Small business owners should always search for ways to better connect with customers so that they increase their sales. These days, email automation and chatbots are two popular tools for achieving just that. And while they're both great on their own, they can be even more powerful when used together. So, why exactly is the combination of email marketing and chatbots such a potent power couple? Read on to find out!
Table of Contents
- What is What
- Why Combine Email Automation and Chatbots?
- Email and Chatbots Combination: 5 Great Use Cases
- How to Integrate Email Automation Tools and Chatbots
- Conclusion
What is What
First things first, we'll remind you what email automation and chatbots are.
Email automation — can help you save time and make efficient email marketing. Thanks to such tools as TruVISIBILITY's Messaging application, you can create an email sequence that welcomes new subscribers, follows up with leads, or nurtures existing customers. With automation and segmentation, you can personalize the content and tailor the message to the recipient's behavior and demographic data.
Chatbots — software that simulates human conversations. By using a chatbot on your website or social media profiles, you can interact with your audience 24/7/365, handle customer inquiries, and gather feedback. There are different types of chatbots. Some rely on strict pre-written rules, while others can use artificial intelligence (AI). Both types you can easily build within TruVISIBILITY's Chat application. Regardless of the size and scope of your business, chatbots can provide a personalized, instant, and automated communication channel that saves you time and resources.
Why Combine Email Automation and Chatbots?
When you combine email marketing and chatbots, you're able to reach your target audience through two different channels. This means you have double the chance of getting their attention and engaging them with your content. For example, you can use email marketing to promote your chatbot and then use the chatbot to further engage the customer by answering their questions, providing personalized recommendations, or even taking orders.
And because chatbots have a higher open rate than email, they're more likely to initiate customer interaction and drive engagement. By sending targeted emails to subscribers who have already interacted with your chatbot, you can assuage the benefits of both channels to increase your reach and engagement.
Email and Chatbots Combination: 5 Great Use Cases
Now let's see how exactly you can use email automation and chatbots together.
1. Building and Segmenting Your Mailing List
Chatbots can play a vital role in helping you build and segment your mailing list. They can serve as your frontline responders to customer queries and collect valuable information, such as their email addresses. You can also get such data as customer preferences, purchase history, and location to create targeted email campaigns that are more likely to engage your customers. Using chatbots to segment your email list according to your customer base can lead to more effective email marketing campaigns.
2. Following Up On the Emails
One of the most significant challenges of email marketing is getting the recipient to open and respond to your emails. A chatbot can follow up with your email recipients in a friendly and conversational way, thus increasing the chances of engagement and conversion.
For instance, you can use chatbots to ask if they received your email or if they need any additional information. You can also use chatbots to initiate a conversation and offer them an incentive to make a purchase if they're still on the fence.
3. Launching Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns take a customer on a journey, nurturing their purchase decision with personalized emails triggered by their behavior, either on your website or as they engage with your chatbot. Chatbots allow you to set up drip campaigns that automatically send tailored emails based on customer actions.
For example, imagine you run an online store selling eco-friendly products. A visitor lands on your website and starts interacting with your chatbot, expressing interest in reusable water bottles. The chatbot captures the visitor's email address and adds them to your email marketing list.
Now, you can set up a drip campaign tailored to this customer's interest in reusable water bottles.
- Email 1: Welcome the customer and thank them for their interest in reusable water bottles. Provide an overview of your top-selling bottles and their benefits.
- Email 2: Share customer testimonials showcasing the positive impact of switching to reusable water bottles, emphasizing the environmental benefits and cost savings.
- Email 3: Offer a limited-time discount code for reusable water bottles to encourage the customer to make a purchase.
- Email 4: Follow up with the customer after a week, reminding them of the discount code and showcasing new water bottle designs or accessories.
Just like that!
4. Introduction to New Communication Channels
Chatbots can be used not just to help your direct prospects on your website but also as a customer support tool — to answer questions about your products and services.
Once your chatbot is set up, you need to ensure that people know about it, and this is where email marketing comes in. Send an email blast to your subscribers informing them about your new chatbot. Use a Call to Action in your emails, encouraging your subscribers to sign up and engage with your chatbot.
5. Time-Saving Automation
You can use chatbots to send timely alerts or reminders for events in which subscribers showed interest or cross-promote content based on their interactions on the email campaign.
This helpful way of automation, which we shall call "triggers," ensures that the customer never misses out on critical updates or new offers in real time. By setting up these triggers and automating the process, you can save precious time and resources and allocate them to more interesting activities.
How to Integrate Email Automation Tools and Chatbots
If you use software tools from different vendors, integrating them may be not such an easy task. You will have to use third-party integration platforms (iPaaS), namely Zapier, Tray.io, Workato, and Make.com. Another way is fiddling with application programming interfaces (APIs). However, the best way to make different apps work together is to use an all-in-one platform, such as TruVISIBILITY Suite.
In TruVISIBILITY Suite, we have combined several applications to make complex marketing processes. You can create chatbots, build websites, write blogs, and launch email blasts just within one single platform. Being a constitutional part of one platform, TruVISIBILITY apps are easy to connect, and you don't need to be familiar with coding because everything is done inside a visual builder. Just drag and drop elements, and you're done!
TruVISIBILITY Suite is:
Chat — for building chatbots of any complexity. You can build simple rule-based chatbots, hybrid AI-powered chatbots, and set up a live chat.
Messaging — for automating welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, newsletters, promotional emails, and first emails in response to a customer's question or complaint.
Sites — for creating websites and landing pages. You can boost your website's functionality by adding a contact form, payment gateway, or even an SEO-friendly blog.
CRM — for tracking and optimizing every interaction and opportunity with every contact for pre- and post-sales activity.
Email — for securing private information sent through email. It supports compliance regulations in multiple industries and guidelines, such as HIPAA, CFPB, FINRA, and ESIGN.
All the TruVISIBILITY applications are part of one platform, and therefore they are easily integrated with each other literally in one click. You can also use them on their own with third-party applications. And all this without a line of code!
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website, including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
Conclusion
Now you know that the combination of email automation and chatbots is a powerful weapon for small business owners. It will help you build a mailing list and segment it, remind your subscribers to read newsletters, launch drip campaigns, encourage customers to use new channels of communication with you, and save time.
And the good news is that making email automation software and chatbots work together is not hard at all — just get a TruVISIBILITY account and enjoy the benefits of an all-in-one marketing solution!
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