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Last time I wrote about a brief history of chatbots and their current state. The industry is growing so rapidly that it is difficult to catch up with all advancements. As of 2020, among all new researches and products, one stood out. Google’s AI research team published their paper about their new chatbot, Meena. Meena is the most advanced chatbot in the world right now and its power comes mainly from its ability to talk about “anything” and can handle “multi-turn conversations”.
Scientifically speaking, Meena’s architecture model is based on Evolved Transformer and each conversation’s context represents up to seven messages prior to response. This is a significant improvement to all existing conversation agents that cannot keep up with a simple conversation context. Meena is not available to the public but when it becomes, it could be a big disruptor in the chatbot industry. Here’s a conversation snippet between human and Meena:
Source; Google AI blog
At PERFORMARS we also started offering our chatbot solutions. Being experts in digital transformation and digital marketing we mainly focus on marketing chatbots. We understand the importance of chatbots to your business and how to integrate them with your other digital marketing tools. Before we dive into the specifications of our offerings, I would like to highlight the importance of chatbot marketing and how they can help your business.
What is Chatbot Marketing?
I do not know how an academician would define chatbot marketing, but from our perspective it is the act of leveraging existing chatting platforms (messaging apps, webpage chat widgets) to carry marketing activities such as customer engagement, promotions and targeting and more.
Why Chatbot Marketing is Important?
If you have been doing email marketing over the past few years, by now you probably have noticed that open and click-through rates are suffering from low engagement rates. According to Statista, the average email open rates are 5.9% - 18.8%, and the average click-thought rates are 0.4%-2.1%. On the contrary, Facebook Messenger chatbots are having an average of 80% open rates and an average of 30% click-through rates. As a simple marketing rule, you should know where your targeted customers hang out, and these days almost everyone hangs out in messaging apps. Additionally, it is more convenient and more personal to your customers.
How Chatbot Marketing Can Help Your Business?
Your business can leverage chatbots in many ways. You can use them to automate internal business processes, add more efficiency to your customer service activities or you can use them for your marketing activities. Our focus will be mainly on the last use case. Marketing chatbots are relatively new and not every business understands their true values. There are so many different variations in terms of functionality and purpose which adds extra difficulties when it comes to choosing the right option. Here are some chatbot variations that you might have seen on some websites.
a. Script bots where you can select from given options.b. Script bots where you can input answers manually.
c. Smart chatbot where you can type anything you want but in fact, it is more confusing than being helpful.
d. Smart chatbot that can complete one or two useful tasks (make reservations, handles payment).
I know there are many dimensions that chatbots need improvement but depending on your business objective one of those variations can be helpful for your marketing activities (probably except for “c”). For example, if you are using scripted chatbot on your business Facebook page, in addition to helping your customers with faster reservation and payment options you can segment your subscribers and send them targeted notifications and promotion messages. Also, you can implement Feedback Chatbot for your existing users as a customer feedback channel to simplify existing survey processes. In short using chatbots you can raise awareness, nurtures your leads, deliver contents and finally make sales.
Regarding Our Offerings
Currently, we are offering two options for marketing chatbots. More details can be found on our webpage here. You are probably wondering which one is suitable for your business.
Unless you know your customers’ needs and questions in detail, the simple chatbot would be a good starting point. That is because for AI-enabled chatbot you would need some data to train the Natural Language Processing models that are running on the backed. Starting with the simple options and running it for some time will help you to collect data and understand better the needs of your customers and then you can switch to the smart one. For more details feel free to contact us.
