top 3 most common mistakes in marketing chatbots

mobile messaging platform

Chatbots are fascinating. Their base functionality consistently gets improved, and as a result, these computer programs are becoming more elaborate, convincing and efficient. As with all trending strategies, there are a few things that should be explored and a few that need to be avoided. Without further ado, let's get right into it

Chatbot marketing needs special attention as it is entirely different from usual marketing strategy. So, get the details of common chatbot marketing mistakes to stand out among your competitors.

Are you planning to start chatbot or talking robot app marketing? Or want to know the best possible way to start its marketing.

Well, you have selected the most trending marketing strategy. Hence, before starting, gather as many details and important stats you can, about the chatbot marketing. We have mentioned some most common chatbot marketing mistakes that every marketer must avoid at any cost.

Shortage of a Proper Marketing strategy

Many marketers lack a fitting bot marketing strategy. Hence, they fail to drive the expected traffic or fail to convert the people into users. Undoubtedly, chatbot is a big success if your marketing plan works. But there are a plethora of messaging apps like WeChat, Facebook Messanger, Slack and much more. The main problem is how to compete with well-known brands.

To beat your competitors, you have first to make a foolproof plan. A program that helps in satisfying your business goals, like driving traffic, transaction, revenue or want to save the time of your customer support staff.

Now, the question arises what your business goals are. You can only create a good marketing strategy if you are clearly aware of your targets. Only a crystal clear goal will help you to construct the path to follow. So, know your goal and metrics you want to target, identify the targeted audience, and make a strategy accordingly.

Lack of a specific bot website

Creating a dedicated home page helps your audience to know more about the product and its usability. Always bear in mind, recent generation will waste time and money on half information. Straightforward and clear communication is what they want. If you leave them to explore it, then they might not return. User’s convenience should be the first motto before developing any product or marketing strategy.

Avoiding Promotion Through Bot Directories

Enhancing search ability is a challenging task for chatbots. Currently, only Telegram has robust search functionalities. To solve the issue, a marketer can take help of directories and 3rd party lists o fill the void.

Mostly, submitting a chatbot to directories is free of cost while a few offer paid promotional features as well. The prominent bot directories are Botlist.co, the Slack directory, and BotPages. For details, you can take help of Google search.

Spamming

People prefer messages because they are more personal and it saves the log-in time. Considering the same, create a bot that doesn't push people to communicate or don’t act like a spam. Marketers deem the bot as a product and promote it by following the usual process. However, overdoing sales and promotions encourage users to ban or uninstall the app.

In order to rectify this mistake, only respond when a user is proactively responding to your queries. Avoid sending unsolicited messages to impress your audience. You can also take help from CustomWriting.com to get well-written descriptions and essays.

Vague Details

Offering invalid and vague information can spoil the bot’s image. Users are keen to know more about the product or services before buying, hence, offer quality details in every content piece from product description to ratings and reviews. Make the utility and range of capability of bot amply obvious for your target users.

Let’s check the example - In the description of Scorebot in Slack store, it is written: “Rule the office!”

Now, this story is useless at it contains no information about the bot’s functionality and neither it is adding value. Checkout the highly prefer chatbot and its description and compare it with others to develop an awesome one for your bot.

Interacting without specifying that the Bot is a Robot App

A chatbot is an app where you can talk to a robot. It is evident to the developers, marketers and other persons. But not clarifying the same to the users is the biggest mistake. Messaging is a personalized process hence; user expects to connect with human support staff as they believe that they will get a solution of any query instantly.

If you do not clarify that it is a robot chat app, then expectation will increase and not respond with the correct solution can harm the image of your support team. Either name it with “bot” or “Assistant” to identify your bot with other messaging apps.

Launching Without Conducting Robust User Tests

A chatbot is an automated process which is developed with intelligence. Unexpected UX issues or having a few bugs in the first iterations is a most common problem. You cannot expect an error-free bot in the first go. Hence, it is suggested to invite your existing users to test the performance of your bot and ask for honest feedback.

This will help you to get insightful info, and your clients will feel honored. Treat this bot launch as you any other product and give your best to make it perfect.

Avoiding these common chatbot marketing mistakes can make your app better, and users will love to use it.

If you have other suggestions or tips to improve chatbot commerce, then comment below. Also, share your feedback.

Conclusion

In every aspect, whether it’s popularity or engagement, messaging platforms have surpassed the social media platforms. Hence, chatbots are in trend and marketers should implement a foolproof commerce plan and must avoid these common mistakes to beat your competitors.

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the four steps for building successful chatbots

Tweet “The future of chatbots” and watch what rolls in. To be fair chatbots are the future of every industry vertical today. They are everywhere. Every fortnight there is a new technology offering a new solution that are shoving chatbots into gadgets to make them more useful and powerful.

