Messenger Chatbots and restaurants really seem to be the perfect social media marketing match.
Tons of people worldwide spend hours and hours on social media sharing their food pictures and commenting with friends the best and most popular joints where to spend the night or have a quick and tasty lunch. From savory burger houses to hipster coffee shops, from trendy nouvelle cuisine bistrots to busy sushi bars and juicy pizzerias, any place selling food can find in social media a great channel for finding new customers and go “up market”, attracting more affluent clients.
In this sense, a Facebook Messenger chatbot is the perfect companion for any marketing strategy, allowing the business owner and her consultants to give customers and prospects a sense of proximity, care and attention - while focusing on other aspect of running and restaurant and not having to constantly worry about answering questions about menus, opening hours or any other info that can be easily automated and offloaded on an aptly designed Messenger bot.
As you can see in this page - check out the bottom right corner - we have created a demo chatbot for an ideal restaurant, something you can immediately play with and that will give you a sense of the potential results you can obtain with such a tool.
In particular, this chatbot will show you 4 main functions that are essential for successfully marketing a food-related business in this social media and direct conversations era:
Present restaurant info and contact details
The basic yet extremely useful function a chatbot can primarily fulfill is provide general and contact information about a business, company, professional or page. If you type “restaurant contacts” in this bot you will be presented with an image and a complete text containing info about the, including a couple of very convenient links to the appropriate Google Maps page and with a “click-to-call” trigger to immediately place a call to the place.
Show beautiful pictures of the menus
An extremely cool layout you can use for a chatbot reply is the “carousel” of images, each one with a title, a short description and optional buttons. As you see in the images below, we have added some beautiful pictures of tasty dishes and products (hopefully you are not reading this while hungry! ;). Each slide of this carousel can have up to three links, further improving the “conversion rate” of this chatbot and allowing visitors to quickly access more inspiring images or directly access the reservation request feature.
Collect reservations
The “meat” (pun not intended…) of this chatbot is the reservation request system. This is an extremely powerful lead generating feature, allowing business owners to easily collect reservations and new leads directly from the Messenger chat, in a seamless and very natural way. The way this works is very simple: as the manager of the chatbot, you can define opening hours and available days, duration of each session and form contact details. In his end, the user just “chats” with the bot answering all the appropriate questions, filling this reservation request form almost without even noticing - increasing the conversion rate of this whole channel and the brand loyalty of current and future customers. You can check this out by simply typing “reservation” in the chat window and easily following all the steps.
An automatic leads machine
Finally, do not forget that every time a user interacts with one of your bots he is automatically added to the list of “engaged users” that you can then contact directly or through the powerful marketing automations you have access to as a premium customer. This feature allows you to easily track, categorize and score leads: you can attach “tags” to each bot reply and once a user triggers that reply he is tagged with those categories. You can then use these tags to target prospects very precisely, for example sending special offers only to people who started a reservation request or asked your bot for more info about the restaurant menu and information.