Are Chatbots a Good Idea? – DSP 237

Graham and Derek break down the benefits of chatbots. They discuss the usefulness of popular marketing tools like these and what place they have in brick and mortar businesses like float centers. They might be marginally useful, but there are almost definitely better things to focus on if a float center is having difficulty with marketing.

Buy your tickets for the 2018 Float Conference!

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Schedule a FloatHelm Tour

What is a Drip Campaign?

An Intro to Periscope Marketing Campaigns

(Thanks for the shoutout guys!)

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Alright, welcome again to another day of The Daily Solutions podcast. I am Graham.

Derek: I am Derek.

Graham: That’s right, no Ashkahn again for today.

Derek: Why is that Graham?

Graham: Well, funny you asked. We have an upcoming event, a little thing known as the float Conference. You know, 700, 800 people from the float industry around the world gather here in Portland, Oregon, and Ashkahn is the main host of the event. So, he is hard at work getting a bunch of conferency things ready.

Derek: And organizer and negotiator of hotels and catering.

Graham: Yeah, yeah, all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes that you didn’t even know when running an event. Most of that is Ashkahn running around like a madman doing it.

We have another marketing question for you today, because Derek is one of the marketers for Float On. He actually runs most of our social media in addition to doing a lot of the marketing and behind the scenes stuff for Float Tank Solutions. So the question for today is “should I set up a chatbot for my float center?”

Derek: Yes/no.

Graham: Oh, it depends on a series of complex variables leading into this?

Derek: Ah, sometimes. So, yes in the sense if everything else in your marketing strategy is so dialed in, you’re looking at new ways to bring in traffic, meaning you are excellent on Facebook ad acquisition, your social media is on fire, your emails are just really good clicks and open rates, you’ve got community programs all over the place and you’re like what else can we do to get people in here. It’s happening so well for us. Adding another things with the hopes that it will also do well, yeah go ahead and do chatbots.

But, and I’ve talked about this before, so I already have this pre programmed answer. But if nothing’s working for you and you’re trying everything and you hear this new tool that comes around, goes everybody else is having success. That must be the thing for me. It’s probably also not gonna work for you, because there’s a lot of underlying things that you’re probably missing in the marketing of your float center that no matter if it’s a Facebook ad, a chatbot or whatever the case may be, the tool is not gonna fix the problem. It’s lacking substance and strategy and depth.

Graham: Yeah and I guess that does apply to much more than just chatbots. It seems like there’s always some kind of new whatever, like channel to reach-

Derek: Instagram TV, well Instagram already had videos, and now there’s Instagram TV web. Do I need to be on that? Probably not.

Graham: Yeah, Snapchat or even a better example I guess is when Pokemon Go had the little Pokemon Go places and it swept around for a brief time.

Derek: Confession. I still play Pokemon Go.

Graham: And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Derek: Okay good.

Graham: But, running around after the latest fad, especially as a brick and mortar business, which a float Center very much is.

Derek: And then your Pokemon Go strategy experts start popping up and trying to charge you. Well let me show you how I can turn your business into a gym.

Graham: Yeah, so it does, it feels like there’s more valuable things to spend your time on, unless you’ve already maximized the value for these very base level things, I guess you listed some of them, like organic social media, running your ads really well. What are some other things you put down there under basic have your bedrock in place?

Derek: SEO, email, other paid ad strategies, so like if you’re killing it on Facebook and you’re killing it on Google Ads, maybe radio, maybe television, trying those and seeing if you can get some good traffic.

Graham: You put that before chatbots?

Derek: I’m putting paid ads in a category.

Graham: I’m just saying if someone was like, should I get a chatbot, you’d be like run radio ads first?

Derek: Why don’t you run telegraph ads before you run a chatbot and tell me if it works. No, but I see what you’re saying. I mean what should people run before they decide chatbots? I think they should definitely have email, definitely have social media.