Most of the chatbots talk has been focused on Artificial Intelligence, and while it’s fine to build a chatbot, the chatbot is about so much more than a text conversation. Imagine you walking into a shopping mall. You look at the right and see Men’s collection. You look at the left and see the Women’s collection. Now close your eyes. Can you navigate your way to the kid’s section? Even though you are familiar with this shopping mall, without wayfinding and your sense of sight it’s unlikely that you could find your way.

Walking into a shopping mall with closed eyes is similar to most conversational interfaces today. Everything you need is available, but without the proper cues, information discovery is difficult.

So here’s where we are going to ask you to take a moment to think about what exactly is a Chatbot?

You would probably answer with one of the two things – it’s a conversational robot, or it’s a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users. But here’s the thing about chatbot: it’s not a thing. It’s not your smartphone, an app, or a killer robot. At its most basic, chatbot is a messaging application, sometimes referred to as a conversational interface, designed to simplify complex predefined task(s). Chatbots are very helpful when it comes to simple activities like ordering food, booking a taxi or check for movie tickets.

That said, chatbots are slowly becoming sophisticated as leading companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft to Disney, Taco bell, CNN, just to name a few, are using them.

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations

Let’s go down a typical path to building a solution with Chatbot.

1. Creating Identity for your Bot

A good bot should be meticulously thought out. Ask questions like: Why are you building this bot? Who is your target audience? What problems will the bot solve? How are you presenting the bot- as a person or as a robot? Etc. These are things you should precisely define before getting engrossed into the bot building process. Define the core use cases and stick to it.

Your bot should know its identity and it should understand its user expectations. When a user asks questions to a bot like “What is your name?” , “How can you help me?”, “What questions can I ask you?”, etc the bot must be able to respond instead of showing some static templated messages. Let us look at some examples of the existing chatbots:

CNN is a news chatbot and PennyCat is a bot which helps you find deals for movie tickets, pizza, flowers and much more. In both these examples when asked for the bot’s name there is a templated message.

Users can interact well with a person whom they know and hence the chatbot needs to have a personality. You need to decide who your chatbot is and what matches its identity and actions. Like chatbot – “Hipmunk” has a persona: knowledgeable, Spontaneous and friendly. Likewise, you need to define the persona of your chatbot and build an identity which reflects your brand instead of simply delivering information to users in an automated format.

2. Build your flow

Well, structured conversational flow is the core to building effective and engaging conversational interfaces.

Building a Grocery Bot? Such bot can allow users to order groceries online and even automate their weekly meal preparation planning. The core of the conversation should be focussed on getting grocery to people. Many times people go off the rail, so you should always include the possibility for small talk. Your bot must trigger specific sentiments from your user then create hooks to leverage those sentiments and make the experience even better.

Conversation is limitless and probably your bot would not understand everything your users are going to want. Plan for this without breaking the flow. Even if your bot breaks, make the broken experience as painless as possible.

ChatShopper is a shopping chatbot and AllSet allows users to book a table, order food and pre-pay meals to save the time. In both these chatbots, the flow breaks when the bots are unable to answer some basic questions.

You should let your users know that your bot understands how painful it is and it wants to help you. Your bots should always drive the conversation forward. It should consider suggesting things to help users discover additional functionality. It should use actionable phrases or buttons to redirect them to a place that might solve their issue instead of leaving user with an empty white screen or an open-ended question or statements that force them to decide what should happen next.

3. Content is king

The foundation of chatbot is content. Obviously, you want your bot to be as human as possible. It must be something people enjoy coming back to. Use friendly, inclusive language when speaking to your users to make them feel they are chatting with a friend and they don’t feel like they are talking to a machine.

Does your bot work to fix its own errors? When your users are unhappy with the experience, will your bot recognize this and work to guide the conversation in a different direction or will continue on script, like emotionless robot? Let’s take up an example of the bot designed by CNN and ChatShopper.

They have a templated content which is displayed for any user response instead of replying with an emotionally appropriate response. Chatbots must save our time and reduce our efforts and pain. Otherwise, it’s not much better than any website or app.

While designing the content for the chatbots you have to create boundaries to the conversation either by giving your users buttons to select or actionable commands to use. Don’t leave the conversation open to interpretation. Without boundaries, your users can break your bot. Also be sure to repeat the info back so the users feel more comfortable knowing you got it right.

Like if I ask my bot to set a reminder for a meeting at 2pm, the bot should send me a confirmation message saying “I will send you a reminder for a meeting today at 2pm”. The Chatbot should be able to provide all the needful information within the messaging app making it a pleasant experience for the user.

4. Selection of Platforms

After coding your bot, you can start with the most exciting step i.e., selection of the desired channels! Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, WeChat, etc platforms support bots. Select the platform based on your target audience and the user experience it offers.

What’s our take on this?

We think user interfaces should always simplify choices for the user, not add to their burden. We are moving towards an era where bots will be impacting customer experience. By presenting a few, relevant options, instead of an unlimited choice in the form of an open input field, the future chatbot should be built.

