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Tips & Tricks

Chatbots: How Machine Learning Will Improve Customer Experience

Today’s consumers demand more than simple customer service. They want a brand that builds customer experiences through a carefully designed CX strategy. Businesses can no longer get by just providing a contact number, limited business hour availability, and representatives that cannot sufficiently respond to inquiries. 

As the world has gone global and technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, customers expect high-quality service at their fingertips that’s both easy to use and understand. Here’s the ultimate solution:

Enter Chatbots

Utilizing chatbots can be one of the best responses to the demanding marketplace of a company can. Chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that strives to create computer programs that can mimic human interactions using machine learning algorithms

It’s useful to leverage existing AI technology that recognizes and understands natural language. Businesses can hire AI engineers to implement a chatbot on their websites. By doing this, companies can develop a chatbot marketing strategy that offers better customer experiences while boosting revenue. 

Firm-specific chatbots can be powerful business tools that are experts on brand goods and services, can automate customer transactions, accommodate high-volume client bases, and resolve simple problems that do not require direct human interaction.

 

Key Benefits of Chatbots

Availability

As computer programs, chatbots are always working. Business hours do not limit their ability to respond to customers. 

Since today’s consumer is always connected to the internet, chatbots can respond to issues on the customer’s schedule. Through responsive designs, a bot can also be reached via laptop, tablet, and mobile phone, allowing customers to use their preferred devices.

 

Responsiveness

Nearly half of the customers who contact businesses expect a response within 4 hours, while 12% expect a response within as little as 15 minutes. In short, customers expect responsiveness. In building a user experience, chatbots can meet that timeframe every time. 

Chatbots are not bound by the physical limitations of responding to inquiries one at a time. As high-functioning machine learning applications, they can handle virtually unlimited numbers of customers simultaneously, with no visible lag.

 

Understanding

With advances in AI, chatbots use a form of programming called machine learning. After their base standards are entered, the bots literally learn more with every customer interaction, allowing for the creation of machine learning models and algorithms which apply the learned information. They can correct and confirm spelling errors, ask for verification prompts, and match routine questions with the relevant information.

 

Automation

As a highly capable machine learning application, chatbots are ideal for streamlining and automating administrative services. Customers asking for account balances, delivery times, or regular news alerts and updates can be served without any additional human involvement.

 

Personalization

Customers favor companies that are responsive to their needs and prioritize CX strategy. With chatbots, every interaction is stored for future reference. 

Unlike human service agents, a chatbot will know what happened a month or a year ago, what items a customer purchased in the past, and even store a list of customer preferences that can be used to anticipate needs.

 

Opportunities

When it comes to data collection and CX strategy, chatbots can have a key role in marketing strategies. Data analysis can be applied across a vast customer database to develop or improve products and services. 

It can also be harnessed to reach out to past customers with new offers. Effective chatbot examples include using chatbots to actively contact customers through personalized messaging, companies can increase consumer engagement and raise brand loyalty.

 

Chatbots Can Provide Positive Customer Experiences

Studies indicate that chatbots can be powerful AI business tools that dramatically increase return on investment. Companies that provide better, more positive experiences increase consumer spending by over 40%. 

The use of machine learning algorithms can be an incredibly effective way for companies to maintain a competitive edge. Those who do will serve customers better, compile insightful market data, and encourage repeat interactions from their highly satisfied client base.

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GROWTH HACKS

Taktical Growth Hacks #264

Get the latest Taktical tips and tricks, plus more insights delivered each week: Sign up here.

WHAT’S IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK

TikTok adds Inventory Filters for ad placement. Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram more than Google. Google adds new Performance Max campaign features.

Growth Hack #1 There is no “good enough”

 

What’s a good CTR  to rank high on Google?

After performing a comprehensive analysis of the average CTRs of top-ranking pages on Google, researchers at Sistrix came up with a simple conclusion: there really is no right answer.

Based on the research, the average CTRs for top Google ranking pages are:

1st position: 28.5%

2nd position: 15.7%

3rd position: 11%

Given the limitless amount of variation among Google searches and search results, to find out what a “good” CTR is for your site, you’ll have to get a little more specific.

Source: Sistrix

 

 

Growth Hack #2 Let them come to you

Use Twitter to help your audience find you.

With the popularity of Twitter as a leading social media app, it is important to use its capabilities strategically.

Here are 3 ways to get started:

1. Be consistent: Tweet at least once a day to stay fresh in the mind of your audience.

2. Use threads: For best results, post 2-3 threads weekly, allowing for longer-form content and discussions.

3. Post replies: Replying to well-known accounts in your industry is a great way to gain visibility and have open dialogues with both experts and consumer audiences.

Source: Digital Marketer

 

 

Growth Hack #3 Life is a movie

 

Want to boost your email CTR by up to 300% with one simple trick? You can!

Today’s audiences love a captivating visual that helps to tell the story of your brand.

By adding video content to your marketing emails, you can skyrocket CTR, while also reducing the rate of unsubscription by up to 75%.

