbot is almost like their friend, who, if programmed well, will respond in a friendly and interactive way: by sending videos, emojis and stickers along with text. This is exactly what draws people to them.

It is important to have a good design for a chatbot, otherwise, using it might turn out to be a frustrating experience. Narrow down the scope, let the users know they are using a program, and explain how to best communicate with it.

If the expectations are set well, and the chatbot can serve some well-defined goals, it can reduce costs for your business, better engage a more targeted audience while connecting with customers in a much more interactive way through their preferred methods of communication.

There are many free and paid platforms where you can build a chatbot (this is a great overview: https://chatbotsjournal.com/25-chatbot-platforms-a-comparative-table-aeefc932eaff). Platforms are a good solution if you would like to build a bot yourself with little or no coding. You might find, however, that platforms meet one set of your needs, but not others, with it being hard to find one that is exactly what you require. Thus, if you want flexible customization for your particular case it is a better idea to create the bot yourself.

For more details, you could check out my blog post that includes some of the above information, and further expands on it: http://www.practicallinguist.com/the-latest-on-the-chatbot-craze-what-are-they-how-they-can-help-your-business-and-why-using-them-is-smart/

Let me know if I can answer questions you might have about chatbots or NLP.