FBC – 54 – Should you look into chatbots?

Today for this second episode of the day we are going to talk about chatbots: What they are, why you should use them or not and also how to use them.

I started working “Chat Bots” yesterday.

So these chat bots have been around for quite a while actually. Right now people are talking about it and Facebook have integrated that in industry like a tool on their Web site. But you know the thing is what smart people do is that they will look at other industries and find something that works really well over there and see how they can transpose it to whatever they're doing, and this is what Facebook is doing. So it doesn't mean that Facebook actually invented chatbots. They've been there forever.

But now people have started talking about it in the marketing space when I mean marketing, I'm talking about what you and me are doing. You have your small business and stuff. This is what I'm talking about. And I was like you know what? It's never going to replace e-mails and everybody is saying oh emails are dead and you should move to chat bots, which is always the case when something else comes out.

Email has been there since the 70s, my friends, the 70s right. People don't know it. It's been there since the 70s. Then every time something comes out, people are like it's going to die. You should move over to this to that now. But some people are getting really good results with bots, but it was too hard and I couldn't be bothered. But then I was like you know what? Let's have a look at these chat bots.

Should you look into chatbots?

These shop bots are absolutely amazing! It's pretty cool. OK. Now I want to say this I am not going to discard e-mails and go to chat bots. You should you should still be using emails. It's the most profitable channel ever. So the chat bots you are going to create are going to come in addition to your emails.

So I I'm working on a bot right now and you can create like different sequences and stuff. So you know you can introduce yourself to your audience which is pretty cool and you can actually put some YouTube videos in there. You can say hey this is Martin. Thank you very much for joining my list and whatever. And you can give them some information.

And you can actually create a like an auto responder sequence so if you know what an auto responder is you can do the same thing. And for people who don't know what an auto responder is, it’s just a machine that's going to deliver emails in a sequence that you've determined. So you can write the e-mails today for example and you can say well if someone signs up to my list send them e-mail one day one e-mail to one day to an e-mail tree on day three and stuff.

You can do that in chat bots as well which is pretty awesome. All right. So you have a lot of different triggers in there. So you know depending on where they signed up from you can tag them depending on what they clicked on and then you can create a sequence only for people who’ve been tagged with that specific thing.

It's something I really urge you to have a look at because it's really not complicated. I thought it was complicated because you know we all have different brains right. And you have different views of the flow. So you can create a flow that says OK this is message one what happens when someone clicks on message one? Where do you take them? OK.

So you have a view that's like a like a list view but you do have another view where you can actually see everything connected with like dots and arrows and all that stuff.  And in the beginning I was checking out the list and it was a bit complicated for my brain. And so once I move to that, I started having a lot of fun man. It's really, really insane. Pretty cool. So you can actually start for free. You can start a chat bot for free. You don't have to pay anything.

Manychat.com is a good one. You go there and you can create an account for free and then you can connect your chat to every single page you own. Right. So it’s going to ask you to connect your Facebook and then it’s going to have access to the pages that you that you've created and then you can create your chat bots from there. And it's actually very intuitive.

All right. So how do you get people on your boat? Well there are different techniques. But me what I what I'm going to do and I think I'm going to put in place is you know try to get people to sign up on the chat bot so that they can receive regular updates from you. So you could say “if you want these exclusives that I'm only going to share with a select few, then you want to sign up to the bot”. OK.

And yeah as I said just use it as an additional channel to reach your audience. So at the same time as you're sending your emails then you're going to send a message on the bot that says “you know what?  I just had this awesome piece of content and you should join. You should go and check it out” because you know face it people are busy. Right you're busy. You're always complaining that you’re out of time but you're not the only one.

Should you look into chatbots?

Everybody's busy. Right. And if you don't tell people man you should go and have a look then you're too busy to do it right. So you can do you can do it with your e-mail you can do it your podcast with whatever. And the more chances you have of telling them that you have some really good stuff for them the better.

So use that in addition to the other channels that you already have. All right. So I'm going to perfect the art of chat bots. I'm going to spend the day today looking at this and learning the ins and outs. I'm not going to be the biggest expert on the planet right. I think some people have been working on it forever. But again whatever. I'll try to create the most efficient chat bot in as few steps as possible.

So your homework is to have a look at it. You know have a look at this. It's called “manychat”