It’s time to create the Future of Chatbots

The 4 steps of building a chatbot – may seem like a lot of behind the scenes effort, but, they will all pay off when they come to create a chatbot that’s as friendly and likable as it is smart and efficient.

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chatbots and the future of marketing

In the early 2010s it moved to marketing via FB and other social media channels. And, most recently we’ve seen mobile marketing rise and plateau as users have stopped downloading new apps.

As we all know, we are now in the era of messaging. And naturally, marketing and interfacing with the consumer is taking advantage of this novel platform in the form of Chatbots. Even buyer behaviour has witnessed a shift from social networks to messaging platforms such as SMS, FB Messenger, Apple iMessage, Slack, etc. Hence, technology companies are now building Chatbots on these platforms to offer AI driven intelligent and more engaging channels to brands to deliver efficient customer service. Needless to say, they are now an integral part of their marketing strategies.

We have seen innovations happening rapidly, and the basic approach towards experimenting with technology by brands has seen a vast difference. If we have to look at an apparel industry or a hospitality industry, brands are leveraging Chatbots and making them an inseparable part of their CRM systems to manage loyalty programmes, redressal forums, product launches, etc. The list is endless.

Chatbots offer true engagement beyond clicks and views. Along with personalisation of conversation, they help brands get insights directly from the consumers. All in all, they bring the brand’s personality to life. What more could one ask for?

A brand such as Sephora has created a bot on Kik, and shares beauty tips with teenagers. The bot first enquires what users are interested in learning about — eyes, skin, hair, nails, etc. — and only suggests relevant products, beauty tips, and tutorials.

Facebook Messenger, which has 11,000 bots, has become the top choice for businesses for bot development. So, this may be a good place to start out when taking a first look at developing Chatbots that live within Messenger apps.

Chatbots come mobile optimised, thanks to the market using the mobile-first approach. You don’t have to go through the additional trouble of getting them mobile-optimised. More importantly, they are easy to implement.

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

By integrating chatbots across all social media platforms and then having them interlinked, marketers can update brand messages at once across all platforms. This makes sure you have a consistent brand voice across all platforms.

It’s still early in the chatbot game, but not so early that numerous brands aren’t seeing great ROI. There’s little downside, given the growing Internet of Things, and consumers’ dependence on technology overall.

The future of chatbots is still a curiosity, as technology evolves and as the bots themselves get ‘smarter’ and more ‘humanlike’ in their analyses and responses.

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using mobile marketing increasing engagement with your customers

Engaging customers via their mobile devices is an exciting proposition for many organizations; however, it has to be done with care. These solutions often carry a significant cost and depend on a Return on Investment (ROI) model to make sense.

Achieving this ROI requires walking a fine line between meaningful engagement and being a nuisance. Here are five best practices to help you do that.

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

5 ways to ensure your mobile strategy works

1. Think big picture

The goal is to create a user experience that provides vast amounts of data to the organization while delivering value to the customer. Accomplishing that means the experience needs to be immersive and omni-channel (e.g., SMS, email, app-based, digital signage, direct mail, etc.).

Too many organizations jump straight to the mobile application without realizing adoption of mobile applications is low and retention of those mobile apps is even lower. A holistic approach that embraces the web (traditional and mobile), mobile apps, digital and physical signage, and some of the emerging areas such as augmented reality (AR) and context-aware chatbots will be far more successful.

Analytics and business intelligence tools must be included because understanding the success of these messages and their impact on the bottom line is a necessity, as engagement attempts that are ill-received may create a negative effect on the business.

2. Establish a baseline

Before rolling out any new engagement solution or even a single targeted campaign, it is important to understand the baseline. What is normal for a specific time of day, day of week, demographic, location, etc.

If there are areas in which these baselines are unknown, the success of an engagement will also likely be unknown. The length of time to determine a credible baseline depends on business and vertical; however, a month of data will provide statistically valuable data for many organizations.

3. Consider your social credibility

Each engagement or touchpoint with the user must be carefully weighed prior to being implemented, as the organization is spending “social credibility” with the customer in issuing these engagements. Determining that a message is hitting the right person at the right time and place is paramount to success.

While the organization may want to drive a specific behavior, it must be done in such a way that it is graciously accepted by the recipient. For less important messages, consider other channels for delivery—email, direct mail and digital signage integrations are options that are less invasive than a targeted push message.

4. Leverage employee engagement

Business should ensure the human component isn’t lost in this digital marketing frenzy.

Consider a scenario in which an employee could be notified when a user has spent more than five minutes in front of a specific retail display or there has been a high density of users in line for a drink at a sports game or concert venue. Rather than trying to ping users to have them go find another bar, consider triggers that have an employee come over with a mobile payment system and perform line-breaking transactions. This human component may still be considered a “digital engagement,” but it won’t feel like it to the consumer.

5. Keep it fresh

Digital engagements should always be timely and relevant. Organizations can’t afford to be lazy about managing these platforms because pushing irrelevant messages will drive away customers, cause them to remove their mobile apps, and even consider competitors.

