An Instagram chatbot is considered a critical social media tool for marketing.

As we all know, social media has become a good source to target, reach, and engage your audience. Instagram is one of the best social media platforms for marketers.

The good news is that you can build your Instagram chatbot without much technical knowledge and in minutes. Here is how.

Let’s understand why Instagram chatbots for marketing?. Before that, you must have a basic understanding of Instagram chatbots.

Let’s start!

What is an Instagram Chatbot?

An Instagram chatbot is a social media messaging platform that answers users’ queries in an automated way. Chatbots use AI to interact with their users. Instagram chatbots can perform better than you think. They can answer queries, make recommendations, and even move the query to a human agent if it gets stuck at some points. 

You might have experienced the fake or robotic sounded Instagram bots that mostly send irrelevant messages. That type of Instagram chatbot is generally used to increase followers’ likes and comments that usually Instagram users consider spam and ruin customers’ experience.

But that’s not the case with Instagram chatbots; they don’t pretend to be real people; instead, they act as a go-between interacting from a brand to a customer in real-time. Chatbots are integrated into businesses’ official Instagram accounts, and these are not like separate Instagram accounts with some followers and posts encouraging the users to purchase from their posts. 

For instance-

Let’s consider users going through its newsfeed and catching an eye on posts from its used brands. They can directly chat with them using the let’s chat option to get more information regarding that post instead of waiting a long time to get replies to comments. A chatbot platform can help users to re-engage with brands and optimize personalization.

Why Go for Instagram Chatbot?

Here are some Instagram stats that will set the stage:

  • Instagram has over 1 billion active users, overtaking most other social media platforms. 
  • 90% of Instagram users follow a business.
  • 44% of shoppers use Instagram to shop weekly.
  • 66% of people say that Instagram assists them in connecting with brands.
  • 50% of users have used Instagram to search for new brands. 
  • 92% of Instagram users move to certain products or services after seeing them on Instagram.
  • 63% of Instagram users sign in at least once a day.
  • Two hundred million Instagram users reach at least one business account daily. 
  • One hundred thirty million Instagram users click on shopping posts monthly. (Source: Hootsuite).

In short, sales and marketing through Instagram is a huge opportunity for any brand. 

How does Instagram Chatbot Work?

Instagram chatbots are built with conversation flow charts. They empower the chatbots to interact with potential customers, whether replying to queries or performing certain tasks. 

You can build chatbot flows according to your requirements using three elements:

Triggers: Tell the chatbot when to launch.

Actions: Tell the chatbot what to do.

Nodes: Tell the chatbot what situations cause a particular action

For instance, whenever a customer sends you a message on Instagram DM with a query about shipping, you can answer them via chatbots. Here you are just required to set up a chatbot that will be triggered by a set of particular keywords such as ” shipping,” “track order,” or “shipping details.” You can change the chatbot actions by just modifying triggers, activities, and conditions. 

Types of Instagram Chatbots

Generally, Instagram users communicate with brands for various reasons and situations. To handle all such queries, your chatbot must be able to handle all such functions.

Let’s discuss some of the basic functionalities of chatbots.

Instagram Story Chatbot Responder

Responding individually to every Instagram story comment is necessary. It makes the users feel that their response matters greatly to your brands. But answering every comment is not an easy task when you handle it manually. Many times customer executives won’t be available to answer every query raised by the customer, especially when you have many followers. Chatbots can work very well in such situations; you can set up which reaction should trigger the chatbot. Using this, you can send simple greeting messages along with GIFs or media as a reply to Instagram users. 

Instagram DM Chatbots for Replying to FAQs 
instagram chatbot

Again non-availability of customer executives round the clock is the issue to answering DM instantly. Also, businesses can’t hire quality services specifically to answer queries on social media accounts. Here chatbots can help you by programming your chatbot with answers to FAQs to trigger the chatbot.

Automate Shopping on Instagram via DM with Chatbot

Apart from answering FAQs and sending greeting messages, you can take orders from Instagram. Chatbot right from the chat. Thus, it helps businesses bypass hiring an official to take online orders and make the order placement smooth for the customers and the businesses.

Send Product Suggestions Depending on the User’s Preferences.

Customers are more inclined to have customized products. You can easily achieve this via chatbots, as chatbots can help you gain customers’ details and preferences, and based on that, you can send product suggestions to Instagram users. 

Ask for an opinion on Facebook.

Gathering customers’ feedback is significant for businesses as it empowers them to improve their customer service, thus raising customer loyalty and sales. Instagram’s shopping tool hasn’t developed to leave feedback under the product cards. For this, you can ask your customer to provide their feedback on your Facebook page. Usually, Instagram chatbots can assist you with this by sending a request to a customer. 

How to Make Use of Instagram Chatbot?

1. Save Resources to Handle Complex Queries.

For human agents to answer queries takes time. At the same time, robots can automatically respond to questions, even to multiple queries. You can employ your customer agents to work on more complex issues such as brainstorming new marketing campaigns, competitor analysis, etc. Thus, it saves your agents time and works more productively instead of answering repetitive queries. 

2. Automate Lead Generation and Sales

Instagram chatbots collect the customer’s details, preferences, and many other details. Based on the collected information, it sends product or service list recommendations to the customer. These chatbots can work on your behalf to grab the users’ attention and convert leads. Even during holidays, when there are meager staff to handle queries, chatbots can work round the clock 365 days to attend to every customer query and help them get the product of their choice at discounted prices. Thus it improves the conversion rate of the customer.

3. Engage & Grow your Audience

The more audience you have for your business, the more sales you can make. Instagram chatbots will help you reach a broad audience and improve your niche audience count. 

It responds to every user comment by sending automated replies depending on the post context. 

4. Understand your Customers

Instagram chatbots get insights into what audiences are looking for from what type of questions they are asking. 

For instance, if there is a huge demand for a particular product, Chatbots will ensure that products must have enough supply in the future. Similarly, suppose some audience makes repetitive queries on the same topic. In that case, it ensures to correct and change the content so that the audience will get the right information without any doubts. 

You can do this manually or get information from forms. But that’s the traditional way and takes time. With chatbots, all this information about your customers you can get automatically, thus saving your time and efforts.

5. Multi-language Support to Customers.

Hiring agents with multi-language speaking skills are difficult to find and bear the cost. When you have businesses spread across a diverse consumer base. Customers generally prefer to purchase with a personalized experience, especially when they speak the language they understand.

Although there are multiple ways to set up a multilingual chatbot, for instance, you can translate answers into multi-language or deploy a chatbot platform that supports multilingual chatbots built into their designed system.

6. Promote your Chatbot on Instagram Direct Using Ads

You can promote your product or services using Instagram chatbots. To attract your users’ attention, you can launch a targeted campaign with the goal of” Instagram direct.” Arrange a greeting message in your Facebook account and determine the key phrase that will be the trigger for introducing chat message flows. The user will select the appropriate message and read other messages in the flow. You can even shift your customer to agents when encountering complex queries. 

7. Omnichannel Communication

You can build a complete chatbot marketing strategy not only for Instagram, but you can perform marketing on other social media marketing channels such as  WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram.

Conclusion:

In the Market, we have various marketing tools to spread awareness and boost the productivity of your business sales. One of them is an Instagram chatbot. Once you have deployed the Instagram chatbot for your business, you have more time to spend on other complex tasks. For instance, there will be more time to work on other promotional activities and explore and analyze various other tools to better manage the overall business operations.

Suppose you don’t know where to start to deploy or want to know more about Instagram chatbot for your business. You can take the assistance of our Smatbot team, and we are glad to guide you. You can even go for Smatbot 14 days free trial for your business.