Studies show that email marketing revenue hit an all-time high with 7.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 and is expected to cross the 10-billion-dollar threshold in 2023. These numbers indicate one thing clearly – email marketing can never grow old.
But to keep this marketing niche up and running, it is essential to keep refueling it with new contacts. Manual efforts in the same direction can be daunting, which is why many of us have resorted to automation techniques such as email chatbots.
Email chat bots are becoming popular for overcoming the challenges of manual efforts and building marketing contact lists.
Due to these compelling reasons, we must understand how one can grow its email list in 2022 with email chatbots. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a quick guide that dives into the following topics:
Table of Contents
- Why Chatbots Work for Email List Building?
- They Build Relationships With Customers
- They Allow You To Collect Data 24/7
- How To Get Email Subscribers With A Chatbot?
- Step 1. Build A Chatbot And Design Your Dialogue
- Step 2. Connect Your Chatbot To Your Email Marketing Platform
- Step 3. Test Your Chatbot
- Tips For Optimizing Chatbots for Email List Building
- 1. Use Triggers
- 2. Offer Incentives To Customers
- 3. Ask For Data At The Right Time
- 4. Add Chatbots To Both Your Website And Social Media Accounts
- Email Chatbots: Unlock the “Pro Mode” of Next-Gen Marketing
Let’s get started!
Why Chatbots Work for Email List Building?
They Build Relationships With Customers
Chatbots help you deliver streamlined and delightful customer experiences that, in turn, create brand advocates and loyal customers. A delighted customer contributes 17 times more to the revenue as compared to a somewhat dissatisfied customer.
Also, excellent customer experience allows you to:
- Improve cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
- Minimize customer churn
- Boost customer satisfaction
Chatbots allow you to deliver flawless customer experiences in various ways, such as personalized offers, product recommendations, boost brand awareness, instant resolution of frequent queries, and 24X7 availability across time zones.
Hence, they facilitate better customer relationships, whereby the customers don’t hesitate to share their email IDs or subscribe to the email lists.
They Allow You to Collect Data 24/7
As the chatbots are always online, they allow you to cater to incoming queries around the clock across all the time zones, 365 days a year. They can gather leads, qualified leads and guide prospects on their journey to become a loyal customer.
They can collect email addresses in a more streamlined and more versatile manner than a human agent. After collecting email addresses, make sure you verify the email addresses.
Hence, they are a fantastic way to build an email list fast.
Next, we discuss an easy three-step process to build an email list fast with an email chat bot.
How to Get Email Subscribers With a Chatbot?
Step 1. Build A Chatbot And Design Your Dialogue
The first step is to create a chatbot and build an engaging and addictive dialogue to have meaningful conversations with your customers. This is called conversation design and can be accomplished without much hassle via online bot builder tools.
You can create characters, give a personality to your bot and even opt for including regional or local language constructs in the dialogue. As your bots interact with your customers, you have to ensure that their language is flawless.
Some of the pointers that you must keep in mind are:
- Keep the conversational simple, smart and easy-to-understand
- Match the overall look and feel of the bot interface to your brand
- Give a personality to your bot and make it human-friendly
Step 2. Connect Your Chatbot To Your Email Marketing Platform
You can promote your chatbot in your emails to spread the word among existing email list members. Further, using chatbots to remind customers about unopened emails is also a great way to inform the customers about the content of the email.
Step 3. Test Your Chatbot
Finally, test your chatbot by interacting with it as an end-user. Email chatbot assessment is crucial for understanding its expertise and overall functionality.
Testing conversational flows allow you to have a holistic idea about the personality and ability of your chatbot.
Things to check during chatbot assessment:
- Conversational flow and conversation steps
- Chatbot’s understanding of the issue at hand
- Bot speed and accuracy
- Error management
Tips for Optimizing Chatbots for Email List Building
While you might think that your job is done with the email chatbot assessment and its integration in email marketing, it’s not!
Chatbot optimization is the heart of chatbot implementation, and ensuring its health is the key to successful integration.
So, below, we share some tips for chatbot optimization that you can follow to build an email list from scratch.
Use Triggers
Triggers are the keywords in the messages sent by your subscribers or their actions and can be of multiple types. Some common examples include automated messages or conversation flows sent after a set subscription period by a new or existing customer. Keyword-based triggers launch a conversation flow after a subscriber sends a message containing a particular set of words or phrases.
There can be event-based triggers, such as sending a flow of messages after an event related to a subscription has happened or is going to happen.
These automated triggers allow your chatbots to keep the customers in the loop and help streamline the overall bot experience.
Offer Incentives to Customers
The first rule of making loyal customers is to never ask something from them, even their email addresses, directly.
Because of obvious reasons, customers feel uncomfortable sharing their email addresses and personal information. They might not be willing to share the information even during or after a troubleshooting session.
However, the tables turn when you have something to offer them in return.
For example, you can have a proactive chat for your website visitors looking for information on a particular topic. Once you have shared the information, you can ask the visitors if they want to receive a related e-book for free.
Some other freebies that your subscriber bots can share include webinars, exclusive guides, infographics, newsletters, etc.
You can also ask the customers if they would like to get notified when a particular product or model is restocked.
The customers would most likely say “yes”!
Next, the chatbot can ask if they would like to subscribe to your emails or newsletters for a discount on their next purchase.
Ask for Data at the Right Time
Now that your customers opt-in to receive regular newsletters and become your subscribers, you can ask for data.
You can set a conversation flow where your chatbot asks your customers to:
- Share their details, such as gender, age, and location
- Share their preferences for getting better and timely recommendations
- Share their preferences for brands, products, and even specific models
Once your chatbot has got the data, it can streamline the subscriber experience by offering highly personalized content via email.
As your subscribers are getting tailored content, they will stay interested in your brand offerings and never get fatigued by the regular emails. Don’t hesitate to use the power email verifier, which will help to maintain a reliable and healthy email list.
Add Chatbots to Both Your Website and Social Media Accounts
Recent studies revealed that 1.4 billion people are using messaging apps and are willing to interact with bots. Social media has an immense following all over the globe and is undoubtedly a credible way to serve your customers and get more of them!
So, to offer a 360-degree customer experience, we recommend having chatbots for all your channels – website as well as social media.
Always remember, the key to great marketing is to engage with your customers wherever they are. After all, what is the use of sending loads of emails to customers that spend a more significant portion of their “online time” on messenger apps or social media?
Email Chatbots: Unlock the “Pro Mode” of Next-Gen Marketing
Subscriber bots will undoubtedly help you grow your email list fast, but they are no magic wand to get things in a day or two!
Chatbots need knowledge, training, experience, and consistent effort to be relevant to your business model.
However, an email chatbot’s functionalities and fantastic features allow businesses of all scales to improve their email marketing efforts. They are a consistent fuel for your email lists, customer experience, and engagement. Make sure to always check your email lists and ensure there are no bogus addresses to harm your sender reputation.
They allow you to make so much more of the raw and straightforward customer data than the traditional email marketing system.
So, invest in the right chatbot builders, build innovative and highly intuitive email bots and train them to evolve into self-learning data processors with conversational capabilities to reap the benefits!
