If you are involved in marketing today, then you have heard of chatbots, also known as conversational agents.

With Hubspot recently reporting that almost half of all consumers would rather connect to a company via live chat than any other means, 40% of those people saying they don’t care if it is a chatbot or human being, and with 35% of people wanting more companies to launch chatbots, it is clear that this new emerging technology is changing the way companies handle marketing and customer service.

That said, sometimes it can be hard to envision where and how you would incorporate using chatbots in your marketing plans.

Well here are a handful of companies that are using Chatbots effectively, to give you some ideas and inspiration of how you could be using them for your company.

Spotify 

Spotify is one of the most popular music apps around and sharing what someone is listening to and getting song recommendations is a big party of the Spotify experience. So it makes sense they would launch a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, which offers playlist recommendations based on factors such as mood, activity, and genres.

Here is what it looks like to get started on the Chatbot, which you can find here : m.me/Spotify

It might seem pretty straight forward, but Spotify has jumped on an emerging technology, taking their users sharing and recommendation activities, and introduced a function around their app that is bound to increase user satisfaction, app usage, and attract new users.

Sometimes simple and easy is all it takes to have success in marketing with emerging technologies like chatbots.

Mastercard

Mastercard took an interesting approach, by launching their Masterpass Chatbot technology, which allows other businesses to take payment through their chatbots. Like selling shovels at a gold rush, Mastercard took advantage of a need to receive payments and launched Masterpass onto multiple platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, Telegram, Slack and more.

A large number of companies have partnered with Mastercard using Masterpass Chatbot technology, such as FreshDirect, Blue Nile, Office Depot, Neiman Marcus, The Cheesecake Factory, and Subway, who had one of the largest Facebook Messenger launches in the Restaurant space, launching with more than 26,500 Subway restaurants.

By making a technology that allows so many other major companies to find more financial value in their own Chatbot experiences, Mastercard was able to expand its brand and participation in one of the fastest growing emerging technology markets.

Now these are some great examples of companies using Chatbots to improve their customers experience in a way that enhances their already existing offerings or services.

Here are some examples of companies who have really become creative with Chatbot technology, providing some unique benefits for their customers.

Casper

As one of the leading mattress companies in America, Casper knows sleep.. and they know that sometime people just cannot fall asleep.

Can’t sleep for any reason, then connect with Casper’s Insomniabot to be entertained (and possibly lulled to sleep) with some light hearted conversation until you finally doze off to sleep.

Casper’s previous VP Lindsay Kaplan described Insomniabot as having “watched all of “Stranger Things” and stayed up way too late that night. It’s kind of obsessed with pizza and is really on the fence about if it’s too late to eat or it should just wait to eat waffles in the morning.”

MedWhat

Just about everyone goes online at the first site of some illness, injury, or mysterious symptom they want to figure out.

Well MedWhat has taken it a step further by providing a robust medical artificial intelligence chatbot to help improve your every day health.

MedWhat says: “Our virtual assistant answers medical and health questions for consumers and doctors instantly. The answers are provided by an intelligent super-computer that learns about medicine everyday and over time about your health record and medical questions history.”

So not only does it answer your initial questions and try to determine what problem you might be having, it also continues to improve over time as it learns more about you and the medical industry as a whole.

Similar to Mastercard, MedWhat also has launched an API to allow other companies to partner with them to utilize their information and chatbot technology.

We mentioned a couple examples of Chatbots in use in this article, but there are thousands of examples out there with more every day.

Don’t wait.. start thinking about how your company can utilize this exciting new technology in your marketing plans!

*All images used from the mentioned company websites or personal screen captures.