Why Bots Are the Present for Marketers with Stephanie Blake
On today’s episode of Just the Tips, Dean and I welcome Stephanie Blake to the podcast. Stephanie is at the forefront of Facebook Messenger bots, and how they can help marketers take the next step in their field. Stephanie has an amazing and relatable story, being a work-from-home mom with an affinity for taking online courses, and she’s used that to really place herself on the vanguard of bots. We talk with her about how she got into marketing, how she discovered bots, and how you can leverage bots to make your marketing sing.
How bots work for your marketing
Stephanie is the quintessential entrepreneur. She’s gone from getting laid off by her work-from-home job, to becoming a self-taught expert in a cutting-edge field. And she says bots are really at the forefront because they allow you to interact with your customer on a much more personal, individual level at a time when we’re seeing click-through rates and retention rates on emails and webinars decline. If this is all new to you, or you’re also worried about the effectiveness of your tried-and-true tools, you have to listen to this week’s episode of Just the Tips.
Bots are a revolution in communication
Stephanie calls bots a communication revolution. And while she’s already seen how Facebook Messenger bots can change things for companies, it’s not stopping there. She told us about how tech giants like Google are asking phone companies to switch from SMS messaging to RCS messaging. And that change will make a seismic shift in how people communicate with their phones, so there will be much more opportunities for dynamic interactions (including buttons, links, etc.) that will be a marketer’s dream. So if you already know how to communicate well with a bot, you’ll be able to jump on when it expands so rapidly.
With great bot power comes great bot responsibility
Stephanie points to a company called Smart Moms Plan Disney as an example of someone who is using a bot effectively and, well, intelligently. According to Stephanie, the owner of Smart Moms makes her bot very interactive, including having visitors take quizzes or surveys so that she can help serve them better. And Stephanie has some great ideas for how to get people subscribed to a bot beyond simply asking someone to subscribe. This is truly a tip-filled episode of Just the Tips.
Bots haven’t killed email lists
As Stephanie told us on this week’s Just the Tips, if you have people subscribed to your bot, you don’t own that list. That’s why email lists will never truly be replaced by bots. But while she walks us through a lot of the similarities between bots and email, she says one of the worst things you can do is copy and paste email campaigns into bots. So what should you do instead? Listen to this week’s episode of Just the Tips to find out.
Outline of This Episode
- [3:19] How Stephanie got into marketing
- [7:48] What is a bot?
- [10:51] How to make your bot look like it isn’t spam
- [15:40] How to get someone subscribed to the bot
- [18:10] Bots are saving entrepreneurs money
- [21:37] Do you own the list of subscribers to your bot?
- [24:54] Don’t copy and paste email campaigns
- [28:30] How bots are like a Choose Your Own Adventure
- [34:26] Getting in touch with Stephanie
Music for “Just The Tips” is titled, “Happy Happy Game Show” by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
