Chatbots have been gaining in popularity. Take a look around the web and you’ll see the little chat icons powered by great platforms like Intercom, Manychat, and Drift. Facebook itself has built it’s own chatbot feature within its Messenger platform. In 2017, the number of chatbots Facebook Messenger supports grew to 100K and the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025.
Why are chatbots so popular? They can quickly answer questions someone has about the hours of a business, questions about pricing, or links to documentation for a particular feature. Having a bot handle these questions allows the Sales and Support teams to focus on handling more complex questions about particular use cases and building the relationship with a potential customer or client. These days, they’re seamlessly tied into the sales and support processes, so that the conversation can be taken over by a staff member if it advances that far.
With the advancements in the capabilities of chatbots, can they replace email altogether?
The short answer is, it’s unlikely, for a few reasons:
Chatbots are a fantastic way for someone to engage with your brand to quickly get information from you, but sending the first message through a chat interface is a replacement for email. Email is a way to receive a message that can be addressed without immediacy. Chats are more of a live conversation, and require the user to be running the app, or on the website where the chatbot lives.
If you turn the same type of content that is sent in a marketing email and deliver it across a chat interface, you’re going to turn off a lot of your audience. Sending an unsolicited message saying a fitness class has an emergency cancellation today? Fine. Send a unsolicited message via chat that there’s a 10% off sale on some clothes? Here comes the wave of unsubscribes and blocks.
There’s a place for chats, but to say it’s simply a email replacement is not a fact just because the technology is newer, and current engagement is higher. If marketing via chat gets as popular as email, then you can be sure chat apps and platforms like facebook are going to have to categorize the content received just like gmail has created a main inbox vs a promotions tab.
Ultimately chat is one channel of marketing and engaging with your audience, but it is not an email replacement. Chat is a great addition to your communication channels with prospects, leads, and clients, and allows them to have short, engaging conversation, but it is not a replacement for a digest of information that can easily be retreived like email can.
Looking to introduce a Chatbot to seamlessly fit into your overall sales, marketing, and support processes?
Let’s chat. and P.S. it won’t be with a bot 🙂