As a business, you’re always looking for ways to reach more customers and followers. You may have already tried using Instagram to reach your target market, but are you using Instagram chatbots? Instagram Chatbots are automated programs that can help you message customers at scale, to increase leads and followers. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to use chatbots on Instagram to get the most out of your account.
What are Instagram Chatbots and how do we use them?
An Instagram Chatbot is a conversation bot linked to your Instagram account that can work 24/7 and have multiple conversations at once.
People can message your Instagram account whenever they like and receive a response, this opens an opportunity to provide a better customer experience, generate more leads and even increase sales.
What does an Instagram Chatbot do?
Instagram Chatbots allow you to automate conversations that are happening in your Instagram inbox.
We know that engaging with your Instagram followers is a full-time job on its own. Replying to comments, liking posts and creating new posts are almost impossible to consistently do 24/7. Implementing a Chatbot to your Instagram account allows more time to focus on growing your Instagram account while capitalising on the incredibly valuable automation they offer.
Instagram Chatbots can automatically answer questions, collect email, and phone numbers, create product-related quizzes and help send customers to point of sale or conversion.
Where Instagram Chatbots stand out though, is allowing you to take advantage of increased engagement and turn that into REAL business outcomes.
They can also increase engagement by automating replies to comments on your posts and automatically sending your followers a message.
Instagram Chatbots can also run campaigns like giveaways and promotions. They can deliver instant support to your followers and answer FAQs. This makes it so easy for people to message your account and ensure a response in return. No more leaving people on read!
Ultimately, Instagram Chatbots can help you build and maintain your brand.
Who can you message with an Instagram Chatbot?
An Instagram Chatbot can send messages to any users that perform a behaviour that triggers an automated message. This includes:
- Sending a direct message to your account
- Mention or tag your account in their Instagram story.
- Leave a comment on a post or Instagram live
- Reply to your Instagram story
Tips for using a Chatbot to create more leads on Instagram
Instagram Comment automation & replies
One of the best ways customers can open up a conversation with your business on Instagram is by leaving a comment.
An example of this is an Instagram competition where you leave a comment to try to win something. You know the ones, “Tag a friend, follow this account, like this post…” – yeah those ones.
Great for engagement. But they can miss the mark on driving some more ACTUAL business.
Take that competition and now once a comment is left on your post it can then be automatically liked and replied to by a Chatbot.
This can then trigger the Chatbot to directly message the user to confirm their competition entry and take this a step further by asking for their email and phone number to enter.
After this information has been taken from the user, we can then automatically sync that information over to our email systems to have the user communicate with us on two different platforms at once.
How the Instagram Comment Reply works
Triggered Instagram Chatbots by keywords in reply to particular Instagram stories
Keywords can trigger messages, entire conversations and business automation if an IG user directly messages you with a specific, pre-determined keyword or phrase.
By directing followers to ‘DM you’ a keyword, you can encourage them to claim that offer/piece of content/info directly in their inbox. They don’t have to ever leave the Instagram app and it opens up opportunities to potentially gather other information that can help your business.
How the Instagram Keyword reply works
Reward loyal customers that tag you in their stories
Another method we can trigger a conversation is Instagram stories. When users tag your account in their story, a Chatbot can automatically reply each time.
This is also a great way of identifying loyal customers and rewarding them as well as capturing their content for future use.
Using a system like Manychat (more on that shortly) has is the ability to see how many followers a user has.
For instance, if an influencer tags your account in a post, the Chatbot can send a manual notification to the admin of the account to say somebody with 100,000 followers has tagged your account in their story.
Without a Chatbot, you could miss this post the potential opportunity for collaboration and to identify loyal customers. And we all know it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than generate a new one.
How to generate more followers on Instagram using a Chatbot
When it comes to followers, Manychat has a unique feature which is called a ‘condition’. It is able to determine whether a user follows your account or not. If they don’t, the Chatbot can ask them to follow your account.
If you offer it as a condition of entry or to claim that ‘offer’, your Chatbot is quickly creating more value for your business.
What tools do you use to build Instagram Chatbots?
Most Chatbots are built with conversation flow charts that allow Chatbots to interact with customers. To do this, we use a program called ManyChat, which is one of the best programs for building Chatbots for Instagram.
Manychat can build simple and complex ‘flows’ of messages that can build personalised conversations quickly inside a code-free interface.
To get 30-days free of Manychat, click here to claim your unique link.
Using an Instagram Chatbot to generate over 1200 emails in 12 days with $0 ad spend. Here is how 6ft6 did it.
Example of businesses using a Chatbot for Instagram
We helped our client 6ft6 Wine collect over 1,200 emails using a Chatbot for a recent campaign.
During their ‘12 Days Of Xmas’ campaign, 6ft6 partnered with a number of local producers to provide daily giveaways that were promoted on their Instagram profile.
Each day, customers were asked to comment on the daily post by tagging 2 friends. The comments were directly connected to an automatic reply that confirmed their email address and used a condition to confirm if they were following them on Instagram or not.
The daily posts were supported by the use of Instagram stories, where users were encouraged to reply or send a DM with a keyword to trigger the entry flow of messages.
The results for the 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway Collaboration:
- 1,200+ emails generated
- Avg. 463 comments on each individual post
- 1200% increase in engagement over the period
- $0 ad spend
1200+
Emails that were generated and synced directly with Klaviyo
463
The average amount of comments that were on each individual Instagram post
1200%
Increased on engagement on Instagram during the period of the competition
$0
Spent to promote the competition. This was purely run from organic posts.
Test an Instagram Chatbot
If you would like to see how an Instagram Chatbot works, you can slide on into our DMS on Instagram, @chatresponse with the word ‘IG BOTS’ and you can see first-hand how an Instagram Chatbot works.
If you’re not using Instagram chatbots yet, you should be. They’re an incredible way to gather contact information and generate new leads from your customers. Ready to get started? DM us ‘IG LEADS’ on Instagram (we’re @chatresponse) and we can get you started with an extended free trial of Manychat. Not only will this help you gather valuable contact information from your target market, but it can also help you increase your following on Instagram quickly and easily. We hope you enjoyed this post – be sure to check back soon for more helpful tips!
