Using chatbots for competitions and customer connections is fast becoming the norm as our lives increasingly play out over the internet.
While you may not be aware of chatbots just yet, you have definitely used one or at least seen one in use.
Chatbots help to streamline interactions between people and businesses, enhancing customer experiences and leaving business owners and staff time to focus on other aspects of the business.
Chatbots can also offer fun, engaging opportunities to run social media competitions that fall within the strict competition policy from Facebook and Instagram.
What are Chatbots?
Chat bots are artificial intelligence software applications used to conduct online chat conversations via text, email, websites, apps or Facebook Messenger.
As it can be very time consuming to respond to every client inquiry by hand, chatbots allow you to streamline conversation and information sharing to provide quality consumer interaction and connection while you focus on other things.
- If you’ve ever been on a Facebook page and a Messenger window has popped up with a message from the page, you’ve interacted with a chatbot!
- Have you ever been researching a product online and the website opens up a chat function for you to ask questions? Then you’ve interacted with a chatbot!
- If you have ever used voice commands to work your way through a call centre phone menu, you’ve also interacted with a chatbot!
Generally, there are two types of chatbots:
Task-Oriented Chatbots: These chatbots are single-purpose chatbot programs that focus on performing only one basic function. These chatbots generate automated but conversational messages to user enquiries and are often seen on business Facebook pages and websites to assist people with common FAQs like opening times. These are the most commonly used chatbots and the ones that we use to create customer connections and competitions!
Data-Driven Chatbots: These chatbots are often referred to as virtual assistants and are much more sophisticated as they can learn as they go. These chatbots can apply predictive intelligence to personalise interaction based on profiles, past behaviour and recommendations. Examples include Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa.
What Do They Do?
Chatbots are used to improve customer experience, allowing internal staff to focus on other business areas. With an intelligent chatbot, common but time consuming tasks can be automated to relieve the busy day to day pressures of consumer expectations.
At The Creative Collective, we mostly use chatbots for two main reasons: customer connection and social media competitions.
Customer Connection
Every time we set up a Facebook page or a website for a client, we like to include chatbot functionality so that they are best able to handle consumer requests and inquiries and provide a high quality service. On Facebook, we are able to set up:
- Automatic Welcome Message – When a potential client or customer clicks on your business page, they are automatically greeted by a Messenger popup, offering help or assistance if needed.
- Away/Out of Hours Message – If users interact with your message function outside of hours, an automated message is sent to let the user know regular opening times and that you’ll be in touch as soon as possible.
- Frequently Asked Questions – If users are seeking FAQ information such as your main offerings, opening times, location or contact details, you can set up a number of FAQs in Facebook so that users can simply click on the question they need answered and receive instant feedback to assist them.
- Follow Ups – You can also set up ‘follow up’ functions to allow your business to get in touch with users if they have either recommended or not recommended your page. You can also set up reminders if someone has booked in an appointment with you through Facebook.
Competitions
As Facebook and Instagram have such strict competition rules, most businesses are unaware that they are regularly using illegitimate competition formats. Any competition or giveaway that requires users to tag their friends in the comments for entry are actually not allowed and if Facebook finds you doing this, you risk having your page shut down.
To get around this problem, we have devised our very own style of ‘comment to bot’ competitions that have provided extremely positive results for our clients! These competitions involve the creation of a Facebook post that sits in the news feed and asks users to comment a specific word like ‘Enter’ in order to win a prize.
After they comment the specified word, Messenger automatically opens, asking the user for their details (e.g. phone number, email address) or sends them to a survey to fill out. All user information is collected by the bot and can then be exported and shared with our client at the end of the competition.
We have found these competitions to be incredibly useful, especially for businesses looking to boost brand awareness, grow engagement on Facebook and for those looking to expand a database that can be marketed to through email or other means in the future.
AND with broadcasts sent through Facebook Messenger generally receiving an 80% open rate, and a click through rate (CTR) of 4-10 times email marketing, you can trust that this strategy will yield much better results than other similar marketing activities.
But Aren’t Bots Bad?
You can easily understand how chatbots are mistaken for bots. Although the terms are very similar, they do in fact mean very different things.
Bots are automated programs that are often, but not always, used for malicious purposes such as scams or phishing. This term is linked to a history of hackers involving automated programs to cause havoc online.
However, chatbots do not share this history and do not have a reputation of being used for hacking purposes. Chatbots are conversational tools that can perform routine tasks much quicker than a regular human. Chatbots are generally well received as they help people find information quickly. They also allow business owners to focus on higher level strategic planning.
