User Experience Web Design

Make Your Webpages Talk, With Chatbots

Marketing meeting for advertising professionals

By idfive \ May 11, 2016

In the past, chatbots have been far too easy to troll to work well.

With misguided answers and questionable user intentions, conversations between people and bots tended to go either nowhere productive or somewhere quite unnecessary.

But if the bot leads the conversation, giving web visitors responses to choose from that stay within a certain topic, brands can have more control over where the conversation goes.

Both the Quartz’s news app and this designer’s website followed that strategy. Here’s a conversation I had on the bloggers site:

chatbot image

Instead of letting visitors ask open-ended questions and then try to generate a sensible response, these chatbots lead the conversation with suggested topics to discuss and responses from which to choose.

While this isn’t our ideal conversational, open-ended AI experience, it is a safe and effective way to communicate with your audience 24/7 while revealing your offerings, mission, and brand personality. Additional chatbot tactics include:

  • Provide information about your brand’s services and offerings.
  • Tell your brand’s history to create a deeper connection with audiences.
  • Improve your website’s SEO by engaging users to stay on the site longer and click on more content.
  • Collect information about your consumer’s interests and understanding of your brand services.
  • Establish a brand voice through the messages that your chatbot sends.

While you might not want to integrate a chatbot into your homepage experience, experimenting with one on a microsite or landing page would be an effective way to test the tool and see how chatbots can fit into your future marketing mix.

If you have any questions as to how to develop a chatbot experience or want to kick around creative executions, feel free to give us a shout or sign up for our mission-based marketing newsletter.