Think of a chatbot like a decision tree. You ask a question, and then provide a few limited options. From those options, you provide another layer of limited options, and so on…

Chatbots can be extremely useful for answering a lot of common questions that your perspective buyer might have. They can also be used to move people through the initial stages of product/service research and into a sales conversation.

Chat bots are not available on every platform. In fact the only one that’s really taking advantage of it is Facebook. You can create your Facebook chat bot on Facebook, but it is advised that you use one of the third party tools that are designed specifically for creating chat bots. Two of our favorites are Chatfuel and Manychat.

Once you have added someone to your chat bot list, they become part of a list that you can communicate with again until they unsubscribe. In this way it is similar to email marketing. You can send them broadcast messages and sequences of messages. You can build in triggers based on specific words or options that are selected.

In our opinion, one of the most important part of using a chat bot is to be very clear that it is an automated sequence and not a human being, and that if at any point someone wishes to speak with a human being that there is an option to do so.