Chat Bots's are Drift's most talked about product, in this article we'll go over some tips and tricks we wanted to share so that when you are building your bots on your own you can make the most effective bot out there.
In this post, I’ll give a quick intro on how to star building the chat bot, give some best practices to keep in mind, and drop an additional workbook resource for you to review.
How to Start Building your Chat Bot
To begin building Chat bots:
- Click playbooks on the left hand navigation bar
- Click chat playbooks
- Click Create Chat Playbooks on the right hand side
On the next screens you'll be given the options to:
- Select your audience (And workspace if you're on the Advanced of Enterprise plans.)
- Select your playbook type
- Name your playbook
Once completed, you'll be building out your playbook in the flow builder. For a more thorough guide on building out a playbook, check out our help doc here.
Best Practices to keep in mind while building your Chat Bot
Starting the conversation
When starting the conversation; pull the main value proposition from your homepage, product page or your about us page and turn it into a yes/yes question. This prevents the site visitor from opting out of a conversation and keeps the process moving forward. Additionally, you can use personalization tokens in your first question to make the the bot flow feel more organic. For more details on using personalization tokens and how and where to use them, check out this help doc here.
If you're uncertain of how to start a conversation in an engaging way, one of the more common best practices is to open the interaction by simply using a question node in your bot flow and asking "Can I ask you a question?"
Deliver your value prop quickly
Add you value prop as a message node so that you break up the text in the bot. This prevents the message string more digestible to the visitor interacting with your bot. Generally, your value prop will live on either the homepage, or be explained in an about us page.
The question asked at the end of your string should be the main call to action.
Have a fallback Call to Action in your bot flow
If you have a resource tab, a blog, or any other marketing or educational material about your product, it's always a good idea to have a piece of content you can send in the bot flow in case someone is not interesting in your main CTA. This also applies when you disqualify someone in your bot flow. Doing this allows you to still offer some value to the visitor.
Utilize your targeting conditions
Targeting conditions on your bot flow allow you to have your bot shown to specific visitors. You don't have the same conversations about your products with prospects, so you shouldn't have the same bot running on different product pages. You can also add retargeting bots to high trafficked or high intent pages.
For further info on targeting conditions, including what targeting conditions are available; check out Targeting Conditions.
Consider adding bots to your high traffic pages
To see where your conversations are happening most in Drift, consider using Conversation Reports. To view these metrics:
- Click on Reports
- Select Chat overview (under conversations)
- Scroll down the page to view the "Top URL’s" block.
Viewing this block will allow you to see what pages are starting the most conversations. You can also export this data by clicking the Export CSV button on the block. You can using targeting conditions on your bots to have them fire on those frequently viewed pages. One way to do this:
- Go to playbooks
- Select your bot
- Click on the targeting tab
- Select Visitors who match the following conditions, and select URL/is/::enter your URL:: from your pulldowns.
For further info on targeting conditions, including what targeting conditions are available; check out this help doc here.
Additional Resources
While this post covered a good amount of best practices in building out your chat bots, I’d also suggest you check out the attached pdf below before diving in to building your bots in order to achieve maximum success.