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The concept is quite similar to email marketing, where you build a list of contacts, send them targeted/personalized content, and have a goal of converting them to paying customers. Messenger marketing is simply the act of marketing to your customers using a messaging app. As a result, chatbots are mostly associated with messaging apps, giving rise to a new kind of marketing known as messenger marketing. You can use chatbots to sell products, deliver personalized content (as Sephora and Forever 21 are known for), and can even use chatbots to help make collecting payments easier.Īlthough you can use chatbots on other platforms, Facebook can take a lot of the credit for reintroducing them to public consciousness (due to its large user base). Why You Should be Using a Facebook Messenger Chatbotīesides the ability to assist with customer service functions (replying to general queries), chatbots can be programmed to do many other things. There are two kinds of chatbots that you can make use of when connecting to Facebook Messenger: one that can only respond to specific commands and another that functions based on machine learning, which recognizes language and language patterns, meaning that it “learns” over time and adapts. In 2016, Facebook introduced the option for chatbots on Messenger, ushering in a new wave of chatbots that incorporate artificial data technology in their design.
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People could create chatbots on the platform, but they were not as sophisticated as those available today on apps like Facebook Messenger. Chatbots re-emerged in popularity upon the introduction of WeChat in China.
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The first chatbot (called ELIZA) was developed by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960’s.
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