Best Chatbot Software: #1 Ranked Omnichannel Marketing Solution

Chatbot software is only growing in its usefulness and popularity. This can be attributed to the fact that consumers prefer chat messaging over other forms of communication in almost all instances.

Supported by data, there’s no better channel for business and marketing pros to master: 

• 75% of customers prefer live chat with businesses over email or call.
• Chat messaging has 10X – 100X higher engagement than email and social media channels.

Rated #1 by Entrepreneur, Customers.ai chatbot software is the most advanced omnichannel marketing bot platform. And there’s a lot to unpack.

So, we’ve broken down the best overall chatbot software into the following sections:

• Different ways to use chatbot software for marketing
• How to use chatbot software to sell more online
• Improve customer experience with chatbot software for customer support

Chatbot Software for Marketing

Founded by globally recognized marketing mastermind, Larry Kim, Customers.ai has a growing list of growth marketing tools to choose from.

Using its proprietary OmniChatⓇ technology, Customers.ai connects chat marketing solutions from Facebook Messenger, Instagram messaging, live chat on websites, SMS text message marketing, and other top performing marketing channels, all from one platform.

Lead generation chatbot software

Customers.ai OmniChatⓇ facilitates lead capture, lead qualification, and lead nurturing in the chat apps your customers prefer.

Having the ability to use live chat software tools across different marketing channels, all from one unified messaging inbox, is a game-changer that only the best chatbot software can deliver.

Here are some other great examples you can get started with today to generate leads using live chat:

• Add a Free Facebook Lead Generator to your Facebook Page and Posts.
• Proactive live chat increases prospect and client engagement on your website.
• Using Facebook autoresponders to capture your fans’ contact information.
• Run a giveaway on Facebook to generate many leads, fast.

Adding Customers.ai to your lead generation tools is guaranteed to generate tons of quality leads for your small business with the help of marketing automation tools.

Make Facebook ads interactive

One of the many digital marketing tools available on the Customers.ai platform is built specifically for Facebook Messenger ads.

Facebook Messenger ads present a rare opportunity that pro digital marketers are taking advantage of. 

And that’s because Facebook Messenger ads are different than regular Facebook ads. Most importantly, Messenger ads perform better than normal Facebook ads because they start a more engaging conversation with chatbots.

A couple of types of Facebook Messenger ads exist. There’s an ad viewed on any Facebook property that directs traffic to Messenger. And then there’s sponsored content that’s native in Messenger.

Another cool thing about Facebook Messenger ad experiences is that they can take place across the Facebook family of apps, including the Facebook newsfeed, Instagram newsfeed, Facebook and Instagram Stories, Marketplace, Messenger, and others.

Here are the top 4 reasons to use Facebook Messenger ads:

• Messenger ads outperform other ads by 2X-10X
• Instant lead and data capture
• More features available for personalization
• Automated lead qualification and follow-ups with chatbots

Check out the top 7 Facebook ad hacks of all time to get some more ideas!

Remarketing with chatbot software

Chatbots are great for remarketing and retargeting. You can reengage your contact lists by sending:

• Messenger blasts
• SMS blasts
• Facebook ads
• Remarketing lists
• 1-on-1 communications

Remarketing takes place both at the top and the bottom of your marketing and sales funnels.

You have these Facebook tools at your disposal:

• Facebook ads – Use Customers.ai’s Facebook Ads audience sync to create a custom audience based on any audience you segment in Customers.ai.
• Facebook Messenger ads – Set up a click-to-Messenger ad using the same audience sync tool mentioned above.
• Sponsored Messages – Sponsored messages are sent via the Customers.ai Promo Blaster to send a promotional message outside of the 24+1 window to an audience of your existing contacts.

Your remarketing pitch can include things like blog content, coupons, deals, discounts, giveaways, contests, quizzes, downloads, etc.

If you were diligent about creating attributes and segmenting your audience when you set up your dialogues, remarketing should be easy.

You can check out your Customers.ai’s Audiences dashboard to look at all the audiences you’ve created. Then, you can design a remarketing campaign designed to reach a specific audience that may be close to converting.

If you haven’t, no worries. There are plenty of opportunities to learn, re-test, reconfigure, tweak, optimize, and experiment.

Two things will be helpful as you work to improve your Facebook Messenger funnel: Page Insights and Customers.ai bot analytics.

In order to get to your Facebook Page insights, select “Page Insights” from your Page menu, and then “Messages” from the Page Insights menu. From here, you can take a look at some of the key data trends on your Messenger activity, such as new connections and block rate.

Another great source of information can be found in Customers.ai bot analytics, which you can access by going to from the Analytics tab.

Bot analytics in Customers.ai provides data on your contacts, custom audience segmentation, forms statistics, and advanced bot analytics.

Using Bot Analytics, for example, you can get valuable insights into the growth of your contacts, open rates, sessions, conversions, and more.

