If not, the time is now, in 6 months Facebook messenger will be flooded and the open rates will definitely decrease. People will get used to messages from pages and the unsubscribe rates will increase. Didn’t convince you yet? Keep reading and maybe I will have changed your mind by the end of this post.

Ready? Let’s do this.

What are chatbots anyway?

In very simple words: Chatbots are messaging apps, which essentially allow businesses and brands to be online 24/7 providing customer support (e.g., instant responses, quick answers, complaint resolution). The beauty of chatbots is that they can fulfil a particular task like time-booking or pre-qualifying a lead or solve a customer service problem via natural-sounding conversation inside a messenger app.

Types Of Chatbots

Now, that you know the basics, let’s explore the different types of chatbots. Chatbots come in many shapes and sizes, which might make them very confusing and hard to understand sometimes. Luckily, thanks to amazing platforms like Manychat or Chatfuel, it’s very easy to build bots with great functionality without requiring any technical expertise. We will focus on those.

Marketing & Facebook chatbots

For marketers and small business owners, Facebook chatbots are the most promising ones, because that’s where most of their customers are. Facebook has recently come up with many cool ways to get people talking to your bot and you should definitely take advantage of that.

Engagement

Getting people to engage with your bot and leading them down your funnel is so much easier and simpler. You can ask the users about their preferences and get instant responses and based on that make more personalised offers. Due to the instant nature of bot interaction with your customers, it’s so much more engaging.

Drip Campaigns

Just like with email – you can drip-feed your subscribers valuable content over “sequences” by sending them content in bite-sized chunks. You can ask them questions inside those broadcasts and tailor your offering based on that.

Communication

What’s really cool is that at any point in time, you can hand over the bot-communication to a human. Your customer will have a seamless experience while you’re improving your results.

Analytics

You get to learn so much more about your customers than you can when they visit your website or read your emails. You can see in real-time how they interact with your bot. You can collect that data. Analyse-it. Iterate instantly and become better. Automatic Leads to Discovery (the FB app store for bots)

The great thing is that since Bots are like Apps were 10 years ago, then now is the perfect time to get one since Facebook has just released a bot Discovery section and is actively promoting bots that perform well 😉

But why make a bot? Sure, it looks cool, it’s using some super-advanced technology, but why should someone spend their time and energy on it?

It’s a huge opportunity. HUGE. Scroll down and I’ll explain.

Why Chatbots Are Such A Big Opportunity

You are probably wondering “Why does anyone care about chatbots? They look like simple text-based services… what’s the big deal?”

Great question. I’ll tell you why people care about chatbots.

It’s because for the first time ever people are using messenger apps more than they are using social networks.

Let that sink in for a second.

People are using messenger apps more than they are using social networks.

So, logically, if you want to build a business online, you want to build where the people are. That place is now inside messenger apps. This is why chatbots are such a big deal. It’s potentially a huge business opportunity for anyone willing to jump headfirst and build something people want.

But, how do these bots work? How do they know how to talk to people and answer questions? Isn’t that artificial intelligence and isn’t that insanely hard to do?

Yes, you are correct, it is artificial intelligence, but it’s something that you can totally do yourself.

Let me explain.

How chatbots work

Building a chatbot can sound daunting, but it’s totally doable. You’ll be creating an artificial intelligence-powered chatting machine in no time (or, of course, you can always build a basic chatbot that doesn’t have a fancy AI brain and strictly follows rules).

You will need to figure out what problem you are going to solve with your bot, choose which platform your bot will live on (Facebook, Slack, etc), set up a server to run your bot from, and choose which service you will use to build your bot.

There are tools with which you create platforms (like ChattyPeople, Chatfuel and ManyChat). You have to integrate the bot with the Facebook page (make sure you are an admin) and then start building Flows and Growth tools!

For the examples below I will use Manychat.

Make sure you are not violating any rules (for example the 24hours +1 for promotional messages)

Out of the box ways to use a chatbot:

1. Create quizzes – games

Chatbots are a good way to interact with your subscribers (and potential customers). Creating small quizzes is a fun way to communicate with them (make sure you ask their email to send more quizzes or the results ?). 

There are many types of quizzes you can create. You can create a custom field called “quiz score”, make sure you set it to 0 in the begging and increase by 1 after every correct question. After the last question, you will let them know the score they achieved!

The second type is to create multiple custom fields and increase the score of each one depending on the answers. In the end, you can inform them about the score they achieved in each field.  Here is a quiz we created for you.

Do you want to go one step further?? ⚽

Use the basketball and/or the football emoji as a quick reply. When they press it the emoji will appear, ask them to click on it and the fun will start! You can even set up a gift for everyone who scores above a certain number! The potentials are unlimited. Here is someone who created the Rock, Paper, Scissors Game

2. Improve the recruiting process

Recruiting people can be tricky. We always try to automate the process and make sure that we did the right choice. So we created a chatbot to help us with that. The main idea behind this is to give the recruiter some fields and ask him to evaluate the candidate from 0-5.

