Tag Archives: chatbots

Twitter DM Cards and Chirpify – Pushing Chatbots to Meaningful Conversation

Last week Twitter announced a new Direct Message Card for advertisers. The card allows brands to create ads with up to four different prompts that can be used to kick-start conversations on a specific topic, with the goal of helping brands start a private chat with customers. Having developed chatbots since 2011, we are excited to see Twitter’s continued investment in making chatbots more accessible to marketers and customers alike.

If you aren’t already familiar with the new Twitter Direct Message Cards, they are specially designed ads that prompt people to select a given reply from a menu of choices within the ad. From this response, a personal conversation will begin in Twitter’s Direct Message tab. In the case of the Patron Tequila ad below, a person selecting one of these four responses will engage a bot in a Direct Message conversation with the bot suggesting cocktails based on their menu choice.

The new DM Card, according to Twitter, will help businesses drive discovery both through promoted tweets and organic sharing.

Discovery

Which brings me to my first point about the evolution of chatbots. While Twitter’s DM Card seeks to address one area that chatbots have traditionally struggled — Discovery — Chirpify has long had a solution to this issue. Specifically, we’ve been driving chatbot discovery and engagement through the use of social triggers that can be used in any medium – from TV advertising to billboards; megatrons to email – that causes an immediate conversion opportunity from offline marketing to brand chatbots. While the Twitter DM Card helps elevate chatbots within the Twitter environment, Chirpify can elevate chatbots across marketing channels, in the process growing customer awareness, engagement and conversion. And, once people have converted with Chirpify, future conversion is seamless; people can stay in the Twitter (or other social media/messaging) context in which they are already operating.

Loyalty Drives Engagement

MarketingLand compares the new Twitter DM Card to Moviefone in which users “dial 1 for…” and the bot responds with content based on that topic. While this approach may engage people who are intrigued by the multi-choice ad, it will be important to create content that is viewed as a true value exchange for participation. A proven way to do this is to connect the person’s social ID to the loyalty program or CRM database to gain a deeper understanding of who the person is your chatbot is interacting with and use that data to further personalize your content and/or offers.

Connecting your chatbot and loyalty program is an ideal approach for two important reasons:

  1. It allows you to identify customers individually and in aggregate
  2. Provides you the opportunity to offer customers loyalty program points or other valued rewards in exchange for their participation.
This value exchange is critical to chatbot adoption and long-term success and in the process also provides brands with significant data that informs the ROI of their chatbot efforts.

Chirpify Marketing Chatbots

The Chirpify engine provides leading brands like Marriott, La Quinta, and Columbia Sportswear with chatbot abilities to engage and convert customers and calculate ROI of social media and messaging efforts. Critically, these organizations have linked the Chirpify engine to their loyalty programs, driving greater:

  1. Engagement and participation
  2. Rates of conversion
  3. Loyalty
  4. Spend per visit
  5. Frequency of spend

Increasing Spend – ROI

Indeed, Chirpify’s retail customers have found that people who connect their social ID and loyalty program account buy twice as frequently as non-connected members. And Chirpify’s hotel customers found that connected members spent 75% more than the average member in a given year. They also had 2X more purchases than the average member in the same time period.

The ChirpBot has been growing in sophistication for years now, with complex rules based logic, such as geo-fencing, frequency of participation, moderation, and responding to people in their native tongue. Ready to put the Chirpify chatbot experience to work for your brand and customers? Contact the experts at Chirpify today. To make it convenient, simply chat with the ChirpBot. Or, you can always contact us to schedule a conversation.

Facebook Messenger Bots and Your Marketing Roadmap

5 Key Considerations for Marketing Bot Success

facebook bots

According to stats shared by Facebook at its annual F8 conference, more than 60 billion messages are sent per day through its two chat products, WhatsApp and Messenger. That’s three times the number of traditional SMS text messages sent per day. Couple that with the facts that Messenger has 900 million monthly users and over 50 million companies are on Facebook itself, and the idea of facilitating real-time communication between people and brands via Messenger crystallizes quickly.

Hence Facebook’s announcement of the Messenger Platform which now provides brands with APIs to create their own natural language bots that can communicate with people for sales, service, and more via Messenger. Having helped grow this market space for years now, I can tell you that we are fans of this announcement as the marriage makes great sense or marketers.

As illustrated by the figures above, Facebook Messenger is a natural platform for chatbots because it is trusted by both consumers and brands for conversation and conversion. As consumer attention moves from social networks to private 1:1 communications, it’s becoming imminently important for brands to have a presence in the new dark social paradigm.

However, simply having a presence is not enough. Marketing organizations really need to think through and build several key considerations into their chatbot roadmaps. Specifically:

1. Utility & User Experience: While enabling consumers to engage with your natural language bot is a step forward in user experience, organizations should challenge themselves to create a better experience driven by the utility that modern consumers demand, and by which they measure today’s brands.

For brands to be successful engaging consumers with chatbots, they will need to connect the interface to meaningful experiences, back end business processes, and consumer programs that already exist within the organization.

2. Loyalty: Loyalty programs are an ideal example of an existing program designed for utility as program members can engage deeply inside messaging apps. Providing this level of utility allows your most loyal customers to interact with the brand in ways that are meaningful to them and encourages a symbiotic relationship with points and/or other rewards in exchange for participation.

3. Conversion: One of the commonly cited hurdles of chatbots is that they are reactive in nature and attempts to be proactive can come off as pushy or trying too hard at best. Chirpify helps brands with this issue by allowing marketers to activate offline media like television, events and in-store calls-to-action to conversion using chat, thus increasing the effectiveness of all channels involved.

4. The Right Mix of Automation and Moderation: Automating 1:1 consumer marketing communications and conversion inside messaging apps like Messenger can be a boon to your marketing efforts. However, as I shared earlier, it is important that brands determine their strategy for balancing personalization empowered by a smart rules-engine with human moderation backed by automation.

For example, a brand may choose to let a bot interact with a consumer if they are activating a campaign call-to-action to enter a contest. While brands may elect to moderate conversations that require greater knowledge (e.g. past transaction history with the brand) and personalization, such as a request for a hotel upgrade.

5. Data: I mentioned backend systems above, but it’s worth its own callout as it is really important to tie chat identity, demographics, and other first party data to email and other information in your CRM and/or marketing database. Being able to connect the dots on this information not only gives your team more extensive knowledge of your customers but also serves to provide a significant competitive advantage.

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new interface – especially one that is as disruptive as this. Yet, I encourage marketers to think about Messenger Platform bots (and chatbots more generally) as an opportunity to build a customer experience focused on utility that can convert. Brands across industries and client types can benefit by thinking about existing, internal programs such as loyalty that are a natural fit for extending customer relationships to maximize customer lifetime value.