Campaigns should also create a sense of urgency—create a fear of missing out or at least ensure customers understand this immediate deal is good for only the first 100 redemptions.

Gamification is one way to keep things interesting for consumers, and it can drive additional spend as it may promise “bonus” rewards for the additional engagement. The solutions should be simple enough that they can be managed by marketing teams and not IT.

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mobile messaging or sms chatbots

Since messaging apps overtook social networking apps in popularity last year, there’s been a lot of bandwagon-jumping pressure for businesses to quickly deploy customer-facing chatbots into Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other messaging networks. One of the biggest challenges  companies are facing today are how effecting are  messaging  chatbots ? and are they  really the best place to provide customer service? And are chatbots—even sophisticated ones—the right way to respond to the growing demand for text-based customer support?

Before your business hops on the messaging train, take a step back and survey the landscape. Instead of trying to utilize all the messaging apps you think your customers might be using in the future, or trying to “go where the millennial's are,” why not consider a reliable, stable technology that also has the virtue of being a medium your users already use and love, and where there’s a proven response rate and demand?

The future of chatbots for businesses is not in messaging apps, but in SMS.

SMS is preferred by many for text-based support.

It’s true that messaging apps have overtaken social media, but that doesn’t mean that’s the best place for customer service from your business. These metrics prove only the apps’ popularity, not their utility or their ability to serve your customers’ needs best.

Imagine for a second: Where would you go first when you have a problem with a business? Let’s say you need to make a change to your airline flight itinerary, or return a faulty product that you ordered online. Are you going to open Facebook Messenger? How would you even initiate that conversation?

Unless the business already initiated the conversation via your preferred messaging app, there’s no obvious place to start. How would the business know which is your preferred messaging app, anyways? There are so many choices now, just like social media, and none of them is right for everyone. What if the business went all-in on WhatsApp, and you only use Messenger? Before you’ve ever contacted the company for customer support, you’re annoyed.

As a business, you can remove the question of which messaging app to support by building your text-based support channels via SMS instead. Everyone who has a smartphone with one of the messaging apps also has a phone number and a built-in texting app. Even people who don’t have smartphones (though they may be increasingly fewer in certain Western countries) can get a great customer support experience through a text message thread. Instead of worrying about where your customers might be, rely on SMS to find them where they already are.

Allmost all statistics show that SMS response rates beat out other forms of text-based communication by miles ahead.

Most people have email too, you might argue, so why not use email? Isn’t that a proven channel of customer communication? While that’s true, according to the Pew Research Center, short-term response rates for text messages are consistently higher than email. Text messages for marketing have a 98% open rate, while email open rates only average about 20%. On average, text messages are read within 5 seconds. Additionally, 97% of smartphone users use text messaging regularly, making it the most widely-used smartphone feature.

As a result, 79% of companies believe their customers want SMS support. If you want high response rates from happy customers, these statistics prove that text-messaging is the way to go.

Best practices for SMS chatbots for customer communication

SMS isn’t going anywhere, despite what the CEOs of messaging companies might prefer you believe. When it comes to customer service, consider deploying an SMS chatbot over a messaging app one, to better serve your customer’s needs. If you’ve decided the time is right for your company to deploy an SMS chatbot, consider these best practices first, to ensure you’re providing maximum value for your users:

• Find ways to make it clear what the boundaries of the bot’s capabilities are, and to communicate to the user what it can and (implicitly, at least) can’t do.
• Fail gracefully by always implementing friendly, useful denials and error messages, like “I’m sorry, I’m not understanding the question—I’ll connect you to my human colleague.” Those outs will help you avoid creating the text communication equivalent of road rage.
• If a human is expected, don’t make it impossible to get to a human on the line (like many voice-based customer service lines currently do).
• In fact, if you’re a smaller business, or already have a customer service staff, consider slipping the bot altogether, and making SMS a channel to reach real people.
• Conversely, if a bot can answer a question and dealing with a person is unnecessary, don’t make the customer talk to a person to get an answer.
• Don’t be gimmicky—or people won’t engage with you for very long.

What makes a bot really great? According to Robert Hoffer, who worked on one of the first successful chatbots on the internet, “most designers agree bots need to have something resembling a human personality.” Even though his creation, AOL Instant Messenger’s SmarterChild, wasn’t all that sophisticated, it had a stickiness that we don’t often see in modern bots. At its peak, SmarterChild chatted with 250,000 people a day.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here are some modern bots that provide real value:

• Reply Yes provides an ecommerce service over mobile messaging. The customer enters their phone number, and then the service texts them product images and descriptions. The customer can respond LIKE, DISLIKE, or OWN to personalize future picks. Or, as the name implies, reply YES to purchase the product.
• Digit helps people save money with small bank transfers and intelligent analysis of their bank account balances and transactions. While it has apps for iOS and Android, its SMS interface is comprehensive and users do not need to download the app to get the most out of it.
• Capital One has its own bot for banking customers called Eno. Customers can use it to easily find out more about their money.
• StaffJoy notifies your team about scheduling updates, ensuring that changes to a complex schedule never get missed. This can be used to make support teams, warehouses, delivery companies, or restaurants more effective.
• If your company is interested in leveraging an existing Natural Language Processing or AI platform to build a bot, Agent.ai and DeepPIXEL both provide artificial intelligence, including natural language processing (NLP), to enhance and empower customer service and sales teams. A third option, Conversable, “powers the intersection of AI with messaging and voice.”
• Finally, for a fun example, Botline Bling lets anyone simulate a texting relationship with the artist Drake.

