From email to chatbot marketing – an upcoming and promising medium

Each marketing channel at a certain moment reaches a stage of exhaustion, increasing costs or reaching the maximum achievable level. The once greatly working channel is going to be exhausted. At the same time there are always new channels that are very promising. It is therefore important to follow these trends and to adapt the communication strategy to such new developments at an early stage. Of course, there are risks involved here, because at a very early stage. Email is a good example of a channel that is reaching its limit, while Chatbots are a new channel with lots of potential.

E-mail

Email has been functioning for years as a fundamental, extremely important communication channel for many companies. Email has the important characteristic that it can be used excellently to promote products on a large scale. However, it nowadays costs more and more money to figure out the email addresses of potential customers. Customers also feel less and less involved with this medium, fewer people open marketing emails and reaching someone’s inbox also has become more difficult.

And although email is still an important medium and produces results. This channel is simply used too much and is therefore flooded with marketing emails, and more and more email providers are also filtering emails with promotional content. But if email marketing is going down, what is a new alternative?

Chatbots

Chatbots offer a service that is driven by rules and sometimes also “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), the interaction runs through a chat interface. Chatbots can be used in a variety of ways, and can be used in any large chat product. For example, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, SMS etc.

Chatbots have been around for a while and working hard on perfecting this service. But awareness about this medium is also growing, especially since the launch of Facebook’s new Messenger platform that also supports Chatbots. The many possibilities of Chatbots should not be underestimated, this is the right time to be an early adjuster and to the benefit of this new channel.

5 advantages of Chatbots

Are you not completely convinced? Check out the following 5 reasons to get started with Chatbots on Facebook Messenger:

1. When someone approaches your Chatbot, you can send them messages via Facebook Messenger with almost no restrictions;
2. You can use user input to dynamically divide them into groups and adjust your content accordingly;
3. With Chatbots, you can set up automation workflows in the same way as you would with e-mail marketing automation;
4. At this moment the click-through rate and the engagement is very high. The chance of interaction is much higher via a Chatbot than if you have a spot in someone’s timeline;
5. Facebook has linked advertisements with Messenger, this means that when someone interacts with your advertisement, the contact with the person can be followed up directly in Messenger.

Use the Chatbots wisely

It is important that the Chatbot is used with moderation, so that people are clear about how often and with what kind of content you will contact them. Always give them the option of getting this content and how often they want to receive it. Give the users as much control as possible and personalize the content. Use the Chatbots wisely, otherwise people will be affected by the amount of messages and this has a counterproductive effect.

As with any other medium, the Chatbot must be used wisely and strategically. The success of the Chatbots will depend on it.