Graham: And when you say email, do you mean they’re sending out like a monthly newsletter or do you mean they have a kind of series of post float emails or what kind of email?

Derek: All of the above. Like a good over arching email strategy would be like having a monthly series of emails, maybe once a week or maybe just once a month that educates people about floating or reminding them you’re there, et cetera, kind of the drip campaign and onboarding series, so once they sign up, they get the message of what to bring, if everything’s dialed in, everything’s got good open rates, good click through rates, people are loving, they’re not unsubscribing. That’s a good healthy email campaign.

Graham: And just to back up too, drip campaigns are something where a customer will get a series of emails, but it’s usually pre planned, so you’re not sending, personally going in and sending out each one. It would be something like after they schedule their first float, they get automatically enrolled in a series of two or three emails, which go over some of the benefits of floating or after their first float, they get a pre launched or pre written series of emails that’s just to fill our listeners in to our crazy marketing terminology you’re slinging around.

Derek: I’ll also throw out a pro tip. There is a fantastic tool out there called Google. I say something because I am so deep into the marketing nerd dome, you’re like “what the hell did he just say?” Google it, you will get a hundred million results.

Graham: Are people, they’re busy cleaning salt. They’re driving right now-

Derek: All I’m doing is marketing all day. I don’t clean salt.

Graham: They can’t take a break from cleaning up their pumps in order to Google these things. We need to hold their hand.

Derek: Okay.

Graham: With that said, there are, if you haven’t taken a look, our show notes are actually really good and there’s links too. Even things we mention off hand, in fact our-

Derek: Juliet.

Graham: Yeah, Juliet who goes through and creates those, recently told me that I said that there was a common saying that existed out there in the world, that she couldn’t find any trace of when she Googled it, so bonus points if you can figure out what I thought actually existed that didn’t in one of the past episodes. But yeah, check out the show notes as well. Shameless, shameless plug. Okay, back to you hating on chatbots.

Derek: I don’t necessarily hate chatbots. Would I use chatbots in my marketing? In certain cases yes. So, let’s go to the strategy behind chatbots. It’s more like the email drip campaign, but the argument in favor of chatbots is nobody’s opening emails anymore. Emails are now going to promotions tab. Emails are so cluttered because everybody’s sending you emails every day, week, month, year, that you can no longer cut through the noise and that you need to now find something that’s going to do that and chatbots are the thing. We’re all on Facebook all day long. We can get into Messenger whenever we want. Whatsapp is a thing, but guess what? If everybody started doing chatbots, what’s gonna become noisy? Chatbots.

So I mean it’s not really, this goes back to the moving target you’ve talked about in the past. A chatbot strategy is almost like if you have a really good email strategy and it’s killing it for you, and you wanna cover the other side of things, go into chatbots. Use your email strategy, the drip campaigns, the onboarding sequences, nice thing about chatbots is people can respond within a comment of post, hey if would like the top 10 things that make your float better next time, say yes in the comments and people say yes in the comments and then all of a sudden they’re subscribed to this chatbot that will feed their Facebook messenger periodic messages.

It’s basically like another way to get email messaging out there. Just in shorter spurts on a platform that a certain type of demographic might enjoy.

Graham: Yeah and I guess along those lines of new marketing strategies having a life span, usually you refer to that as channel crowding, right?

Derek: Right.

Graham: It’s like a new marketing channel will open up, and then it’s kind of wide open initially and might not be that useful, and then it hits this point of obvious utility, hopefully for the channel. Like Periscope would be another one of these kind of examples.

Derek: I will tell you a little secret.

Graham: Yeah.

Derek: So everybody says that when a new platform comes out and it’s starting to look good, get on it, everyone’s on it. You know who’s on it? Other marketers getting on it, so all you’re doing is marketing to other marketers, and then maybe the next wave of actual users come on board. By that time, who knows if it’s stiff effective for marketers or not.