More good news: SMS continues to evolve. Take the emergence of the RCS (“Rich Communications Service”) standard, an initiative supported by an increasing number of carriers around the world. While large carriers are still converging around how the marketplace will work, RCS (sometimes called “Advanced Messaging”) enables rich user interactions, dynamic elements, and analytics, right in the messaging inbox. This means that bots built on SMS will soon have a rich interface as the standard, which will empower better, more consistent communication across devices—without requiring users to download an app or friend anyone. Keep an eye on news about RCS, as it’s something you’ll likely be hearing about in the coming quarters.

When it comes to chatbots, what not to touch with a ten-foot stick

Finally, there’s a long list of “Don’ts” for chatbots. Here’s a short list of things you should absolutely not do with SMS chatbots:

• Don’t send soulless spam or overuse SMS messages (for instance, to convey information the user already saw on the web or in your app)
• Don’t ignore customers with legitimate problems or use a “we’ll get right back to you” autoresponder, afterwhich no one ever follows up
• Don’t deploy chatbots who say the same thing over and over again, or have no personality
• Don’t auto-message customers with pushy or invasive sales pitches
• Don’t use bots as a substitute for real people when a personal touch is needed
• Don’t create a chatbot simply because you think its personality is entertaining. Customers don’t want entertainment—they want help!
• (It goes without saying that you should practice good hygiene with basics like user opt-in and compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and other applicable regulations)

Sadly, many first-generation chatbots are simply identical copies of existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR)—phone customer service—experiences. As Chris Messina, product guy and bot expert, pointed out in a recent Q&A, “To stop there ignores the potential for these platforms, as well as what advances in AI and machine learning may offer in the way that they adapt, respond, synthesize, and respond to inbound user queries.” Instead, imagine a scenario where those dense and annoying call trees are removed altogether. Those kind of chatbots, in the words of Messina, “allow a user to express herself in her words (to specify an intent) to have the system respond with a relevant and contextual response, avoiding the multi-layer decision tree workflow altogether.” Imagine how much happier your customers will be when this becomes not just a reality, but the norm.

The bottom line is: don’t use a chatbot because it’s new and shiny. Only add one into your communication workflow if it genuinely improves the customer experience. And don’t be distracted by the popularity of new messaging apps. Instead, meet your customers where they already are with text-based communication through SMS—and, when appropriate, with chatbots in that high-touch channel. Your customers will thank you.

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biggest distruption in short messaging in 2017

In 2011, influencers were predicting the end of SMS text messaging, greatly in part due to the app’s growth in the mobile marketplace. Now heading into 2017, industry analysts are reporting that SMS is set to grow from $55.49 billion to $71.60 billion by 2021. As for the mobile app? The average smartphone user in the U.S. is downloading zero apps per month.

While many marketers quickly jumped aboard the proposed app-first era and skimmed over the capabilities of SMS, a few experts saw the writing on the wall—or more accurately, the smartphone screen. With SMS’s convenience and ease of use, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 2016 will go down in the books as the year millennials helped make it the preferred channel for business-to-consumer communications.

To follow-up its trend-setting year as not only a consumer-to-consumer communication channel, but also a business-to-consumer engagement tool, SMS has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.

Here are the SMS capabilities projected for 2017.

Chat Bots + SMS = A Match Made in Customer Service Heaven

Chat Bots will automate customer interactions for specific self-service use cases like appointment scheduling or responding to payment reminders. Chat bots and SMS are the two key ingredients to help an organization become king of customer service in 2017. According to a recent OpenMarket poll of over 500 US-based millennials, 60 percent of them prefer the sort of two-way text engagement available through company chat bots. And, with Gartner predicting that by 2019, 20 percent of major brands will abandon their mobile apps, companies are scrambling to implement new and highly effective communication channel opportunities that simplify mobile engagements with consumers.

Voice Will Be Replaced by Text

In 2016, texting became the number one preferred channel for notifications from businesses for millennial audiences. Email came in a close second, but as for voice? It lagged behind in a distant third. On top of this, 72 percent of millennials are currently texting at least 10 times a day and 90 percent of text messages are read within three minutes. The likelihood of reaching and engaging consumers on their mobile devices is getting increasingly higher, and the channel that works the best is leaning much more in favor of SMS.

