Everywhere you look in modern marketing, people are talking about artificial intelligence (AI). The prime example is the rise of chatbots, one of the most popular forms of this technology.
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These computer programs are created to boost the overall customer experience, and many companies are adopting chatbots to improve their business in a number of ways.
In this article, we uncover why advertisers should utilize chatbots in their pay-per-click (PPC) strategy, along with the best chatbots available, and where this technology is heading.
What are Chatbots?
As we briefly mentioned, chatbots are programs developed to offer an automated conversation between business and customers. Since these communication helpers are available 24/7, they have quickly become a popular tool for online businesses.
If implemented correctly, your business can gain actionable insights about your customers through these conversations.
The result?
A more accurate understanding of how to direct your audience towards the services and products they desire.
The Best Types of Chatbots Available
There are a few different types of chatbots you can use on your website. The following are the best chatbots available:
- Customer Service – Use this chatbot to respond quickly to site visitors on service and FAQ questions.
- Product-Specific Chatbots – This type of chatbot will gather data based on customer engagement which helps businesses better their product line.
- Marketing Bots – These bots message customers. They can guide the visitor towards useful products and content, based on the conversation they’re having with them.
Top 9 PPC Marketing Chatbot Trends in 2019
There are so many reasons why people are loving chatbots.Here are the top chatbot trends that marketers should know about:
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24/7 Accessibility
As virtual robots, chatbots operate throughout the year, every day, 24-7, without requiring breaks of any kind.
This instant response timing increases customer engagement and satisfaction, which helps cultivate a positive brand image. Over time, that’s good news for your search ranking and reputation.
2. Handling Capacity
Unlike us limited humans, chatbots are perfectly capable of dealing with multiple customer issues at the same time – and they’ll never complain about being tired or stressed!
Using a chatbot on your website will eliminate any stress that comes with responding to each customer at a time, which ensures no order or question falls by the wayside.
3. Flexibility
Chatbots are a programmed software, capable of customization according to the user’s requirements or needs. All you need to do is feed the bot with the proper conversation structure and flow, and let it do the rest on automation.
4. Customer Satisfaction
While chatbots don’t understand emotions, they can be programmed to understand your customer’s behaviour based on past data.
This can make mail orders a lot easier, while also offering the ability to make suggestions for future orders. This provides a smooth and easy transaction – which customers love.
5. Time-Saving
One of the greatest benefits you’ll get from your chatbot is its ability to save your company a lot of time.
These programs offer fast, automated answers to queries which eliminates the waiting game for customers while allowing your business to serve the most amount of people as possible.
6. Cost-Effective
Hiring humans can be expensive, especially if you’re on a tight budget. A chatbot can easily communicate with hundreds of customers at once, saving you time and money that would otherwise be spent hiring a team of customer support agents.
7. Increased Customer Base
Another benefit of using these programs is the ability to reach more people, which can boost your customer base while keeping those customers happy.
Chatbots can be used in many applications. Take advantage of this to help grow your business.
8. Fewer Errors
Humans are flawed – this is no secret.
To avoid these inevitable errors, you can turn to a chatbot, and take confidence knowing that they are designed to provide the right answers every time.
9. Add Humor
Chatbots are always in a good mood. Program your chatbot to show a bit of good humour to make them more human-like and relatable. This will put your customers at ease, and help you nurture trust through a more satisfying experience.
5 Possible Chatbot Downfalls
While there are many reasons why chatbots are great additions to your business, these optimized robots aren’t completely perfect.
Here are five possible downfalls of the chatbot.
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Limited Understanding
Chatbots don’t always understand what the user is asking for if a word or sentence is not found in their dictionary.
While they’re useful for entry-level support, chatbots won’t provide useful responses to complex customer queries until they have gathered enough data from the machine learning-based system.
2. Security Breach
Unless you maintain proper security checks, your chatbots can be a security hazard as they’re vulnerable to hackers.
3. Unable to Understand Emotions
Sometimes, chatbots aren’t able to understand users’ queries because of their inability to process emotions. It’s a good idea to have humans on standby in case customers want to speak to a real person!
4. Inability to Make Decisions
As software, chatbots can’t make decisions. Therefore, it’s essential to properly program your chatbot to ensure it can deliver appropriate results and responses.
5. Always Room for Improvement
You’ll need to continually look for program updates to resolve loopholes that inevitably arise. The nature of AI chatbots is it will continue to learn, so you must always seek for ways to improve the service.
Best Chatbot Building Platforms
There are many building platforms available for chatbots. Taking advantage of these builders can help you easily create a chatbot.
Choose one of the following builders to create your own bot, depending on your needs and building environment:
- Converse.ai
- Motion.ai
- Octane AI
- Botsify
- IBM Watson
- Chatfuel
- Pandorabots
- Semantic Machines
- Microsoft Bot Framework
- Pypestream
- Engati
The Future of Chatbots
Trends in the online market and AI are giving rise to the chatbot. It is still a relatively new concept, but one that is set to dominate in the future.
Using one of these helpers on your website offers a wide range of benefits, which leads to increased conversion rates, happier customers and employees. On the other hand, if you don’t welcome these trends, you may get left behind as more innovative competitors overtake you.
Without the ability to track PPC performance and an agile approach to adopting new technology, your digital marketing efforts will falter. Marketers who consider chatbot technology with this view will undoubtedly be the ones to reap the rewards.