Graham: It’s kind of like that crossing the chasm sort of idea. You have the early adopters, which in this case is just other marketers, and then you have the bulk of people who may or may not ever come on board. But, so there’s that whole development curve, both of products or in this case, just of marketing channels. It’s one of the downsides of just running, especially if you’re just a single shop. You know, you have one float center, and if you’re a big franchise, you could have someone whose job it is to make sure you’re on top of the latest social media things, to make sure that you’re getting that extra percentage coming in.

Or, the way I always think about it for a lot of these is, if you sell shoelaces online, or if you sell some generic product, and you can sell it to anyone in the country or anyone in the world, and you were just trying to up your conversions. All of a sudden these online things make a big difference, because if you can get that extra four or five percent conversion. You’re talking about on a national scale, a huge boost in your business. And yeah sure, invest money in staying on top of the latest greatest fad that is taking off.

But as a brick and mortar business, especially one that’s built so much around word of mouth and reputation, it just feels kind of like a waste of time to me to invest in the newest latest greatest things, rather than just doing the few things that you do really solidly and doing them well. I think it’s almost asking too much of, for the size business that we are, to say that this will yield a return, given the amount of time it just takes to learn about everything.

Derek: That’s an excellent point, and I mean there’s even a step before chatbots I think people need to tackle, and that’s copywriting. Good messaging, knowing how to put into words something that’s persuasive enough to get somebody to convert to buy. That’s a skill far and above knowing how to use many chat to use, chatbots. So, I think before people get too deep into the latest greatest thing, make sure your messaging on point. Make sure you have good hooks. Make sure you have good content with your messaging. Make sure people are actually engaged in what you say before you say more in other places.

Graham: You know I’d even say, as far as things to do that you might not be doing already as part of your marketing, just some simple A/B testing is probably more worthwhile investing in than chatbots initially. Making sure that your calls to action on your homepage are actually converting to clicks and that people aren’t dropping off along your funnel in order to purchase a float. And just another one of those, if you don’t know what A/B testing is, it’s basically taking two versions of the same site or the same page, one might have different text or different colored button, and you just divide traffic evenly as they’re visiting your site in these two variations, so that you can see which performs better.

And even really simple things, things like changing “order your floats” to “get your floats”. You might find actually ups conversion a decent amount.

Derek: Schedule appointment versus book online.

Graham: Yeah, and small things like that can actually have a big impact on your bottom line just by getting that extra 10% to even click a button from your site. So, and then once you do that, then you know the kinds of things you would want a chatbot to say, like you know what your customers are reacting to, and before that, again, you’re just investing a lot of time learning a new technology without even really knowing what’s going to drive sales once you get people to even start talking to the bot.

Derek: Exactly.

Graham: I rocked it. I love it when Derek agrees with me. I’m like, ah I didn’t do bad.

Derek: I agree with you most times. However, I’m quick to disagree with you.

Graham: That’s right, and go get those tin foil hats, just like I said last time. Cool, anything else on this one, chatbot wise?

Derek: Yeah, I feel like we use chatbots as a jumping off point for other topics, but yeah I think when you start hearing these things that hit the media, like this is the latest and greatest thing, maybe it’s my personality as a marketer and I like to wait to see how it goes, but I like to justify that with what exactly Graham said, I have better things to do with my time, if this does start being a hit and I do start seeing great uses for it, then I’ll dabble in it. So, I’m now starting to see chatbots maybe be a thing for business-to-business, not business-to-consumer. So, we’ll see from there.

Graham: And I guess too, since this is just gonna be archived for all of eternity basically, if these take off, we are also betting on that too. I bet that they will develop and get better over time, so if chatbots are the next thing, then we’re totally correct about that as well as them not being right now, which we’re also correct about. So, we are never gonna be wrong, and-

Derek: Color television, why would you want color?

Graham: If you have your own questions, head on over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

Derek: See you everybody.

Graham: Bye.

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