Categories
GROWTH HACKS

Taktical Growth Hacks #263

Get the latest Taktical tips and tricks, plus more insights delivered each week: Sign up here.

WHAT’S IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK

Snapchat adds a paid subscription tier. TikTok now allows marketers to set their own attribution windows. Walmart and Roku streamline purchases from shoppable ads.

 

 

Growth Hack #1 Time is money

 

An e-commerce company recently added one simple element to their site which increased its conversion rate by 8.6%

The online shop experimented by adding a “countdown for next day shipping” timer on their product pages and tested it against a version with no timer.

The result: a huge increase in sales of people who wanted to lock in next day shipping!

Source: Behave

 

 

Growth Hack #2 Patience is a virtue

 

Leanplum broke down 671 million push notifications to uncover some interesting trends. Here are their key findings:

1. PNs sent and opened trends upward throughout the day, with a small peak around noon and a slightly larger one around 3pm.

2. The post-evening trend is interesting – after 6pm, push notifications opened start to trend higher, relative to previous hours, while pushes sent trend lower.

Bottom line: Wait until the late afternoon or evening to send pushes if you want to maximize engagement.

Source: Andrew Chen

 

 

Growth Hack #3: Give out your digits

Increase conversions 15X on your Google Ads by adding a phone number:

A survey conducted by Ipsos revealed that 70% of mobile users call directly from Google search results.

By eliminating a step along the funnel, click-to-call leads convert 15.5 times better than web leads.

And, clicks on your phone number are the same cost as headline clicks on Google.

What are you waiting for? Here’s how to add phone numbers to your ads.

Source: Youtube

Categories
How To Guides

How to Spy on Your SEO Competitors: A Competitive Guide

To keep up with the competition, you have to be engaged in a wide variety of marketing initiatives to make your brand and products top-of-mind for prospective customers. But, like it or not, possibly the most important thing you can do to get yourself in front of your target audience is to improve your Google rankings (and don’t forget Bing and others).

Organic search results are one of the most important markers of a company’s status and reputation in the industry. Ranking toward the top of organic search results for your target keywords is not something you can buy. SEO and SEM are both important elements of your marketing strategy, and learning how to spy on your competitors’ SEO profiles is a great way to figure out how to give your rankings a boost.

The importance of backlinks

One of the most important things you can do to improve your SEO profile is to make sure your website has the right density of keywords for which you want to rank. But, the old adage, “content is King,” is a bit of an oversimplification. Content has to be engaging, keyword rich, and fresh, but it also has to inspire others to link to it.

In some cases, your backlink profile might be the most important factor in your organic search engine rankings. Let’s say your content is mostly in the form of images that have limited metadata for search engines to crawl. If enough other sites link back to your page, you might outrank a competitor whose site is page after page of keyword-rich text. This is because Google puts more stock in what other sources are saying about you than in what you say about yourself.

One way to increase your own rankings by putting a dent in the competition is to steal your competitors’ backlinks. Here are a few methods to help you:

2. Define your Competition

In trying to figure out how to spy on your competitors’ SEO, defining your competition is a critical first step. If you know the keywords you’re targeting, do a search in Google to see where you rank and who ranks above you. If you search for “dallas tx landscapers,” for instance, you might see this when you scroll down past the paid search ads:

Unless you’re a large, well-known company in the area, you’re probably not going to be able to compete with the rankings of an aggregating site like Angie’s List. But, whoever is below those sites in the rankings is the company to beat. Additionally, sites like Angie’s List or Houzz can be great places to find out who your direct competitors are and what their status is in your target market.

2. Check out their Backlink Profile

Once you’ve got specific competitors in your sights, find out who is linking to them. There are a lot of backlink profile analysis tools out there (just Google it, obviously). You can add your competitors, then drill down into who is linking to them, how they are linking to them, and when they linked to them.

Source: Growth Hack Scale

You’ll want to identify which of your competitors’ pages are getting the most backlinks so that you can put your own spin on their content strategy. If you see that a particular topic is getting a lot of link love on their site, you may want to do your own take on that topic.

3. Contact your Competitors’ Backlinkers

One of the easiest ways to steal your competitors’ backlinks is to simply ask their backlinkers. If a competitor is getting a backlink from a respected site in your industry, and you have relevant content, you can request that whoever is linking to your competitor’s site also link to your site. Do you have a whitepaper that addresses an important issue in your industry? Or a new free tool that can help consumers in your industry? These are things that may interest them.

And you don’t have to get a backlink from the same exact page as your competitor. You may want to find a page on the backlinker’s site that relates more closely to your products or services.

Don’t Simply Copy your Competitors

You don’t want to just go around trying to steal your competitors’ backlinks without providing something worthwhile to link to. The most important element of your SEO strategy is to effectively communicate the value of your products, services, and ultimately your company. What does your company provide that no one else does? If you can answer that question clearly, your SEO strategy gets a whole lot easier.