List building with chatbot software

Whether you’re just getting started with growing your email list or you’re ready to grow your audience 10X in 2021, there are many options for marketers to grow your email list fast

But here’s why chatbots are your secret weapon to growing your email list:

When prospects or customers are chatting with your bot, they’re engaging with your brand. This is a great time to invite someone to create a connection via email as well.

And chatbots, it just so happens, are a great email capture software tool because they’re interactive, convenient, and instant. Plus, people are more likely to engage in chat than they are to fill out a form.

So, once you capture user data, where does it live? Customers.ai will hold all of your bots captured user data. Additionally, chatbot software can be connected directly to an email marketing platform to automatically send contact data, including an email address.

Lastly, here’s some bonus material with multiple options for how to get email addresses from Facebook using chatbot software.

Target the right audience with chatbot automation and segmentation tools

Live chat is the channel of choice for customer support, but it’s also a great tool for lead generation.

Using live chat for lead generation includes leveraging the interactivity and high-engagement of messaging to get more subscribers, signups, and opt-ins.

Where you have signup forms, consider using interactive chat forms to increase form conversions.

Customers.ai customers have found that switching from static web forms to interactive web chat forms that users can finish at their own convenience increases conversion rates by up to 75%.

Additionally, Quick Questions allow you to save attributes to your contacts’ profiles with ease. String Quick Questions together to qualify leads and customize conversion funnels based on user selections.

Forms, as you’d expect, let you collect multiple fields of lead information. Like Quick Questions, Form data saves custom variables to contacts.

Use Forms to specify fields that count as a completed conversion in bot analytics:

In the example above you’ll see that the chatbot asks the question, “What’s your phone number?” When the user replies with what the bot recognizes as a phone number, a conversion is recorded and can be viewed in your chatbot analytics.

Chatbot Software for Sales

Chatbot marketing is an extremely effective way to sell products online. This is due to a number of factors, including, but not limited to:

• Chatbots are 24/7 sales assistants that can sell on their own or capture client information for follow-ups.
• And that chatbot software improves the customer experience and improves conversion metrics throughout the sales funnel by creating an interactive and low-friction process. 

Check out how to build a chatbot for sales when you’re done with this article.

Promotional marketing chatbot solutions

Chatbots are great for running promos. And that’s because with an omnichannel chatbot like Customers.ai, you have multiple avenues to get in front of the right prospects at the right time.

It’s very common to add a discount or other promotion to sweeten the deal and encourage conversions. Without a tempting offer, a direct marketing campaign stands little to no chance to succeed.

Other examples to increase conversions in your direct response campaigns include time restrictions, giveaways, and information highly sought out by your target audience. 

The more you refine your offer combined with the right chatbot channel, the lower your CPA (cost per acquisition) will be.

For example, SMS text marketing is a great chatbot channel for running a promotion. 

You can also initiate conversations about sales and promos using an automated follow-up that sends a coupon code to new subscribers through chatbot drip marketing campaigns.

Opt-in prospects and customers for ongoing messaging

You’re never going to make a sale 100% of the time on the first interaction, of course.

Instead, for those interactions that do not result in a sale, you can use chatbot software to sign people up for ongoing marketing communication in real-time messaging channels like Messenger and SMS.

For example, using a Customers.ai chatbot for text message marketing, you can use an SMS keyword to opt-in customers to receive future communication via text. In the case below, the keyword being used is, “CLUB”.

An American Marketing Association report notes that businesses report live chat supports all stages of a customer journey:

• Marketing awareness: 29%
• Early-stage direct sales: 32%
• Marketing conversion to sales prospects: 39%
• Mid-stage direct sales: 24%
• Sales closing: 18%
• Post-sales customer support, education, engagement: 39%

For more opt-in strategies, take a look at this article on how to get more SMS subscribers.

Chatbot Software for Customer Support

The best chatbot software should strive to create a better CX (customer experience) from the first touchpoint with a prospect to actions that help to retain long-time customers.

There are incredible benefits to gain from customer support chat software, such as:

• Increased customer loyalty, sales, and revenue as a result of live chat, according to 79% of businesses surveyed.  (Kayako)
• A 10% lift in AOV (average order value) when a buyer’s journey includes customer support chat. (ICMI)
• Chat support (41%) is preferred to phone support (32%), email support (23%), and support via social media (3% ). (Kayako)

Unified multichannel live chat inbox

Giving customers control to use the chat app that’s already on their phone means more conversations started. And when customers use live chat in their customer journey, it leads to more downstream revenue.

In fact, according to eMarketer, 38% of surveyed buyers said they had made their purchase directly because of a chat session.

The advantages of customer chat are clear.

So what’s it look like in practice? And how can a business effectively be available in all the chat messaging apps that a customer may be looking for?

Enter the OmniChat inbox: One messaging inbox that streamlines a business’s multiple customer chat channels. That includes, Messenger, SMS, and live web chat for your website.

