3 Important Tips to Combine Your Email Marketing and Chatbots

Chatbots have been massively taking over the business world. Businesses can quickly increase engagement and, with it, improve conversions. 

This digital communication function is effective on its own but if you pair it with other marketing channels such as email marketing, chatbots have massive potential for increasing conversions.  Counting from May 2022, in the last 12 months, 67% of the customers across the globe have interacted with a chatbot at some point. 

With chatbots and email marketing integration, you can experience even better results. They can be used to gather email contacts, automate the email list segmentation, warm up the chat leads, and improve customer services. 

So, chatbots have multiple benefits and use even when they are used in cohesion with another marketing channel, emails. 

We will go through these aspects in detail, beginning with a short introduction to chatbots and how we can leverage chatbots and email marketing for better outcomes. 

What are chatbots? 

Chatbots are software capable of having a conversation with a human, typically to help complete specific tasks or address common questions and problems.  

Their service can cover multiple things, starting from functional to fun, and it could live in any leading chat product like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Text Messages, etc.   

One of their main goals is to increase digital customer engagement and improve customer experience.  

There are two types of chatbots: 

• Scripted – whose behavior is determined by rules
• Intelligent – which are built with artificial intelligence techniques

According to a Gartner study, 70% of the global interactions will happen with chatbots at the front. And this is due to the fact that chatbots appeal to modern-day workers and customers. 

Examples of chatbots 

Chatbots can be used in many different industries and areas of business. With bots, the possibilities are endless. 

Let’s take a look at a few ways how companies use chatbots: 

• Newsbots –tell the user whenever something interesting happens 
• Scheduling bots – send scripted messages to arrange meetings 
• Weather bots – provide weather information when asked 
• Grocery bots – help the user to pick out and order groceries 
• Personal finance bots – help the user to manage their money more effectively 

How to create a chatbot? 

The time you’ll spend on building a chatbot depends on what you plan to use it for and how sophisticated you want it to be. As they provide a unique value to the business, chatbots must be built with the best-in-class features consistent with AI, NLP, Machine Learning, and other advanced technologies. 

The difference between simple and complex chatbots is: 

• Simple chatbots: They use a preprogrammed database composed of keywords and corresponding responses to moving a conversation along. This type of chatbot doesn’t use any artificial intelligence. It simply follows a script of sorts, sending the preprogrammed responses when the associated keyword shows up in conversation. 
• Complex  chatbots: These use machine learning to understand different inputs better and find the right solution in real-time. They are more capable of understanding varied inputs and even accounting for spelling errors and different permutations of the same request. In addition, they provide more natural outputs. 

If you plan to build a simple chatbot, you can even do it yourself, but if you want to take it up a notch and use it for something more complex, then you should definitely hire an expert. 

If you decide to do this on your own, several platforms can help you create chatbots that don’t require a ton of technical knowledge.  

Take the following three platforms as an example: 

• Recast.ai 
• Mobile Monkey 
• Chatfuel

Combining chatbots with email marketing 

Email is still one of the highest converting marketing channels there is. However, it can be very time consuming to send the same general email manually. That is why some brilliant mind has come up with this amazing combo – chatbots and email marketing. 

Some of the many advantages of using chatbots and email together are:  

• Customers can share your product on Facebook Messenger  
• Having more access to your customers 
• Approaching people that use Messenger more than they check their email  
• Bringing people back to your site 
• Chatbot popup attract the attention of people and gets them to enter an email 

Email marketing is said to be one of the most cost-effective marketing channels; still, we are not able to use it effectively. At a time when one in five email campaigns are not optimized for mobile devices, businesses are missing out on a big opportunity here. 

Four out of five marketers say they are ready to leave social media, a must-have marketing tool today, rather than email marketing. We can easily realize how vital email marketing is for marketers and to gain business organically.

Chatbots and email marketing can bring wonders to a business, provided they are leveraged correctly. So, here are some tips for executing a marketing campaign combining chatbots and emails.

How can we leverage chatbots and email marketing?

1. Driving customer to your email

Email marketing is dependent upon a customer to check the email and open your email willingly.  

You can’t expect the chatbot to make the customer read the email, but you can use it to attract their attention. 

Even though 99% of us check email every day (according to DMA Insight), people tend to have too many emails in their inbox, and they can easily skip yours. 

Chatbots are a great choice to engage consumers via smartphone popups. 

They will help the users to remember the name of your company so they won’t think of your email as one of the many spams they receive. This gets them to expect to hear from you. 
“Once you get their attention, it is up to you to dazzle them with a killer subject line and email content. In case you need help, you can always resort to professionals,” suggests Asiya Patton, head of marketing for Get Good Grade.

2. Enhancing customer service

The benefit of integrating chatbots and email marketing is that you can easily redirect your customers and visitors to a self-reliant and automated customer service system. 

After sending an email that introduces your product or has any other topic, you can ask the reader to connect with a live chatbot for further assistance. This provides them with instant access to a helpline. 

This way, a chatbot can become a regular part of your customer service team by providing some basic information. 

Now that your emails and chatbot are connected, you can also use the latter to send personalized messages to the customer when they revisit. 

Use chatbots for sending messages such as: 

• Hey (name)! Glad you ordered (the product). I just wanted to let you know that it was shipped out this morning and should be arriving in three to five days. For more details and the tracking number check your email. Have a great day! 
• Hey (name)! How is (the product) working out for you? Do you have any questions about it? If you have some time, check your email for a feedback survey – it’s worth 15% off your next purchase! 

You can even add a little personalization by adding something like this: 

• And it looks like your weather today is great – hope you enjoy it! 

You can also include a link to a chatbot support platform, once your customer has purchased a service or a product. This will help them to feel that there is always someone out there who can help them. 

There will be no more waiting for office hours to give you a call. Your customer service will be on the patrol 24/7. 

Whenever the customers need some general information, the chatbot can be there for them. 

You just need to pay attention to how they speak. Maintain linguistic continuity by using the same particular tone in your emails, on your website, and for the chatbot. For some extra help in this department don’t hesitate to use a list research paper writing service and always proofread the intended copy for chatbots with Grammarly.  

3. Building up a subscription list

Another way to combine chatbots and email marketing is using them to grow your subscription list. You can program your bot to collect all the necessary information from the users so that they can receive all the important news from you via email. 

Sarah Scott, an SEO specialist at DesignWizard explains, “This may be one of the easiest strategies to implement the chatbot because you’ll have one simple goal – get new leads to sign up for an email list.” 

The conversation can be triggered when a user likes your page on social media such as Facebook. Then the bot can ask for further details like subscriber’s email address, gender preference, areas of interest, preferred frequency, etc. 

Some of the messages the bot can send are: 

• Thank you for showing interest in our page! Would you like to subscribe email list and be the first one to know about all exclusive news and promotions? 
• Which content types would you like to receive: promotions, discount information, company news, helpful articles? Pick as many as you like. 
• Please let us know your email address. 
• Thanks for sharing the information! You’ll see an email from us as soon as we have something interesting for you. Have a great day! 

All of this information will be then transferred to the email database where you can access it and use it for sending marketing emails based on the users’ preferences. 

As you can see, this is an extremely easy way to collect valuable information, grow your subscribers, and extend the reach of your email marketing. 

Some Final Thoughts:

Email marketing is a powerful way to reach out to your customers and get them interested in your products and so are the chatbots. The above-mentioned tips have shown you how easily and smoothly can you connect the two for the ultimate result.  

By using them together you can automate your business on an entirely different level. We all must admit that chatbot technology is here to stay so there is no reason why you shouldn’t combine it with your email marketing efforts and grow a successful business.