Guest post by Avi Benezra, CTO of SnatchBot.

Now that chatbots are the new normal, companies and marketers need to attract people to get them using the bots and more interested in sharing information. Competitions and prizes are just one way to get users interesting in chatbots, and can make a welcome return in an era that’s too focused on taking customer data for free.

Rock band Feeder has been touring the world recently, and shared an interesting post to get more people using the Facebook Messenger chatbot, Tallulah. She is helping to promote their new album and tour. Everyone who had a chat with her was entered into a contest to win an expensive guitar, while secondary prizes of guest list tickets and other goodies have helped to keep the conversation rolling beyond that initial engagement.

Your business might not be a globe-trotting band, and your brand might not be instantly recognisable to most. But the requirement to get people using your chatbot makes offering a prize, discount voucher or other enticement just as a valid an approach.

Your company may be able to offer a 5%, 10% or 20% discount depending on your volumes and margins, but remember to always have a narrow expiry date to encourage immediate use and to make it easier to measure the interest. If you don’t feel that will work for your customers or target audience, you can always offer a specific value item like an Amazon voucher, sports tickets, free service or something related to your trade, market or vertical.

If you offer business services, then reduced subscriptions, access to free reports of value or a free consultation might all be ways to attract would-be customers to your offering. The chatbot should be capable of signing them up for the deal, there and then, or passing their information on for a quick response.

Quizzes and other chatbot temptations

For other ways to attract users to your chatbot, there are many ways to do so without having to offer a real prize or take a financial hit. Quizzes are a natural territory for chatbots with a string of questions and answers an easy way to engage people on a specialist subject, be it a genre of music, sports team, business sector or stamp collecting.

This helps drive interaction and gets customers used to chatbots, with one example hlelping Indian shoppers engage and using leaderboards to build stickiness. “The quiz bot presents GK quizzes to consumers every day, with the incentive of winning a big prize if they make it to the top of the leaderboard by answering correctly. The novelty of the chat-based format for the game is fun and engaging, incentivising them to come back for more.”

People love quizzes and the prize need only be a virtual one to encourage people to use the bot, and to better understand what information and services it offers. Other examples include a photography competition where the prize was awarded by an AI taking a look at the photos, which was managed through a chatbot submission process.

From your local stores to big businesses and retail giants, any business can build a bot using a service like SnatchBot. For example, giant retailer Saks Fifth Avenue used a chatbot to build a holiday gift guide for shoppers last Christmas, mixing seasonal demand and the novelty of bots to attract interest.

If your business has key seasonal high points, using them to attract people to the chatbot can help boost your sales or contacts, without overwhelming your usual customer contact points. Greater sales and less stress on your workforce or team is a win-win, and chatbots are increasingly seen as the way to achieve this, and will be practically mandatory in 2020 and beyond as businesses look to streamline and become ever-more efficient, whatever the global economic outlook.

Look at other bots in your market or industry and see how they are using offers and other ways to attract attention to help get their bot recognised and used by customers. Through shareable content, you are more likely to find users discussing or sharing the chatbot on social media and making. Whatever your chatbot, it can do much more than just provide information and accept customer data.