The score will be calculated and in the end, you can have an answer if the candidate is good enough for you.  Here is a chatbot to evaluate a candidate for a Growth Engineer position. You can use many variations of this, create a test for the candidate, for example, using the format we discussed above.

3. Send Coupons

Using coupons is very good to drive your sales. You can use Facebook Messenger for this. Either you want to send a link to your bot or you want to create ads using messenger as the destination or JSON bots will help you boost your sales by personalizing the ads.

Do you want to send unique coupon codes to your customers? 

You have to use Zapier and Coupon Carrier alongside Manychat in order to achieve that.

You have to upload the Coupons on Coupon carrier and create a zap that will assign a code every time a flow is triggered by the unique id of the user. After that, you have to update the custom field and send a message to your customer with the coupon. You can trigger the process by using the word coupon or using a button “coupon”.

4. Automate sales

You can create a fully automated sales process based on the option you give to your customers. You have to create a Custom Field => Price. You set the price to 0 and then you increase the price based on what your customer’s choices. You then have to add a free input to know the address and if they want to tell you something for the order.

We have created a test bot for you. (Unfortunately, it’s only a test don’t expect any pizza delivered to you? ). You can also give your customers more options (add salad, add a coke or whatever you want to cross-sell)

After that, you can create a zap to a google sheet where you will have all the data filled (size type of pizza, extra ingredients etc) and of course the delivery address. Furthermore, you can notify the admins once somebody completes an order.

5. Wifi Code flow

Ask people to subscribe in order to have the internet code

It works like this:

Have a little printed thing on every table in your cafe with a Messenger Code & a little explanation on how to scan them. Also, make sure to note it in the restaurant management platform. When they scan the code they get subscribed to the chatbot & you’ll tell them the Wi-Fi details. 

Afterwards, you can send more information or ask them to subscribe them to for example events. The only downside with this strategy is that people need the internet to scan the code. They can scan via smartphone and use the code on their laptops.

We use this image in our business cards:

6. Bots for lead generation

You used to have to ask people to sign up on your website or leave their contact information. With chatbots, you can generate leads and get them instantly hooked! You can send them a freebie straight to messenger inbox when they comment on a post in Facebook, start a conversation with your page, click on an ad or “send to messenger” button outside of Facebook on a website, blog post etc. 

A great example of how Josh Fechter collects leads by sending a growth hacking book to your Facebook messenger.

7. Time booking for service business

If you’re a service business like an instructor or coach – this is really for you. A great way you can collect warm leads is to lead them through a sequence that talks about your services and the way you like to work and once they’re warmed up, suggest booking a demo with you. 

At this point, your bot will share a Calendly link and BOOM you got yourself a nicely warmed up lead. What about Chatbots & webinars?

Before you had to send an email with a whole pitch to convince someone to attend your webinar. Now you’re just sending a message “Hey Max, would you like to join my webinar tomorrow?” And if they click yes you register them!

It’s super duper awesome.

Some of the coolest things:

1) One-click on a quick reply & you can register them for the webinar. I’m doing this with Zapier and Demio.

2)Send an automated reminder with Delay by Zapier 1 hour & 10 minutes before the webinar starts. That’s really cool because I know most people do broadcasts manually. Now you can use that time to engage with people who attended early.

3) A  bit more advanced, but when you have synchronized your chatbot with your ESP you can even send messages after your webinar based on if they attended or not

4) Send content out DURING your webinar to your subscribers.

5) Offline business loyalty program

Do you want to create a bot for your loyalty program?

The old school way you would give them a little card and stamp it every time they come, but what if they could collect points inside your chatbot and could send them follow-up reminders if they didn’t come for a while?

This is super powerful and can be used in so many ways. It  works like this:

1) You have a printed card behind the bar with a Messenger Code that they can scan after purchasing a coffee.

2) Every time they scan the code 1 point will be added to their “score” by using a custom field & an action

3) The 10th time they’ll get a message that the next coffee is on the house by showing the message to the barista. You can do this with a condition that will check if the score is greater than 9 or exactly 10.

4️) Reset the score or just continue and reward them at 10, 20, 30, 40 points. That way you’ll also get an overview of your most loyal customers.

Then…

After step 2 you subscribe to them to a sequence that will send a message after 2 weeks saying; “Hey {{First name}}, we noticed that you didn’t come by for a while” with maybe a small offer to make them come back. (watch out for sending promotional content here and give a possibility to opt-out from those reminders)

Every time they scan the code you unsubscribe them from that reminder sequence and subscribe them again to that sequence. That way the 2-week count will start over again. 

This could be really powerful and Loyalty Cards for a café are just one example for offline businesses. So we saw what chatbots are, some interesting facts and of course some ways to use them. There are not any limitations as long as you follow the rules, so make sure you take advantage of them.

Chatbots are here to stay.

Your customers are there, so make sure you come in touch with them!