Use a unified OmniChat inbox to:

• View all conversations happening across native chat, Messenger chat, and SMS (WhatsApp, Instagram Messenger, and Apple Business coming soon).
• Filter conversations by status (e.g. follow-up, done), assigned agent, or messaging channel.
• Respond to conversations with live chat.
• Save notes and tags to customer profiles.

The right tool can be a time saver and efficiency generator that makes marked improvements in customer satisfaction.

24/7 automated chatbot support software

In addition to generating leads, sign-ups, and opt-ins with chatbot software, when a customer messages your business you can:

• Set up menus so they can browse your content and offers easily.
• Automate answers to FAQs.
• Talk to them one-on-one from the live chat mobile app for iOS and Android.
• Integrate your chatbot software with your marketing tech stack.

More than anything, prospects and customers want fast answers to their questions.

This is why using a chatbot builder can be such an asset for your bot-powered business. It gives you the ability to provide instant responses to a generation of consumers that has come to expect that as part of standard service.

Customers don’t need to talk to a person to get an instant answer in chat. 

Your business can program answers to FAQs for your bot to handle and customers can get the critical information they need without ever talking to a live agent.

The way you set that up is with customer support chat Q&A triggers.

Set up keywords that trigger a response to a customer’s question in the chat.

You can even see the questions people are asking in chat sessions and program answers to those questions from existing bot content or create new content.

Create an ideal customer journey on your website

Every page on your website has a different goal. And different pages might even have multiple customer profiles in mind.

So don’t make the mistake of adding just one generic chat widget on every page on your site.

Instead, take a look at the different customer personas using your site. Then map your web pages to the customer journey and use page-specific chat widgets to help users navigate to info aligned with their needs.

Additionally, set up custom greetings for important website pages. Predict what that page visitor is looking for, and use a greeting designed to start more conversations.

For instance, the web chat greeting on your pricing page might be: “Do you want to see if you qualify for SPECIAL pricing?”

While the web chat greeting on the purchase confirmation page might be: “Would you like to receive text message updates about your order?”

Here are some custom greetings that can act as ice breakers:

• Would you like help in finding the right-size bicycle for your kid?
• Are you looking for a rental apartment, buying a home or condo, or selling your property?
• Would you mind taking a brief survey about your customer experience today?

It’s easy to set up a custom greeting, the automated follow-up, and menu system for individual web pages using Customers.ai. Which could look like this:

Create a new customer chat widget for each custom greeting and conversation flow you want to design.

Then select the page to display it on, and build the chat menu system. This should resemble a ‘phone tree’ that helps a user select the info they need.

Check out these 11 brilliant web chat examples that you can use today for more ideas.

Take over live chat conversations and route customers to the best live agent

Chatbot software should allow you to set up smart notifications in email, mobile app, and browser to alert agents when to take over with live chat.

Live chat takeover and hot lead alerts for your live agents need to be timely in order to close more deals.

Transferring a customer from chatbot to live agent is easy to do and always available with a live operator chat takeover in Customers.ai.

A smart chatbot does the job of answering FAQs and routing customers that need a live agent to the right representative.

Live operator takeover is supported by smart alerts and notifications of conversations requiring a live agent follow-up. 

Notifications can be set up as browser notifications, mobile app notifications, email notifications, and more.

Then, live agents can jump into the conversation at the right time thanks to easy-to-setup live chat lead notifications.

Drop a notification widget into any automated conversational flow and select from the notification options that work best for any team — from browser notifications to email alert to web app or mobile app notification.

And the Customers.ai desktop inbox features more advanced customer support team features, such as assigning chats to agents and marking conversations as needing follow-up or done.

Furthermore, the OmniChat inbox collects all the chat conversations happening across your brand’s messaging channels. Which includes Messenger, live web chat, and SMS – in one unified location so that you can streamline your chat support efforts.

Customers.ai also has tools to let you respond to customers in a mobile chat app: View and respond to customers wherever you are from the live chat mobile app for Android and iOS.

Using chatbot software for customer satisfaction surveys

Surveys are a great engagement and data gathering chatbot example. Set up drip messages to automate customer support satisfaction surveys.

Drip campaigns automatically send messages to customers based on triggers, like when a new contact subscribes, you can send a welcome message and offer.

Or when a customer support ticket is closed, and a chat conversation is marked done, that can trigger a satisfaction survey.

Using a pre-chat form as a way to qualify leads for your live agents is a great way to proactively engage with your website visitors and generate leads. Customers.ai live chat surveys:

• Are quick and easy for users to complete with clicks of the mouse
• Save the survey information they collect in your customer profiles
• Allow for you to send follow-up content

There’s a lot of marketing value in pre-chat surveys. And maybe the most valuable is the data you can capture quickly and then use to create targeted audiences for future engagement with customers and prospects alike.

Important Next Steps