Restaurants have to continuously come up with new ways of connecting and engaging with their customers. In this new messaging and mobile era we live in, more and more restaurants are starting to incorporate Facebook Messenger chatbots as less intrusive ways of doing precisely that. More importantly 95 percent of dining consumers surveyed by chatbotsJournal.com believe bots will play a critical role in customer service moving forward
How Restaurants Can Use Chatbot Marketing
Chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence designed to communicate with customers at any time of the day. They can be programmed to perform various tasks, ranging from showing the restaurant’s menu and making reservations to processing payment and answering customer questions. Here are some of the ways restaurants can use chatbots:
- Book and Manage Reservations: Through the use of chatbots, you can allow customers to make and manage their reservations.
- Take Orders: Restaurants can also use chatbots to take, process, and complete orders with 100% accuracy.
- Present Menus Better: If your restaurant has an extensive menu and you don’t want your customers missing or skimming over any dish, you could use a chatbot to present your menu in a more visually attractive way.
- Provide Customer Feedback, Statistics, and Analytics: Machine learning chatbots can enable restaurants to collect and follow up on customer feedback. They can also provide restaurant owners with valuable information about customers and their experiences.
- Promote Offers and Deals: By tapping into your email list, a chatbot can send new enticing deals and offers to your existing customers, helping restaurants bring in more repeat business. However, you do need initial permission from the user to send these types of offers.
Combining Facebook Ads and Chatbots
Creating a digital marketing strategy that will be efficient and successful is becoming more challenging because every brand creates ad campaigns on blogs, websites, and social media. As a result, such marketing channels have become flooded with information that can be overwhelming for potential customers to sift through. That’s why combining Facebook ads and chatbots can be significantly beneficial.
Facebook already has over two billion users and, together with chatbots, presents an excellent opportunity for your chatbot marketing team to have personalized conversations with your potential customers. Through combining the two, restaurant owners have a way to:
- Provide immediate responses to queries from potential customers without using customer service reps
- Collect customer information without having to redirect potential customers to a different website
- Send personalized messages to thousands of people and boost the relation-building process
- Reach out to a local audience with deal-based offers, helping you boost localized brand-awareness
- Significantly increase lead generation and sales
Asking for Customer Data
In a world that is becoming more customer-focused, your ability to acquire relevant customer data and insight is essential because it allows you to fine-tune your service and solutions. Also, leveraging customer data goes a long way in keeping you ahead of your competition.
Customer data enables you to paint a clearer picture of your target customers, their needs and wants, and how to best market to and communicate with them.
However, the problem is that the more frequently customer data is collected, the more wary people become about sharing personal information. They might be less likely to trust that businesses will not tamper, abuse, or lose that information.
People in general are more willing to engage with chatbots than other forms of communication. Search Engine Journal recently wrote that more people are checking their chat apps than they are checking their social media accounts. When asking for customer data, it is vital to keep the following considerations in mind.
Types of Personal and Transactional Data To Collect
Begin by collecting basic information like name, age, gender, birthday, and email address. Such information enables you to personalize communication. Later on, you might consider getting information regarding their lifestyles, values, and personalities.
You should also collect transactional data such as what they order and how frequently they order it. This information helps you to know what to offer them in the future.
Ways To Collect Customer Data
Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to collect a bit of information about them. You could do this through conversational marketing like online chats, in-phone conversations, online surveys, or whenever they visit your restaurant and interact with a live person.
Storing and Protecting Your Customers’ Data
When it comes to storing the information you collect, you will need more than a simple computer program like Excel. One of the best ways to keep, track, and make sense of the data you collect is through the use of an all-in-one customer relationship management (“CRM”) solution.
Ensure that you encrypt all the data you collect to protect it. You could either hire a data security specialist to do this for you or opt for a third-party solution.
Retargeting Customers Through Chatbot Marketing
Through the power of retargeting, you can convince your new leads to return, ultimately helping you boost your sales even further. You can also grow your customer base and create lasting relationships with your customers. Here is how you can retarget customers through chatbot marketing.
Track Your Audience
The first step to retargeting customers is to know who visited your website but didn’t make a purchase. Take it a step further and segment the visitors according to their level of engagement. This data helps because someone who only skimmed through your landing page or blog posts is different from the person that considered placing an order.
Create Segmented Ads
Use the segmented list you have to create segmented ads, with each ad serving a particular purpose. Some ads will spread awareness and be meant for cold leads, while others will be for more aggressive lead generation for a customer’s birthday celebration.
Remember to test your ads so that you can get feedback on what works best. Always run one test at a time, starting with the most crucial elements. This process could involve testing for the perfect lead magnet and then finding the copy with which most people will engage.
Include a Chatbot CTA
Incorporate your chatbot into your retargeting ad by including it in your call to action. Consider enticing customer engagement by offering various incentives after a certain level of interaction.
Your chatbot can re-engage the customers who have messaged you in the past and try to win them back. You could also use the customer-chatbot interaction as an opportunity to do more market research by having people take a quiz.
In Summary
Chatbots have become skilled at helping different kinds of businesses engage with their customers. Through chatbot marketing, restaurants can offer customer support, take orders, make recommendations, and even find out their celebration dates to make an offer through chatbot messenger automation. You can give your customers a seamless digital experience and show that you understand their needs.
FAQ about Restaurant Chatbot Marketing
Can Chatbots be used by a restaurant?
Answer: Chatbots can act like an extra host for a restaurant. They can take reservations and even modify a reservation. They can tell you what today’s specials are on the menu. They can even engage a customer and make a special birthday BOGO offer.
How do you make a chatbot for a restaurant?
Answer:
1. setup a Manychat account and a Facebook business page.
2. Think for the most common questions your host get’s on the phone and add those to a chat flow
3. Sync, your chatbot to your Facebook business page, and have a link you can send through email outreach or sms (with permission of course).
Why do restaurants need chatbot?
Through cookies and A.I., chatbots for restaurants can easily recognize your regular customers and make specific offers to them that are unique to them, such as a free dessert on their birthday, or ask if they want to make a reservation for their anniversary. These offers can be sent with text, emails or Facebook messenger reminders the day before the special event.
Can a Chatbot take customized pizza orders?
Answer: A chatbot can be programmed to offer a restaurant’s menu and even allow for customizations and provide the appropriate pricing modifications to an order based on conditional logic. For example, a pizza restaurant may charge $1.25 extra for goat cheese. The bot can ask would you like to add anything else? If the person enters the word “cheese” then the bot can ask, “would you like premium imported goat cheese for an extra fee”