Episode 3-50: Why You Should Care About… Chatbots

Hey you guys, Alex Branning, your marketing coach, here. I want to talk about chatbots today. Why you as an entrepreneur should care about chatbots. If you’ve been listening to my podcast, you’ve heard me talk about them, but many of you still aren’t using them. So my goal for this podcast episode is to encourage you and inspire you to take action and incorporate chatbots into your business.

Some of you will be able to use them as a marketing tool. Some of you will be able to save a ton of time by setting up a chatbot for your customer service. And some of you on the call are going to listen to this episode about chatbots, and your brain is going to start to imagine ways for you to use chatbots as a marketing tool, as a customer support agent, or even to automate some of the processes that you currently have for onboarding clients.

Are you excited? All right, let’s go. So what is a chat bot? The chat bot is an automated Facebook Messenger sequence or a predetermined conversation that you have with a prospect where you guide them to a desired outcome.

Now, the first reason that you should use a chatbot is because you can offer 24 seven customer support. As a business owner, you probably don’t have the time or capacity to constantly check your Facebook messages, right? That’s where chatbots come into play. Setting up your chatbot correctly will allow you to handle the majority of your customer support without you having to do anything. Not only can it offer support, but you can also use it to set appointments, make sales … You can accept payment on your chatbot now, it is crazy, and offer free quotes. All without ever having to check your messages or manually do anything.

It’s all about putting together a really good conversational sequence where you’re collecting the information that you need, where based on their answers you’re able to guide them into another fork in the road on the chat and bring them back and support them.

Now the second reason that you should use a chatbot is because it allows you to build a brand new list that you can engage with. As soon as someone messages your Facebook page, they are automatically subscribed to your chatbot. This allows you to send out Facebook messages and walk them through sequences just like you would through email. However, Facebook messages have a far superior open rate than emails, because Facebook messages show up right on the phone. And so we see open rates of anywhere between 80 to 95%, which is mind blowing. Email’s about 3%. And you know this, you get a lot of emails that you don’t even open. Now, Facebook messages, they’re at least seen, which is so much better than what we’re seeing on emails.

Now, the third reason, the third thing that I want to encourage you to look at when it comes to chatbots is there are so many different ways that you can use them to grow your business, not just support your business. You can set it up so that where your chatbot can automatically send a message to anyone that comments on a selected Facebook post. So for example, if you post a video online, now let’s say that you take my advice from the last episode where I talked about Facebook ads. You follow my video domino and you post a video on your Facebook page. Now that you’ve posted that video, it is a post on your page. You can select that post on your Facebook page and attach the comment growth tool to it, which means that ManyChat is going to listen and it’s going to … any comment that comes in, it will reply with the exact script that you tell it to reply with.

So it’ll send a message to every single person that comments on your video. Then depending on what your video is, if you are making an offer for an appointment, for example, if people comment on the video, your Facebook messenger can reach out to them and offer that free appointment. Or if you’re asking, if you’re making an offer for a quote, that initial message can start the conversation so that you can collect the information you need to give them a free quote.

If your video is about a product or an informational course, and they comment on that video, you can set up a growth tool so that when somebody comments on that video, they are sent a message to ask if they would like to move forward with buying the course. Is that amazing? There are so many fun and exciting ways to use chatbots. A lot of the entrepreneurs that I’ve talked to that have not yet started, it’s not that they don’t want to, it’s they don’t know how to. So I want to encourage you to start taking action.

You can go to chatbot101.com and grab my informational course, and if you go to chatbot101.com, there is an opter in there for a Free Five Day Build Your Own Chatbot. And I’ll walk you through the five steps needed to take action and build out a chatbot. Now if you decide, “You know what? I want to really go in on this, I want to figure out how this stuff works,” you have the option to also get my informational course where I go into a little bit more of the nitty gritty.

I give a whole bunch of templates and examples that you can click and import right into your ManyChat account. There’s a lot of different things that you can do there.

Now let’s go back to chatbots. One of the cool things with ManyChat is that you can actually integrate your chat button with Google Sheets. So what that means is that as people are answering questions in a conversational sequence that you’ve set up, that you can save their answers into a Google Sheet, adding them as a new row on a Google Sheet, for example, for a free quote for life insurance. You can store their name, their age, their gender, et cetera, on a Google Sheet.

Now you can take that information that’s saved in a Google Sheet, and you can add them in and add them into your Salesforce or other CRM that you have, so that now you have that information stored and you have it readily available in your Salesforce and you can make a quote and send it to them. Just like if you had gotten a lead from a referral. Is that amazing? Chatbots are so cool. They’re getting more and more advanced, they’re releasing a lot of of new functionality.

So keep following me. I will keep you up to date with what’s happening in the world of chatbots. If you need any help with this, reach out to me, AlexBranning.com/call. We can hop on a phone call real quick and I can walk you through some chatbot ideas that are going to help you grow your business. Talk to you guys later. I’m excited to see your chatbot.

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