SMS > Facebook

Despite what may have been forecasted in predictions past, social media is not the best way to reach young adult audiences. While there’s no doubting its pull for networking purposes, that’s where the channel’s power ends. There are simply too many different social media channels – even Facebook as a company no longer has a single social media solution given the fragmentation of younger users preferring Instagram over Facebook. They key point is that SMS is a much more valued communication tool for B2C engagement, as consumers prefer it over any other form of messaging channels, including Facebook Messenger.

B2C Text Messages Will Dominate the Inbox

Let’s look even further out for this one. By 2025, 50 percent of text messages consumers receive will be from preferred businesses. As we enter this New Year, companies have a huge, untapped opportunity to use text messaging to communicate with their customers. Currently, millennials are only receiving 0-5 text messages from businesses a week, with 20 percent noting they never receive texts from them at all. As consumers increasingly vocalize preferences, over the next few years companies will be forced to address this consumer demand by implementing SMS— or face irrelevancy.

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3 best case studies on how brands are using mobile messaging to market

mobile messaging solutions from vectramind

How Brands are using mobile  messaging  to market their products :Here are some examples of how brands have used pure-play platforms and in-house chat to engage users. 

 WhatsApp: Toyota Brands like Procter & Gamble, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Absolut Vodka and Toyota have tried their hand at WhatsApp-based marketing campaigns. Here’s a closer look at two campaigns on the platform. Toyota Spain built a fun “flirting competition” campaign on WhatsApp to drive the launch of its new car, the Toyota Aygo. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine, 99 percent of messenger app users on iOS in Spain have WhatsApp installed. The campaign encouraged users to “woo” the new Toyota Aygo car (for a chance to win one of their own, with the winner announced on Valentine’s Day) by sending private messages to Toyota Spain with their best cheesy one-liners, memes, pictures, audio messages and videos. Toyota still had to rely on the reach they had on social media in order to drive traffic to the WhatsApp campaign in the first place. Potential fans heard about the campaign from Facebook and other promotions that gave them Toyota’s WhatsApp number.

 WhatsApp: Klik The Toyota campaign was one-to-one marketing in the sense that there was a direct line of communication between one user and Toyota, but multiple users could not interact with one another. What happens if chat gets more social? Israeli chocolate company Klik used WhatsApp to reach groups of teen friends. Friends could add Klik to their group chat and play a game of Klik Says together. Klik Says was like Simon Says, where Klik initiated the commands and friends sent back photos. More than 2,000 teens added Klik to their WhatsApp chat, and 91 percent of them completed the Klik Says game. This high engagement rate on mobile messaging spilled over onto Facebook, with the Klik Facebook page engagement rates increasing by 51 percent.

Snapchat: Taco Bell Snapchat has 100 million daily active users and 11 percent of U.S. teens say they use Snapchat more than Facebook. Consumer brands across industries have tapped Snapchat to reach teens. Ephemerality lets them send fleeting rewards and exclusive content, adding a ticking clock to drive up engagement. taco bellTaco Bell uses the app to announce new launches, promos and menu items. Nicholas Tran, former digital marketing lead at the company, says the users are “crazy engaged,” with 80 percent of users opening the brand’s snaps and 90 percent of them watching a sent video in its entirety, even if a clip is 5 minutes. Tressie Lieberman, now Vice President of Digital Innovation at Taco Bell, explains the rationale behind the approach: “It’s all about treating them like personal friends and not consumers.” Ms. Lieberman, we couldn’t agree more. 

 American Eagle’s In-House Chat Teen-apparel brand American Eagle used chat to drive clothing sales directly and to solicit reviews for their products. This took place in their mobile app, which showcased their products and offered discounts. Users could tap into a live chat feature to talk to an American Eagle sales associate. The brand reports that teens asked the sales associates for shopping advice from sales associates and treated the experience as an informal styling session with a friend. The response to chat was overwhelmingly positive, and it had a business impact, as well: 51 percent of the conversations had to do with sales.

how traditional marketing is giving way to mobile messaging

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.

The Application to Person (A2P) SMS messaging market has been on the rise for the past few years as both enterprise organisations and service providers turn to this form of messaging to enhance customer experience and consequently their engagement. This two-way communication Messaging Market between businesses and their customers is only expected to continue growing, in fact according to recent analyst reports this market is set to grow from $55.49 billion in 2016 to $71.60 billion by 2021.

A2P messaging services have been used across various industries, including Government, IT and Telecoms, Healthcare, Travel and Tourism and Retail and eCommerce to name just a few. Out of all of these, the Retail and eCommerce vertical is expected to hold the largest market share due to the constant growth in the number of internet users, the rapid rise of smartphones, and the increasing number of tech-savvy consumers.

Mobile marketing by both marketers and application developers as well as the overall growth in mobile payments and banking applications have also contributed to the rise of the A2P and P2A messaging market. In fact, the MEF Mobile Messaging Report 2016, stated that its successful employment within the financial services sector helped lead to this recent growth.

