Growth Hacking Monthly Issue #2 - A simple guide to chatbots

Hi all,

Welcome to the second issue of my growth hacking monthly. In this edition I’ll be sharing my views on chatbots, how you can get started if you’re thinking about using a bot and what platforms you can use.

And do you also hate to give away all your personal details when trying out a new tool. Then scroll down to the end :)

If you liked this issue, please share on social and if you have any suggestions for my next one send me your tip on Twitter or email!

Enjoy!

Chatbots are quite a hype these days. It seems you don’t really count if your company doesn’t offer a chatbot. So building a chatbot might seems a good idea for your business. But where do you start and what are important things you need to think about?

The four steps below can help you decide if and how you should build your bot.

The most important step you need to take before you start building a chatbot is thinking about the goal. Why are you building a chatbot? What does it need to do? And is a bot the best way to accomplish this goal?

These are a couple of uses you might build a chatbot for:

Most chatbot can be deployed on a host of platforms and services. You can start a bot on Messenger and host it on your Facebook page, build a chatbot for Whatsapp or deploy one on your own website.

When you’ve decided on the channel(s), it’s time to find a service where you can build your bot. Here are some examples of platforms where you can build a chatbot and offer a free-plan.

I used Flow.xo when I was experimenting with building a chatbot for my own personal website. You can check it out and have a chat here. It’s very basic, but wasn’t that hard to build. So I recommend just playing around with one of the platforms to get a feel of the workflow when building a bot.

The personality of your chatbot is a mix of copy, branding and conversational style. Think about what kind of personality works best for your brand.

A bot with an informal style might work well for a brand focused on younger people, but for a B2B brand this would probably not be the best fit.

Also take care when using humour for your bot. A sense of humour is very subjective and you have a real chance of missing the mark and end up hurting your brand.

Building a good chatbot can be very time consuming. For most chatbots you have to write every piece of script yourself and create the conversational flow. This requires a good sense for copy and writing and also some technical expertise. As you need to know how the chatbot operates and how you create a good question/answering flow.

You have to decide for yourself if you build a chatbot yourself or outsource. When outsourcing the copywriting part, make sure you have a good idea on what you want to achieve with your bot and what kind of personality it is you’re looking for. You don’t want to end up with pages of conversational scripts which end up being worthless.

Here are some more interesting articles if you want to dive in more:

Check out how other brands use bots with this big chatbot collection.

I love trying out new tools or platforms. But what I don’t like is having to share my email address and other personal details while signing up.

But with the ‘Easy disposable email address’ Chrome extension you generate a unique email address (and temporary mailbox that opens in a new tab). A great way to try out a new tool without having to give out your own email!

That’s it for this edition, hope you liked it and again please share any feedback with me on Twitter or email.

My next issue I will be talking about digital persuasion. So if you want to learn about which psychological techniques you can use, don’t miss the next edition of my Growth Hacking Monthly.