5 Reasons Why Chatbots Will Do Better Than Email Marketing

More than 3 billion users are spread out (and using) mobile messaging apps, at the time of writing this, according to Statista.

Now, more than ever, people spend an awful amount of time on their Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, line, and many others.

While they spend all their time on those mobile messenger platforms, it’s also a sign that times are changing.

If all those 3 billion people are spending on time messaging on Whatsapp, staying put on Instagram, and active on Facebook all the time, do chatbots work better than email marketing now?

You can’t rule out the power of email marketing with a whopping (and proven) 3,800% ROI anyway as it has its own role to play.

But as far as engagement, lead generation, lead nurturing, and content distribution go, chatbots are incredibly effective thanks to the sharp dominance of people’s preference to “message each other quickly and easily” over mobile messaging.

Here are six reasons why Chatbots will do better than email marketing (at least in a few ways):

Chatbots have high retention rates

Illker Koksal of Botanalytics wrote on Venture Beat about some of the most important chatbot metrics to track. Of the many metrics available, there’s “Chatbot retention rate” that stands out.

Entertainment bots, for instance, have the highest retention rates ever while the average retention rate of a bot is about 4%.

Email marketing has a retention rate too, with the average retention rate of 85%.

Does it mean that email marketing beats chatbots here? Not exactly. Here’s why:

Chatbot retention rate actually explains how well the chatbot is able to keep, retain, and engage users. Email retention rate isn’t a metric that explains anything of value (not the way the chatbot retention rate does). Emails stay in Inboxes and most people might not even bother if the messages stay in the “Inbox” for ever. They might not read those emails. They also don’t “Unsubscribe” just because they forget or are too lazy (explains the high retention rate, eh?)

Chatbot retention rate, however, is far more accurate in the sense that users either engage with your Chatbot or they don’t.

Chatbots are unbeatable for customer support

Customer support and customer service isn’t just for “support” or “service”. They help drive up revenue and profits too.

Customer support channels also help generate leads, enable opportunities for upsells and cross-sells, and actually close sales.

Each time you raise a support ticket or you send out a message using the regular live chat, it’s still email that helps deliver your questions or queries to the support staff on the other end. All our traditional ways of customer support (on the digital front) have email as the backbone.

Using email as the backbone for your support ticket system is a slow method. By the time you get around to write back to your customers, they are usually gone.

For these use cases, email just won’t work, but chatbots will work like a charm. See how Chatbots rule here?

Customers at their natural habitat

For most people, checking email is work. Getting on a mobile messaging app is not. It’s quite natural for people to fire up their Facebook messenger app to communicate with friends, relatives, and others in their network. You can’t say the same for email — which is mostly used for work, business, and for anything a little more “serious”.

Mobile messaging apps are a natural platform for what we all do as humans: engage with people who matter to us, be a part of a community, etc.

Using chatbots puts you all primed up to engage with your customers where they feel most comfortable. How hard is it to see and respond to an ad on Instagram while you scroll up and down to check out the latest photos of people you follow?

No latency, with quick engagement

Email marketing is effective and it’s a money maker for businesses. There’s no doubt on just how powerful a simple set of autoresponders can be or how well emails work within your sales funnel.

But there’s an issue: there’s a fair bit of latency (in delivery, in the time it takes for your prospects or leads to check emails, in open rates, and in click rates). For all the positives that email marketing has, there are still issues regarding 100% delivery, subscribers opening emails, clicking on links within emails, and actually taking action that matters to you, as a business.

While chatbots don’t guarantee clicks either, they distribute content spontaneously while having no delay in engagement.

Want to respond to your customers immediately, without delay, and be sure that they see your messages? Use chatbots.

Live, spontaneous, and immediate engagement

Consider a scenario: a visitor come through organic Google search. She checks out your website. She reads your blog, and then signs up for something free that you give away as an offer.

If she wants to write back to you, can she?

In most cases, she can’t (some email service providers allow subscribers to write back to your email marketing messages).

Now, consider this: the same visitor comes in, checks out your website, and reads your blog. Only this time, you have a facebook messenger live chat box prompt her to download the freebie. She clicks through, gets to her own Facebook messenger platform, downloads the freebie.

At this point, she can download and read it (as she might). Or she can also chat back with you. Instantly.

Chatbots allow you to have people “subscribe” to something and enable you to “deliver” lead magnets (just like email marketing would). Except that there’s an additional window of opportunity with chatbots to “chat”, “talk”, and spontaneously engage with your visitors, leads, or customers.

Chatbots certainly have the potential to help you respond to your customers faster, to enable better engagement, to let you nurture them with more relevant content, to generate leads, and more.