Chatbots have taken the marketing world by storm. They are offering A.I.-powered technology to companies, allowing them to provide more advanced customer care while monetizing their marketing efforts by pushing deals and promotions on demand. Unlike popular belief, creating a chatbot does not have to be a hard task that costs lots of money.To help you with your chatbot making endeavors, below, I’ve outlined the benefits of implementing a chatbot into your business and 10 tips for creating a successful chatbot.

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The benefits of implementing a chatbot.

• More conveniently reach your audience.
• Answer your customers’ queries.
• Increase your lead generation.
• Build brand awareness.
• Boost your sales.
• Send targeted content based on data gathered from conversations.
• Monetize your social media pages.

Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business

Creating a chatbot is not difficult, but creating one that is functional and unique can be challenging. The 10 tips below will help you create a chatbot that speaks to your audience and delivers the messages that you originally intended, helping you to push your audience through your sales funnel efficiently.

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1. Use a chatbot-making platform.

• It works seamlessly with Facebook Messenger and comments
• You can push offers and deals to customers on demand
• It recognizes variations of your keywords
• It can take orders directly from Facebook Messenger and comments
• It integrates with all the major payment systems
• It supports numerous CMS platforms and business categories

2. Define your goals and expectations.

3. Give your chatbot a unique name.

Don’t let your chatbot get lost in the growing chatbot crowd. When thinking about a name think about your chatbot marketing. More and more companies are implementing chatbots, and if yours does not have a unique name, it will not be remembered or found online. Giving your chatbot a unique name will ensure your customers can search for it easily.

Related: Make Chats With Chatbots Work

4. Approach your customers with your bot.

• Create an effective greetings message.
• Incorporate a clearly positioned “Get started” button.
• Tell your customers how you can help them with a welcome message.
• Use buttons on your Facebook page and website.

Related: 7 Ways Chatbots Can Benefit Your Marketing Strategy

5. Create a natural conversation flow.

Make sure your bot is conversational! Conversational bots make the interaction between your chatbot and your audience more open, allowing you to understand your customer’s needs better and gather more valuable data. The whole point of your bot is to answer your audience’s questions. Therefore, be sure to not get in the way of the conversation, on the contrary, facilitate it.

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6. Start small and simple.

• Keep its communications concise and understandable.
• Don’t use jargon to communicate with customers.
• Remember that your bot is representing your brand and its products.

Your bot is currently in its infancy; it doesn’t need to pretend to be something it is not. By starting small and keeping your bot simple, you can learn from your audience’s behavior and slowly develop new versions of it with more functionalities.

7. Evaluate and optimize your bot regularly.

• Determine what you need to optimize it for
• Focus on optimizing your chatbot based on your goals
• Establish the best ways in which you can drive your audience to your desired outcome

8. Unveil one feature at a time.

Aside from the fact that you need to perfect each of your chatbot’s features individually before launching them to the world, it would also be overwhelming for your audience to be faced with that much information in one go. For maximum effect, unravel one feature at a time, when customers need them.

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9. Figure out which data you want to gather.

• Ask for your customers’ zip code if you need to know their location.
• Gather key learnings about their shopping preferences to push relevant information in your next interaction with them.
• Ask them about their eating, shopping, or exercise habits to push the right offers and promotions to them in the future.

10. Stay up-to-date with your competitors.

• Things they are doing well that you could implement into your own chatbot strategy.
• Things they are doing badly so that you don’t make the same mistakes.
• Any innovative features they are using that you are not yet aware of.

Launching a simple, easy to use, easily accessible, and efficient chatbot is the best and most innovative way you can reach your audience today. Not only this, by providing them with a conversational chatbot that has a bit of personality you can be sure they’ll be coming back for more.