February 2020

So you have a chatbot, and you’ve been sending out messages to your audience.

How’s it going? Have you taken the time to look at your data and see what’s working wonders for your business versus what’s crashing and burning?

When you’re deploying any type of marketing campaign or effort, the one thing you don’t want to skip is the optimization phase.

Actually, I take that back… you don’t want to skip the analysis phase either. Both are equally important.

If you don’t have a chatbot, then it’s time to get one for your business. My favorite tool to use is ManyChat (very user friendly and easy to put sequences and flows together).

I want to focus on a few really key things you need to focus on optimizing in your chatbot to provide a better experience for the end user and a better experience for you as a business owner.

Let’s get into it:

Quick replies are prompts that your user can push that record a specific response and trigger a response from your bot. You put text in the quick reply, and the user chooses their response, triggering the rest of your flow to begin. If your replies are vague, consider changing them.

Actually, don’t consider it. Do it.

Chances are that your users will just be curious to see how your bot is going respond as opposed to really needing or wanting to click the quick reply.

Example: I recently saw a bot message that had two quick reply options.

Option #1: “OMG!!!??? 🤪🤪🤪”

Option #2: “Are you serious!! 🤯 ”

A few things about this: Your business needs accurate answers and data so that you can serve your audience to the highest ability. It’s cool to be quirky and trendy, but let’s not overdo it. Less is more.

Too many characters in a single quick reply makes for an ineffective and hard to comprehend bot. It also makes for a really long scrolling experience for the user, who will probably just get frustrated and move on.

Always make sure that your buttons and quick replies are short and sweet.

You need the data, right? Make it easy for the user to give it to you.

Have you ever been totally bombarded with a string of messages that you couldn’t keep up with?

That’s no fun.

Make sure your timing delays are nicely spaced out so your reader can actually read the messages you’re sending and respond accordingly.

Sure, sometimes tech happens and your delays are completely ignored, but do your best to make sure you keep the user experience in mind.

Keep an eye on your analytics and conversions and always keep your marketing goals in mind.

Is there a place in your funnel where you can push to a better offer?

What opportunities do you have to push to a high converting offer?

Can you downsell to a low dollar offer if someone doesn’t take your original offer?

Can you further engage users who frequently interact with your bot?

Really take the time to look at analytics and see how you can get more automated conversions through your bot.

If you don’t have an indoctrination sequence, then I’d strongly suggest that you get one. This is just a series of bot messages where you are introducing your brand to new users and offering them resources to segment them after they’ve subscribed. The segmentation piece is optional but strongly recommended.

If you already have an indoctrination sequence, evaluate it.

Are you really offering things that help you meet your marketing goals?

Examples:

• Your most helpful resources that the user must opt in to
• A low dollar guide, video training, or course
• An invitation to join you on a free discovery call

Are you properly segmenting your audience?

Example: Sending out a blog post via chatbot and then following up with, “How would you rate your level of expertise when it comes to with [insert your expertise here]?” The quick replies would be:

1. I’m a newbie!
2. I’m pretty good…
3. I’m a pro at this!

BAM! Now you know who you’re talking to and how you can help them!

I don’t think many people realize the difference between a button and a quick reply in Manychat.

Both allow you to link to external websites, give your users tags, apply logic conditions and so much more… but the MAIN thing is that buttons stay in the user’s chat log after they’re pressed and quick replies don’t. Another thing is that you can only do 3 buttons at a time, but you can do up to 11 quick replies, but that’s not important here.

So what does this mean?

Let’s say you want to conduct a survey though your chatbot. If you use buttons for the user to record their answer, they’ll have the ability to press not only that button multiple times, but the other buttons multiple times as well — leaving you with some jacked up data.

If you use the quick replies, they’ll get to choose one answer.

That’s it.

So just keep in mind, when you’re asking questions in your bot that you don’t want people changing the answer to, utilize quick replies instead of buttons.

Unpopular opinion: a lot of bot experts will tell you to not make it hard for people to unsubscribe. While I agree, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people reply to unsubscribe messages and say, “Help! I didn’t mean to unsubscribe!”

So what’s the solution?

Simple, when someone asks to unsubscribe, just reconfirm.

“Are you sure you want to unsubscribe?”

That’s it. Just reconfirm and if they want to go then they’ll say yes. No big deal.

Your tagging structure should be very similar to the tags you use in your email campaigns. You should know who is doing what within your bot sequences so that you can meet people where they’re at in their customer journey.

If you aren’t already using tags, you’ll want to start out with some general tags and then make subsets of more specific tags from there.

See below.

We all know that one of the major benefits of implementing a bot in your business is to automate FAQs and some customer service issues.

One thing that you’ll want to pay attention to is when you give people the option to talk to a human to expedite their issue.

Here’s the deal: even if the bot answers their question, if you give them the option, they’ll still most likely want to talk to a human.

If you’ve got a business where there are several scenarios that pop up in your customer service queue, you can expect their expectation to talk to a human to be even higher.

You should always have someone monitoring the conversations coming through your bot anyway, but if you have a smaller business you can probably automate your customer service completely.

If you do have a larger business, monitor the current conversations and adjust your bot’s replies to fit your customer’s needs. The main point here is to optimize your bot’s replies by what your previous customers have expected, and offer the option to ‘talk to a human’ at a later point (ideally after the bot has done all that it can do).

Chatbot and conversational marketing strategy should be treated just like your other marketing efforts. Make sure you’re looking at this list when you go to optimize your bot. You may even find other things that you can optimize!

#HappyBotBuilding