Mobile messaging allows consumers to access their banking anytime, from anywhere and the data shows that 33 per cent of people received at least one text in the last month from a banking/financial institute. There are perhaps two reasons for this. Firstly, one-time password texts form an important part of bank authentication. But secondly, alerts replace more traditional and slower physical communications, such as letters sent out to inform customers that they are nearing their overdraft limit. In 2015, The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said signing up to text alerts and mobile apps actually reduced customer overdraft charges and provided them with better insight into the day to day management of their accounts.

Healthcare within the UK is another sector that has also seen a boost in A2P adoption. The provisions for both patients and providers in cheaper and automated processes make this a viable option. Text messages can be automated, therefore are cheaper, more convenient and less likely to be missed than phone calls. Embracing the messaging system allows for appointment reminders, medical pickup notifications and general health campaigns to be accessed directly by the individual at a faster, more reliable rate. The UK is the most enthusiastic adopter with 33 per cent of us having already corresponded this way.

A2P messaging is continuing to grow and the optimism surrounding its uptake no doubt comes from ease of integrating SMS. Many companies are now building apps that send messages and alerts through the software. This has empowered the companies, whilst also eliminating painstaking negotiations with mobile network operators or aggregators. The growth towards conversational commerce or, ‘bots’, will allow for further development, with conversations taking place between customers and business in real time. Facebook Messenger represented the company’s leap into conversational commerce by turning its popular Messenger app into a business messaging tool. Launching a full chatbot API has allowed businesses to create interactions for customers to occur within the Facebook Messenger app. Individuals are now able to order flowers, browse the latest fashion and make purchases, or even request an Uber, all from within a Messenger chat.

Conversational commerce represents the next phase of brand communications and makes messaging apps even more central to people’s day to day lives. Whilst Over-The-Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat are seen as a threat to A2P, model will become the preferred choice for both businesses and consumers.

Businesses continually strive to find new and effective ways to reach their audience and, due to the ease of adoption and in-built reliability of SMS, A2P is the perfect solution for effective two-way communication.

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the danger of fraud in A2P messaging is growing

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

According to Telefonica the yearly volume of text messages sent  annually is 8.3 trillion. And then there are the businesses that are increasingly turning to messaging as a key technology for engaging consumers. Banks, doctor’s surgeries, media companies and charities are all embracing Application-to-Person (A2P) SMS as the most effective channel for engaging with their audiences.

And there’s good reason. In a world that is characterised by more and more digital interaction that is competing for tinier and tinier moments of consumer attention, messaging delivers two vital ingredients – convenience and cut through. Often quoted Dynmark reserach indicates that SMS has a 98 per cent open rate. SMS wins, chapter and verse.

And whilst there’s certainly a shift towards messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as a rich peer-to-peer alternative, A2P SMS messaging is growing in tandem. Analyst firm mobleSQUARED forecasts the A2P market to be worth $58 billion by 2020 (rising from $12.88 billion in 2015).

What’s interesting about the mobileSQUARED research is that it is unusually conservative. It accounts for growth based on mobile operators deploying revenue assurance platforms to shut down grey routes, not market growth initiated by business in to new vertical sectors, growth markets in countries that haven’t reached ‘peak mobile’ or innovation in to new technology sectors like IoT. However, it does point to the wider problem of fraud within the messaging ecosystem.

Grey routes, which fraudulently ride on the dedicated P2P [person to person] connections of operators, are one aspect but there are many other types of fraud in messaging that range from the technical exploitation of vulnerabilities in any given network through to more direct manipulation of consumers.

The prevalence of spam

Perhaps more worrying is the prevalence of spam and SMiShing (SMS phishing), practices that are commonplace in both mobile messaging and messaging via chat apps.

Earlier this year Global trade body MEF released the Mobile Messaging Fraud Report 2016. It found that more than a quarter of consumers (28 per cent) receive an unsolicited SMS message every day and 58 per cent report receiving one every week.

Within messaging apps, the problem is only slightly less prevalent with, 26 per cent of chat app users receiving an unsolicited text message every day, while 49 per cent receive at least one a week.

Whilst the majority of unsolicited mobile messages are not much more than a nuisance – notifying users of an unwanted offer or service for example - 33 per cent of consumers said that they had received . Message aiming to trick them into disclosing personal data such as bank details or passwords for online services.

MEF estimates that SMiShing contributes an estimated $680 million to the $2 billion annual fraud cost currently borne by mobile operators and consumers. It’s also interesting to note that although the SMS channel receives the highest daily occurrence of unsolicited messages it remains the most trusted with 35 per cent indicating that it was their most trusted channel, against 28 per cent trusting messaging apps the most and only 18 per cent choosing platforms such as Facebook, Yahoo and Skype.

This is likely because the percentage of spam messages is still less than one per cent of the overall volume of messages. When compared to the nearly 50 per cent on email, SMS is still a clean and powerful channel.

