Why Every Marketing Team Should Consider Chatbots

Marketing teams everywhere are racing to cater to as many consumers as possible, yet most of them are dismissing the idea of investing in chatbots because they think these AI assistants were merely fads that long ago fizzled out of style.

In reality, however, chatbots can offer marketing teams an easy way to connect directly to customers without having to break the bank and are seriously worthy of your consideration if you’re brainstorming modern marketing techniques. 

Chatbots are continuing to evolve at a breakneck pace, too, so don’t make the foolish mistake of thinking that yesterday’s unimpressive programs are somehow representative of what modern chatbots can do. As you’ll come to see, these chatbots are becoming so advanced that they’ll soon be fooling consumers and marketers alike en masse.

Here’s why every marketing team should consider chatbots, and how these intelligent, helpful little robots are coming to redefine modern e-commerce operations. 

1. Customers love instant gratification 

Perhaps the foremost reason you should consider chatbots is that modern marketing initiatives are really just arms races in the pursuit of consumer attention spans. In order to sell just about anything in this day and age, you must be able to cut through the noise with an effective signal capable of making users feel directly spoken to.

Recommended: 5 Ways to Use Chatbots for Marketing and Sales

This is where chatbots come in, as these helpful robot assistants have proven themselves to be quite adept when it comes to bolstering the instant gratification that customers enjoy when using your web page.

As a matter of fact, young consumers, in particular, are going crazy for chatbots because of the instantaneous nature of the communication they offer. 

A recent analysis in Forbes breaks down how chatbots and their ability to meet the millennial need for instant gratification are becoming an essential part of most e-commerce operations. To put it simply, customers want someone to respond to them whenever they have an issue, and in the digital age young consumers in particular demand nearly-instantaneous gratification whenever an issue arises.

These customers, who came to age in digital environments where the answers to their questions were just a Google search away, now like chatbots because they offer them quick answers when the shopping process goes awry. 

2. Cut the costs of marketing 

Any online marketing team that doesn’t consider enlisting chatbots solely for their ability to woo over young consumers is failing in their effort to build and sustain a next-generation audience of customers.

Outside of offering your customers instant gratification, chatbots are also a necessary part of modern marketing because they free up your team, which will have to spend less time answering simple yet important queries from confused users.

In the future, marketing teams will be able to spend effectively no time at all answering customer questions, as that entire process will be automated as chatbots continue to become more impressive. 

Marketing teams, with the help of a web design agency,  often survive on the basis of how cost-effective they are, too, so marketing professionals worried about their growing budget should consider the help of some automated companions if they want to lower the costs of doing business. 

In the era of automation, finding a way of using software to cut the costs of doing business can be a commercial lifesaver, so chatbots are becoming increasingly relied upon by marketers who want to have a huge impact without having to hire a huge team.

Perhaps future marketing teams will only be composed of a handful of human experts and a plethora of intelligent robot assistants. 

3. Chatbots are becoming more human 

Many marketing professionals continue to dismiss chatbots as being unsuitable because they’re creepy and remote. After all, who wants to speak to a cold machine instead of a warm human employee? These marketing teams have shunned the idea of chatbots because they feel that marketing needs a human element which can’t be managed by a machine.

The crucial mistake of this viewpoint is that it wrongly views chatbots as replacements for human workers when in reality they should be viewed as supplements to human expertise. 

In reality, chatbots are becoming more human at an astonishing rate, with modern chatbots being capable of warmly greeting customers and acting as if they were flesh and blood experts.

Furthermore, chatbots are getting useful at helping employees, too, and will soon be able to help answer more technically-complex questions that arise from workers instead of customers.

Consumers increasingly report that they want chatbots that feel human rather than look human, too, so don’t fret too much about the role of the human marketer in the future of the industry. 

This is likely because modern users trust AI but still have some cultural misgivings about handing a robotic machine their data on a silver platter. Users will thus hesitantly but continuously embrace chatbots in the near-future as they grow more complex yet trustworthy.

As long as marketers realize that chatbots are a great way of supplementing human expertise instead of replacing it entirely, they’ll quickly discover that customers are happy to talk to a robot when something goes wrong. 

Chatbots are excellent tools for marketing professionals to wrap their heads around because they’re so diverse, too, meaning just about any industry can apply the chatbot model to their existing business plan in order to digitize their operations.

The top industries that use chatbots are obviously marketing and e-commerce, but human services, media, and finances can also be upended by the introduction of clever software that can disguise itself as a human as it seeks to answer the questions of frustrated users. 

Chatbots are going to get more emotional and responsive as time goes on, so marketing professionals who deny the power of this innovation are only doing themselves a disservice by shunning chatbots as they increasingly take hold in the mainstream.

Every marketing team should consider chatbots because they drastically help cut down on the costs of doing business, help immediately gratify consumer desires, and free up your human experts to spend more time on important issues rather than answering simple questions from users.  

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