What is the Value of ChatbotS?
Chatbots are extremely valuable to business owners and customers alike. As our world is increasingly becoming more digitised, chatbots are playing a larger role in customer service and experience.
Chatbots allow businesses to connect with customers in a personal way without the time waste and expense of paying human resources. In this way, they are the perfect combination of personalisation and digitisation.
Note: Chatbots still need to be set up and managed, requiring a knowledgeable team member (or outsourced chatbot team) to keep an eye on everything. Human intervention remains a crucial part of this process.
What Systems are there?
At The Creative Collective, we use a chatbot system called ManyChat. This service allows you to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger, SMS and more, as well as integrating these bots with your website. At a more advanced level, you can integrate ManyChat with CRMs, allowing for targeted broadcasting. You can use these chatbots for a range of purposes, such as marketing and customer care.
For us, the platform’s key selling point is that it is user friendly and allows you to create quite complicated ‘flows’ relatively quickly. With no coding required, you don’t need to be a tech expert to learn the ropes either!
However, there are plenty of chatbots out there, including, but not limited to:
- ChatBot.com
- Freshchat
- Drift
- Chatfuel
- MobileMonkey
- Tars
- Tidio
Okay, Show Me Some Examples!
STELLAROSSA BERNOTH CENTRE — FACEBOOK CHATBOT COMPETITION
To celebrate and bring attention to the grand opening of Stellarossa Bernoth Centre, The Creative Collective were engaged in late 2020 to produce a Chatbot campaign on their brand new Facebook page. This campaign was live from November 27th — December 18th 2020. We gave away a $200 food and drinks voucher for the new store. This competition helped the new store grow an online presence and produce a client database for future campaigns.
In the competition period, we achieved:
- 676 new Facebook followers in 3 weeks (338% growth!)
- An approximate daily reach of 3000 Facebook users, with some days reaching well over 8000 users.
- 1,171 comments on the competition post
- 18,288 Facebook users reached with 1,802 engagements on the competition post
- 100% open rate of Facebook Messenger entry message
- 973 new newsletter subscribers
- 90.3% conversion rate from initial comment to full entry (this is amazing!)
ANGLICAN CARE — FACEBOOK CHATBOT SURVEY
Anglican Care engaged us to conduct a competition and consumer survey. The aim of the campaign was to target people over the age of 45, considering aged care in the next 2 years on the Mid North Coast, Newcastle or Central Coast regions.
To entice people to complete the short 2 minute survey, we launched a competition where entrants commented ‘enter’ on the competition post. From there a chatbot ensured they met the eligibility criteria before directing entrants over to complete the survey.
Our ChatBot was able to screen each individual for eligibility. This ensured each response was sourced from only those demographics that we determined were useful. Of these eligible users, 95% proceeded to completing the survey.
As part of this package, ad spend was allotted to the competition and brought in over 20,000 viewers through paid promotion. This resulted in over 600 users actively engaging in the post through reactions, comments and link shares. The post also received a total of 1,525 clicks.
FOOD & BREW — FACEBOOK CHATBOT COMPETITION
We were engaged by Food & Brew to create and manage a chatbot competition for them.
This competition received exceptional results including:
- Spent $240.38 over 17 days
- People Reached — 27.4 k — 17964 = organic (unpaid) + 11370 paid reach
- 2.9k post clicks 1.8k reactions shares + comments
- Messaging conversations started — 215
- Cost Per Messaging Conversation Started $1.12
- Page views — 2685 (up 634%) Page previews 57 (up 1325%)
- Page likes — 577 (up 1343%)
- Post reach — 28,796 (up 1119%) Post engagements — 9484(up 592%) Page followers — 601 (up 1403%)
The owner of Food & Brew has been very happy with the results, stating “the marketing at Food + Brew has been a big success, dinners this week are at record numbers!”
MISTY VIEW – FACEBOOK CHATBOT COMPETITION (Coming Soon!)
Sounds Great! Where To From Here?
If you like the sound of your very own chatbot competition or chatbot setup, get in touch! You can call, email or book a time to chat with one of our team members right now!
If you like the idea of a social media competition but aren’t sold on chatbots, check out our blog post about Gleam competitions.
To learn more about social media competitions and their rules, click here.
To view our extensive Social Media Competition Packages, click here.
If you’re seeking more information about our other services, check out some of our other recent blog posts.