The cost correlation

It’s also true that there is a high correlation between the cost to deliver a message and the amount of spam and fraud the channel attracts. For example, it could be argued that the reason for low levels of spam in Germany and France is directly related to:

a.) The cost to send a message through legitimate routes being relatively high

b.) The effectiveness of local operators in those countries to block grey routes and filter spam being very good.

By contrast India, Nigeria and South Africa the cost for sending a message is relatively low, and although things are improving these networks have historically been less protected. At the same time in many mobile first countries consumers are less likely to have email addresses and SMS therefore acts as a substitute for email marketing.

A lack of cost may be the reason why 72 per cent of users in the study have received unsolicited messages from messaging apps like Whatsapp. Yet no official API exists for sending Enterprise to Consumer messages on many of these platforms. This is concerning as it indicates that fraudsters are using weaknesses in the person to person capabilities of these apps to send messages on behalf of enterprises.

Moreover, messaging apps will need to be cautious when they move to legitimate enterprise communications if they don’t want to replicate the fate of Push Notifications, where overzealous marketers have polluted the channel which is now only trusted by 16 per cent of consumers.

There are a number of things that can be done in order to reduce fraud and spam across all channels:

• Create a global shortcode, long number or email that can be used to report unsolicited messages. The easier we make it, the more people will do it. Ensure these reports are shared across the ecosystem in an automated way so they can be acted on.
• Operators must continue to install SMS and ss7 firewalls in their network to prevent grey and fraudulent routes from being exploited for sending spam and SMiShing messages.
• OTT apps must close weaknesses in their systems that allow individual user accounts to send large amounts of unsolicited messages undetected.
• When OTT apps finally allow for Enterprise-to-Consumer messages to be sent legitimately via an API, they must charge on a per message basis for the service to ensure that both fraudsters and overzealous marketers do not abuse the channel.
• Innovate on how cloud message providers can better validate the identity of companies to ensure that SMiShing attempts are thwarted early and often.

Whilst it's very encouraging that the A2P market is expected to grow over the coming years, we can’t take consumer trust in the platform for granted.

Clearly the industry needs to enact measures that will protect and nourish trust as an enabler for future growth in new vertical markets and innovation in new areas of technology like IoT and machine-to-machine messaging.

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how a2p messaging is impacting the service industry

Enterprise application to person (A2P) is a leading-edge technology that sends short messaging services (SMS), using a unique application system. A2P generated SMS are usually compatible with all mobile handsets and supports popular operating systems such as iOS, Android, Symbian and Windows. Considering the expanding base of mobile subscribers, A2P SMS technology is likely to get more popular in the years to come. Currently, the BFSI sector has emerged as one prominent end-users of A2P messaging and is expected to have more application of the technology as time progresses. Transactional notifications such as one time password (OTP) can be a leading example of A2P messaging service. Some of the other primary applications of A2P SMS include inquiry and search-related services, pushed content services, customer relationship manager (CRM), business services, marketing/promotional campaigns and interactive services.

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

Enterprise A2P technology is also used for establishing large communication channels between receivers and senders during public announcements, mass voting for contests and charity among others. In addition, enterprise A2P messaging services are an effective way of conducting promotional campaigns as well. As per Future Market Insights’ latest study, the global market for enterprise A2P SMS is set to increase at 6% CAGR between 2015 and 2025. Factors such as increasing transaction through mobile application, mobile market activities and mobile banking leading to generation of massive volumes of A2P messages. Moreover, technological advancements and arrival of latest SMS platforms having integrated application programming interfaces (APIs) are likely to boost the enterprise A2P SMS market.

A2P messages are easy and convenient to use, especially with arrival cutting-edge platforms integrated with messaging gateways and APIs. These gateways and platforms ease up the process for transferring A2P SMS for enterprises. Improvement in end-user experience and development of more secure and reliable networks are further encouraging its adoption. Adoption of A2P messaging is at rampant, especially in enterprises. Most of the companies require an effective messaging system, which can make an impact when reaching prospective clients. A2P messaging is quite effective in processing OTPs or confirmation messages. A2P technology comes in two basic format - managed messaging services and cloud API messaging platforms. The latter is expected to be more popular in the near future, owing to its technological superiority as well as affordability.

Amongst regions, the market for enterprise A2P SMS in Asia Pacific is highly lucrative. The mainly attributed to increasing demand for CRM messaging services and promotional application. Moreover, the region has a high percentage of population that uses mobile phones, which further encourages enterprises to use A2P SMS for reaching their target audience. With remarkable growth opportunities in several emerging countries in the Asia Pacific region, multinational companies are laying stronger emphasis on penetrating the region’s market in order to further increase customer base. The aforementioned factors are projected to create lucrative business opportunities for SMS aggregators, SMS marketers and A2P SMS platform providers over the next couple of years.

The global market for enterprise A2P SMS is highly fragmented with service providers raging from SMS gateway providers, telecom operators, SMS aggregators, bulk SMS providers, to marketers or resellers who play an important role in the market. At present, SMS aggregators along with telecom operators and other associated stakeholders collectively account for a large share of the market.

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