When it comes to digital marketing, many businesses often forget about what they need to do when the influx of potential leads come calling?

Will there be anyone there to meet them at the gate? If you’re a busy business owner, then maybe it’s something you haven’t considered. After all there’s the day to day running of your business to take care of. Can you afford to be manning your phone all day, responding to emails, checking your messages, giving quotes,  managing the questions they’ll want to ask?

It all takes manpower and perhaps that’s something you don’t have, or can’t afford to put in place. But you can solve this problem with a chatbot.

Chat apps are the future. We chat with our family and friends and we’re used to having them respond instantly. Because of this trend, we’re now conditioned to expect instant responses with we engage with a business.

Chat marketing is a marketing channel that connects brands with customers over messaging platforms like Messenger, SMS, and other channels. Chatbots are self-help tools for establishing and improving communications. They simulate real-time conversations with potential clients. Businesses involve the customer in direct one-on-one conversation, which help them to deliver ultra-personalized content like product recommendations, shipping notifications, targeted product launches, and more. Chatbots can be ‘trained’ to answer customer questions and direct them where they want to go.

As a consumer, it’s beyond frustrating to find that there could be several business days before a simple issue can be resolved, or a query answered. An automated “no-reply” email can send a potential customer scurrying off to look elsewhere. Businesses can use chat marketing to improve their customer experience, to generate more sales and build a deeper rapport with customers. The
ability to proactively interact with customers means that chatbots allow your customers to easily interact with you.

60% of the most frequented apps are chat apps. And the numbers, when comparing Chat Marketing to other leading channels, speak for themselves:

• Chat boasts 85% open rates, while email’s open rates are a meagre 20%.
• Chat’s engagement rates are consistently 40%, while display ads provide a mere 1% click-through rate.
• Chat’s conversion rates are solidly 10%, while email ekes out 4% conversion rates.
  

In other words, Chat Marketing outperforms the next leading digital marketing channels by staggering numbers.

Acquiring new customers is only part of the journey. Retaining customers is not only easier than finding new ones, but it accelerates profitable growth. Customers, especially new ones, are fickle, impatient, demanding and particular. They want their interaction with you to be satisfying, and if it is, they’ll stay onboard. If not, they’ll go elsewhere. With the development of chatbots,  businesses are seeing a revolution in customer care service and retention.

Chatbots are always there. Because they gather data, they can be trained to answer any questions you may have before purchasing, or provide follow-up customer service after purchase. If there are questions that can’t be answered, then they can hand you over to a customer service team member.

It’s far easier to scale and train support bots than it is to hire new team members and have them standing by 24/7. Chatbots can be trained accordingly as your business grows.

Chatbots can be used as a booking facility. They can create appointments, change and cancel them, send reminders and more.

By using data from your customers, they can personalise special events like birthdays and anniversaries by sending appropriate messages and greetings.

Chatbots can conduct surveys to help make their chopping experiences better. They can use customer data to keep them informed of upcoming promotions, new products and services and much more.

Chat Marketing reaches customers better, it achieves more results, and it’s more observable than any other channel. It takes the guesswork out of online marketing, so your business can focus on what’s important – doing business with your customers!

Chat marketing  improves customer experience, generates more sales and builds a deeper more lasting rapport with customers.

The number of businesses using chatbots has grown exponentially. The use of chatbots attached to Facebook’s Messenger increased by almost 300% from 2016 to 2017. By the year 2020, 80% of businesses will want to use chat messaging technology. These statistics confirm that chatbots represent the new generation in technology.

No more waiting for the right time to incorporate them into your business marketing strategy.

The time is now!