Written by a Collaborator
The mere thought of coding can overwhelm even the most motivated self-starter. It requires time, effort, tedium, and a whole lot of patience with yourself. No wonder it’s such a high-paid gig; most people don’t want to do the job. You might find yourself between a rock and a hard place if you’re an entrepreneur, though, as many modern marketing strategies use some form of code to get their message out.
Fortunately, coders know this. That’s why they’ve simplified many of these new marketing strategies to make them user-friendly for the uninitiated. While these easy-to-use strategies range from email campaigns to multimedia user engagement, today we’ll focus somewhere in the middle with SMS chatbots.
What is a chatbot? Well, it should be pretty obvious given the name if your guess is a robot that chats with you, congratulations! You’re correct. Chatbots don’t just chat with you, though; businesses use them to facilitate customer service, among other things. They alleviate waiting time bottlenecks by answering simple, commonly-asked questions and increasing the number of customers that can be helped at a time. Some predict that AI technology could power these chatbots quite impressively in the future, thereby making it an indispensable component of customer service.
That day is yet to come, but in the meantime, you can create your own sms chatbots with relative ease. The easiest route is going with an SMS messaging service. Businesses like TextSanity, Zapier, and SimpleTexting all provide user-friendly chatbot systems for commercial use.
Before you sign up for one of these services, though, make sure you’re clear on what you want your chatbot to do. Do you want it to help confirm customers’ orders? Do you want to use it as an extra pair of “hands” to help with customer service questions? Whatever it is, make sure you know what you want to use it for before you dive in.
However, you can also build your own chatbot pretty quickly, and yes, without having to code anything. First, buy a mobile number on Twilio for $1. You will use this number to send out your SMS campaigns. Next, create an account on TextIt and enter your newly-purchased number to connect your Twilio and TextIt accounts.
The next step is a little tricky: you’re going to build your app with TextIt. Click on ‘Flow’ at the top menu and create a new flow. Here you can see some sample flows to get an idea of what you want yours to look like. Flows are essentially a list of questions or statements that your SMS chatbot will use to gather data from your leads. Remember to save your results using the leads’ full names. This step will make data analysis much more manageable.
Finally, use Zapier to transfer your data to a spreadsheet. You can also use it to email the data to yourself or to put it up on Google Docs or Facebook. You could also transfer the data to a Google spreadsheet and add a ‘full name’ column to make sure you get everything you need in there.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there today and get your new chatbot rolling.
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