How to Create an Irresistible Chatbot Welcome Message
Hi everyone, I’m Kaia, and in this lesson, we’ll discuss why giving your chatbot users a warm welcome is essential for your chatbot's success.
Let's start exploring!
What is a chatbot welcome message?
The chatbot welcome message is the first response your chatbot sends to the user in chat. It’s displayed when the user starts the chat by clicking on the minimized chat window or the Get started button.
The chatbot response can have different formats depending on your channel, including text, emojis, buttons, images, GIFs, or videos.
Why is it essential to create a good chatbot welcome message?
Creating the right welcome message is crucial for your chatbot engagement since it can influence the user's decision to proceed with the conversation.
A well-crafted welcome message can help you:
engage users into chatting,
deliver a more personalized customer experience that can result in better customer satisfaction,
or collect helpful information about your customers.
Let’s explore the best practices for creating an engaging welcome message. We’ll also go through some chatbot welcome message examples.
Expert tips for creating a successful bot welcome message
1 Be transparent
While creating your chatbot welcome message, make it clear that site visitors are chatting with a computer.
First, it’s fair to let your chatbot users know they’re not talking with a real person. Besides, you might lose their trust if you lie when they realize they’re not talking with a live agent.
Secondly, in states like California in the US, the law forbids bots to pretend to be humans, and you could be punished for breaking it.
The B.O.T (“Bolstering Online Transparency”) Act or California Senate bill 1001, the legislation “make[s] it unlawful for any person to use a bot to communicate or interact with another person in California online with the intent to mislead the other person about its artificial identity.”
To ensure that users understand that they’re not talking with a real person, you can give your bot an avatar that doesn’t show a human face and a self-explanatory name like, for instance, Yammy Bot.
Use that opportunity to give your chatbot a unique personality that would be consistent with your brand image and can play to your advantage.
2 Set expectations about what your chatbot can do
All right, once you ensure users understand they’re not talking with a live agent, you can decide what other goals you’d like to achieve with your welcome message.
Instead of asking the user how your bot can help them, you can suggest what problems it can help them solve.
Thanks to that, users can immediately know what actions they can and can’t complete with your chatbot.
You can also use your welcome message to create a conversation menu and present chatbot users possible topics they can explore. To do so, you can use quick replies or buttons.
The advantage of a button-based chatbot response is that it guides website visitors. They don’t need to type anything to get the answer to their question.
Using buttons also helps when the user asks a question in a way that’s not clear to your chatbot; this way, it prevents misunderstandings and helps to keep the conversation going.
In addition, adding a conversation menu to your chatbot welcome message allows you to improve your bot's navigation.
You can then add the go back to menu button to each chatbot’s interactions. Thanks to that, users can go back to the Story's beginning whenever they need to access previously available information.
3 Adjust the chatbot’s language to your users
To appeal to your audience, your chatbot needs to sound natural.
For instance, if you create a banking chatbot that educates potential credit recipients about financial products, you might use a different, more formal language than when creating a chatbot for a cosmetics brand that sells to teenagers.
Keeping your brand tone in your chatbot communication helps deliver a better brand experience and connect with more new users.
It’s also better to avoid sophisticated words and metaphors because they might spoil the speed of reading and understanding.
Users can often chat with your chatbot using their mobile devices since sometimes they might be in a hurry; therefore, the simpler your welcome messages will be, the more likely users will understand them and complete the following interactions.
4 Be brief
Your chatbot’s communication should be brief to keep the user's attention. Your goal as a chatbot designer is to help users achieve their goals the fastest way possible. Therefore, you should always check whether there's a way to shorten your messages while still keeping them helpful.
A good practice is to limit your welcome messages to a maximum of two-three sentences, preferably split into separate bubbles.
If you create one long welcome message, users might find it difficult to skim, and you’ll risk losing their interest in chatting.
Later, you should also decide how fast to display the messages to a user in a chat window.
If the bot replies are shown too fast, users might be unable to read them. That might harm both our chatbot’s first impression and the user experience.
To avoid that, you can use testers to verify which pace is optimal for reading, which can help you set up a suitable message delay.
5 Personalize your communication
Personalization can help you make your welcome message more successful.
You might be asking yourself what that is.
Well, personalization is adjusting your chatbot replies based on the user's wants and characteristics.
To achieve it, you can use chatbot conditional logic.
Conditional logic is a set of rules that allows you to display a dedicated bot reply to users based on specific conditions.
For instance,
you can create a different bot welcome message for first-time visitors and returning customers,
you can create a different bot welcome message for those who entered your website by using a particular website or geo-location,
or you can create a different welcome message for users who visit your page through a dedicated URL address.
Making the right chatbot welcome message will help you better engage your customers and boost your chatbot conversion rate.
6 Collect user information
You can also use the chatbot welcome message as a data collection tool.
For instance, if you use a chatbot on a university site, you can ask your site visitor whether they are a student or a candidate and ask for their name and email.
You can use gathered information to verify what types of users often chat with your chatbot. This may help you polish your chatbot content, deliver more accurate information, or connect with the user in the future.
Secondly, after verifying who the user is, you can show them a dedicated chatbot flow so that students get content that is dedicated to students, and candidates get content created for candidates.
What’s more, if you notice that your chatbot is getting a lot of weird questions on one of your pages or social media channels, you can use your welcome message to clarify with the users whether they have confused you with another site or provider.
7 React to rich media
Depending on the channel, users might send different message formats in the chat.
For instance, Facebook Messenger users might use GIFs or emojis more often than LiveChat users.
Therefore, training your bot to respond to rich media like GIFs would be helpful, especially when users use them to start a conversation. Doing so can prevent any conversation blockers at the very beginning.
8 Count legal requirements
Last but not least, depending on the data you gather from your users, you can use your chatbot welcome messages to ask the users to accept your privacy policy.
Having collected the customer's consent, you can set up dedicated flows for users who agree to process their data and those who don’t.
Wrap up
Ok, let's check what you remember from today’s lesson:
A welcome message is the first interaction between the chatbot and the users. It can have various formats, including text, emojis, gifs, or videos, depending on the platform you host your chatbot on.
Creating an excellent welcome message is crucial for your chatbot engagement and user experience.
To construct good welcome messages that engage users, it’s helpful to:
Write short sentences and split them into separate bubbles.
Use simple language.
Make it clear to the user that your chatbot is not human.
Give your chatbot a personality that corresponds to your brand.
Set expectations about what the conversation can deliver.
Create a conversation menu using buttons.
Use conditional logic to personalize your chatbot communication.
Train your chatbot to respond to rich media such as emojis and GIFs.
That’s all from me.
I hope you now know how to create a warm and friendly greeting your users can’t ignore and make a great first impression with your chatbot.
See you next time!
