How chatbots and conversational marketing are changing the landscape for marketers, and when is the best time to use either channel?
The rise of chatbots has created a new marketing channel called conversational marketing. From a business perspective, it’s an ideal way of personalizing the buyer journey to serve conversations when a buyer is seeking information. From a marketers perspective, it’s how we serve content to the right person at the right time. And from a user perspective, it’s a two-way conversation that provides information in bite-sized chunks when we need something.
So are chatbots ethical? And if you know it’s a chatbot, does that make it alright? Have Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant changed people’s perspective on chatbots? And how are chatbots evading other channels?
Apple revolutionized the cell phone and music industry when users became fascinated with touch screens that could hold thousands of songs in their pocket with the iPhone. While Siri wasn’t the first chatbot, it certainly paved the way for how humans wanted to interact with a chatbot. It became clear that humans want to ask questions in ways that we normally talk with each other, thus creating conversational marketing. It also begs the answer that chatbots are ethical when users, humans, start the conversation.
Amazon’s Alexa removed conversational marketing from our pockets and place it into our homes. It provided an opportunity to interact with a chatbot at times we didn’t know we needed it most: morning news while we get ready, dinner recipes for the main ingredient we have on hand, setting reminders to help our future selves, and the list goes on.
It’s not just the Apple, Amazon, and Google’s of the world that embrace chatbots and conversational marketing.
It’s rare to visit a website these days without a conversation window popping open within 5 seconds and a chatbot asking to help. But it’s also these same chatbots using conversational marketing in a way that can seem obtrusive.
Perhaps it’s because we, as humans, didn’t ask the question or seek out the chatbot as we would on our phones or in our homes. Imagine if Alexa started asking you questions throughout the day! How obnoxious to have a chatterbox chatbot interrupting you... But somehow corporations and marketers think it's okay to interrupt a person's buying experience on the web? It has created a one-way conversational marketing channel, like Intercom, in hopes that the user will reply to turn into a two-way conversation. And sometimes it works.
When it’s the right message on the right page, it can work. Conversational marketing works best when questions are initiated (sound familiar?), and having a chatbot to provide support by answering a question (vs letting me know a human will get in touch with me during normal business hours) is like gold these days!
It doesn’t work when a chat box opens up the millisecond a page is loaded and becomes the complete opposite of being helpful. It doesn’t work when a chatbot interrupts an entire page, ultimately annoying users so much that they bounce instead of engaging with the landing page they were originally seeking.
Let’s look at another layer of chatbots used in email marketing.
Is it ethical to create personalized responses that answer a company’s frequently asked questions? From a business perspective, it’s the fastest way to scale and provide support to common questions, such as common questions about price or product features. But is it ethical if users don't know they are engaging with a chatbot? Does it matter who answers our questions - human or chatbot?
In a recent conversation with my husband, I offered the perspective that chatbots help businesses qualify leads quicker and weed out unqualified leads in a way that is most convenient for the user. Such a scenario would be sending an email campaign to thousands of people and using a chatbot to respond to their frequently asked questions instead of bombarding your sales team with leads that aren’t quite ready to buy yet. But if they are ready to buy, it’s important to either offer an online checkout or engage with a human quickly. And that engagement usually sounds like “Hi, Julie isn’t available at this time, but she asked me to get in touch with you so I can answer any additional questions you may have…” Of course, Julie is the chatbot in this scenario. While I can’t answer if this scenario is ethical or not, I do know that I appreciate being helped at the time I needed help, even if that meant getting passed from a chatbot to a human.
Another prevalent chatbot experience is within an app, which has also become quite a human-like experience. Such as financial apps that allow me to ask if I have enough money to buy a house or even a coffee. Is it really a human behind the curtain calculating my budget within seconds? The support model within apps has also become ubiquitous for providing links to articles that may answer my question instead of waiting to chat with a human.
No matter the chatbot channel or conversational marketing, it has changed the lives of marketers everywhere. It has added another layer of personalization by receiving leads through channels beyond a phone call. This layer provides additional workflows to identify questions and keywords to tag the correct article. This layer also requires marketers to think beyond just search and display marketing on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Now marketers need to rank in voice search when customers are looking for pizza delivery that has the best alfredo sauce or the best clothing subscription service.
Is it enough to bid on the highest keyword? Regardless of how you feel about Google, it’s easy to agree that Google has kept its SEO a secret. Google is constantly optimizing their algorithm for businesses to rank in favor of the consumer, us. Back in the day when Google identified keyword stuffing and link placements were causing some sites to rank higher but didn’t provide relevant information, Google changed its wizard-of-oz algorithm in favor of the consumer. Thus moving our online experience to relevant content that requires businesses to put forth the effort to actually provide legitimate content that answers specific questions and changes how we find information online.
The question now for marketers is how do we get products and services to rank for voice search? Is SEO still the way or will it evolve into Adwords for chatbots?
The interface of marketing will continue to grow as technology expands its way into our daily lives. As consumers, we don’t know what’s coming, what we’ll feel comfortable using, and if we are finding genuine information or irrelevant advertisements. Chatbots are here to stay. They will continue to change interfaces and may even be in a robot-form soon. As a marketer, we need to remember how we want to interact and have the right user experience as we create it for others. Ask yourself: how can we enable a more ethical interaction using chatbots, voice search, virtual assistants, hands-free devices, and the interwebs? Leave a comment if you've had an interesting experience with chatbots or conversational marketing. Check out my next blog where marketing can take a play out of the sales email playbook.
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