It can’t be denied that artificial intelligence has truly infiltrated our present-day consciousness in a profound way. But rather than serving us breakfast in bed or cleaning the bathroom, AI’s presence is stealthy, behind the scenes, and quietly revolutionary. Also, it’s absolutely revamping the ways in which ecommerce and businesses operate.
AI’s presence in the world of ecommerce is huge, helping us with everything from perfecting automated call distributor systems to helping us run an effective HR department. It might not be surprising to learn, then, that AI has also reached digital marketing. The possibilities of utilizing AI to supercharge marketing are endless, and this is even more true for affiliate marketing.
“How?”, you ask. The answer might appear straightforward: chatbots. But when you start to unravel all the things a chatbot can do to help boost your affiliate marketing campaign, this solution becomes multifaceted and complex – in a good way!
A chatbot’s ability to utilize smart automation and machine adaptability to learn, track things like those all-important Instagram analytics, and develop behind the scenes can provide immeasurable support to any affiliate marketing campaign. This quick guide provides an overview of chatbots and what they can do to boost your affiliate marketing, as well as useful tips for how to use them the right way.
What Are Chatbots?
Chatbots are helpful, clever AI software tools that interact with us through messenger interfaces. They are automated chat systems that allow users to obtain information as if they were speaking with a live customer care agent. They look like a regular text chat interface and can answer common questions, help place orders, and generally help streamline processes.
In an age of digitization that isn’t showing any signs of slowing down and with more and more of us turning to online channels to conduct our business and various digital strategies, such as community management and SaaS link building rising, chatbots have been able to provide personalized customer support. In so doing, they have already shown great promise with:
- Helping businesses save time and money
- Assisting customers by answering queries with a high degree of efficiency and accuracy
- Supporting customers by staying in touch 24/7
- Aiding businesses keep and interpret important metrics and analytics
AI has already firmly found a place within many areas of how we conduct business. It’s the driving force behind contact center workforce management software that generates visibility into customer interactions that drive insightful change; it’s what fuels facial recognition software that we can use to pay for goods; It’s the security found in new anti-counterfeiting tools.
But beyond this, chatbots can, and do, use their ability to learn from their interactions with us to provide us with a useful, pertinent product recommendation, again and again, adapting as it goes. This is exactly where referral marketing software comes into play.
How Can Chatbots Benefit Affiliate Marketing Campaigns?
Affiliate marketing is an astonishingly simple way to make recommendations for people to buy products while earning a few cents on the way. It might make you wonder how to promote affiliate offers, and with good reason. Brands and businesses offer the best tools for affiliate marketing for bloggers, influencers, and publishers to earn a commission when making a referral and driving a sale. In essence, it’s a simple concept, and chatbots can help your affiliate program function effortlessly.
So, you’ve found an affiliate marketing niche. You’re off to a strong start. Affiliate marketing can take many forms, from finding affiliate links on websites, in newsletters, on social media, and anywhere else you can think of. The whole idea is to attract and convince potential customers of the value of a business’ product to hopefully lead to a sale. Chatbots can benefit this entire process in several ways:
They Can Help You Provide Support
Firstly, chatbots can help build trust between you and your audience by only providing relevant information when a customer asks for it. This in turn engages customers by providing instant support whenever it’s needed, even when you can’t. This makes it much more seamless when addressing frequent questions while also freeing up time for other important activities.
They Can Present Intelligently Chosen Affiliate Links
As soon as your chatbot sees a relevant query, it can then answer it with an affiliate link in response. Chatbots can recognize keywords in the remarks of customers and offer links that solve their queries. For example, if a chatbot recognizes certain keywords like, say, “protein powder” in a customer query, it can then provide a relevant link to an affiliate.
They Can Help Improve Lead Generation
A chatbot can help you understand your audience by keeping track of their product interests, their likes, and their dislikes. Inquisitive creatures that they are, chatbots can ask questions and conduct surveys to hone in on individual tastes and preferences. Once this is collected for many customers, it becomes invaluable data-driven insight about trends and product performance.
Let’s say that a customer visits your website. The chatbot can engage with the customer, interpreting and asking for their preferences. If this customer turns out to like, yoga, for example, the chatbot can link to affiliate sites that relate to this. With chatbots, customers get immediate answers and action items. They then use your links, and you receive affiliate income. Simple!
They Can Segment Databases
Chatbots can gather general information and customer interests directly from the interaction between bot and person. This information can then be used to generate data that helps marketing strategies like outreach and to tailor communications. Segmentation also helps businesses prioritize leads.
They Can Help Improve SEO
Search engine optimization can be improved with chatbots working on your website too. Chatbots can greet customers and proactively ask them what they’re looking for to make searches more relevant.
This immediate ability to provide help and relevant information encourages customers to spend more time on a site, increasing what’s known as “dwell time”. The longer a customer remains on your website interacting with a chatbot, the better dwell time it leads to, and the more time the bot has to make relevant suggestions. It’s a win-win situation!
Tips for Using Bots to Boost Affiliate Marketing
Wondering how you can manage an affiliate program in 2021 using chatbots? Here are some tips to help you get started:
Choose the Right Platform
Choosing the right platform from which to operate your chatbot can make a world of difference. By employing a platform such as Communications as a Service that already seamlessly integrates its contact center, voice, video, and chat for AI-powered workflows, you can make it even easier to use chatbots intelligently.
A great platform from which to launch your chatbot can ensure it does all the things you need it to. Seamless integration across all channels can make for higher conversions, better sales, higher ROI, better leads, and improved brand awareness.
Improve Your Business Processes Management
It’s not just about using AI and automation with chatbots. By instilling an atmosphere catered to improving your BPM, you ensure that you always optimize processes and workflows to be more efficient and adaptable. A BPM philosophy is one focussed on optimizing and automating business processes holistically and strategically to reshape how people, systems, and data interact overall.
Target Bigger Communities
Chatbots can help you analyze customers and their preferences to help generate insightful leads. One way to help a chatbot’s ability to generate insightful data is to give it a big sample size! One crafty way to do just that is registering domains as .io websites. By registering your site with .io branded domain name, your website can be used to target communities all over the world.
Choose a Chatbot That Functions on Multiple Channels
By using a chatbot that seamlessly integrates into multiple channels, you can take advantage of setting up affiliate links on these other channels as well. Choosing a chatbot that only needs to be built once before being unleashed on all of your channels will help your affiliate marketing campaign grow exponentially.
Once it’s built, multiplatform bots can target the most lucrative markets such as social media channels and help with your customer referral program. For example, when a potential customer finds your Facebook page, your chatbot can go on promoting a product as well as referring them to your website.
Chatbots and Affiliate Marketing: Final Thoughts
Chatbots have the potential to absolutely revolutionize the ways in which you can make affiliate marketing work for you and your audience. A chatbot’s greatest skill is its ability to provide organic and relevant information to many different customers in a way that can be intelligently tracked and turned into insight. This ability makes it lucrative for any business.
By implementing chatbots in an affiliate marketing campaign, this insight can transform into better business for you and your affiliates. Their ability to assist in increasing conversion rates has been well-covered, but it’s their ability to help users and save you time that is their secret weapon. While you choose the perfect video conference service provider, your bot could be making you money.
