Science fiction has long promised us a future where we are assisted in our day-to-day lives by robotic assistants. While we haven’t progressed to our own personal robo-butlers quite yet, we have started to see technologies like chatbots begin to rise to prominence. Adobe has now released a Marketo Engage-integrated Dynamic Chat solution that your company can leverage to provide targeted, personalized engagement for your audience.

Design Your Virtual Assistant

Dynamic Chat allows you to build multiple dialogues that will define how you want to approach your audience. Each dialogue will have three components to its design that control its behavior. The first two components are logistical in nature. First, you will need to define where you want the chat to appear. In other words, which web page(s) should your bot use to engage your customers? Next, you need to define who you want to engage. The dialogue you present to an unknown visitor could be designed entirely differently from the one you give to someone you know is a member of the C-suite at a company you are specifically targeting.

The third, and most involved, aspect will be designing the actual prompts, content, and logical paths you want the conversation to use. Each prompt can lead to one or multiple paths as your bot assists your visitor. Obviously, as a savvy marketer, you have a desired outcome in mind that you are driving your audience toward. For your reporting and analytics, you can mark steps in the conversation as goal steps. Think of a completed goal step kind of like a successful status in a Marketo program. This will help you track how successfully each dialogue is performing.

The visual aesthetics of your chatbot are yours to design. You have control over the coloring, font, and even the avatar you show. Take the time to make sure your bot follows your brand guidelines. Before you send your chatbot out on to the world wide web, you will need to give it a name. Some brands choose to be transparent, naming their chabot something that clearly indicates you are dealing with a machine. Other brands choose to use a human name. Find what works best for your brand. Dynamic Chat’s UI allows easy control when implementing these decisions.  

Dynamic Chat also allows integrations with your sales team’s calendars in Outlook or Google. Once the setup is complete, you can offer your website visitors the option to schedule a meeting directly from the chat window without anyone on your payroll taking the time to set it up. In case your sales team is worried about being flooded with unqualified leads, you can reassure them that you can set up the dialogue to only present the option to those records that meet certain qualifications.  

Take Advantage of the Marketo Connection

Make sure to take advantage of the Dynamic Chat solution’s integration with the Marketo Engage platform. The conversations you design can fully leverage Marketo’s token functionality. This will grant you the ability to personalize your messages. We all know personalized marketing campaigns perform better than marketing to a generic audience.

Dynamic Chat will also open up a new suite of smart list filter/trigger options that you can use. With access to this new logic, you can seamlessly incorporate chatbot interactions into your overall Marketo plans. This allows you to perform actions like basing a triggered email upon reaching a dialogue goal, targeting all the people who interacted with the chatbot, and scoring the action of scheduling an appointment with one of your representatives. Most organizations will start their deployment of the chatbot small with some specific use cases. However, if you take the time to plan out what the projects need, the chatbot can be fully incorporated into advanced ABM strategies and play an important role in your multi-touch attribution model. 

The Future is Now

We are likely just on the cusp of what automated assistants like chatbots will be able to offer to you, your organization, and your customers. Industries such as retail, healthcare, and banking are all already adopting chatbots meaning consumers’ familiarity and comfort with them is likely only to increase. Younger generations that have grown up on the internet already expect instant service 24 hours a day. Chatbots help fulfill this need.

Here at Leadous, we pride ourselves on staying at the forefront of delivering the best Marketo experience possible. The Dynamic Chat solution will be available to all new Marketo Engage customers, and Adobe is currently in the process of rolling the feature out to existing accounts. No matter your history with Marketo, we can help you incorporate this new engagement stream into your instance and marketing strategy. Let us guide you through your launch and then help you develop advanced campaigns that help improve your customer experience and ROI.

Reach out to a Leadous expert today to discuss Dynamic Chat in more detail.