A Step-by-step Guide: How to Create a Chatbot
Messenger marketing becomes more and more popular in the world. 91% of internet users worldwide use mobile apps. According to statistics, an average open rate on messengers is about 80% in comparison to 10% in emails. If you haven’t used messengers for your business, it is the right time to start! To chat with your customers on their favorite messengers easily, you will need to build chatbots first. BotHelp allows its users to build a chatbot quickly without any technical or coding background. Easy like Sunday morning! In this article you will find out how to design and create chatbots for messengers step by step. Let’s begin our story.
Creating bots is a multi-step process that consists of:
- Connecting channels to BotHelp
- Design of chatbot's logic
- Creating content for chatbot
- Building funnel on BotHelp
- Testing and launch of the bot
Now let’s talk about every step in particular...
Connecting channels to BotHelp
Firstly, you to sign up to Bothelp.
Then, decide on the messengers that you will use to communicate with the audience. You can connect with one, two or on any messenger that is popular in your country: Facebook, Telegram, Viber or WhatsApp.
If you plan to use WhatsApp, please check this article to understand the specifics.
As soon as you decide what messengers to use, connect the channels to your account. Read how to connect on Facebook, Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp following these links.
Design of chatbot's logic
The most important part of creating a chatbot is logic development. Before you start creating it, ask yourself:
- What is the purpose of your chatbot?
- What tasks will it have to sort out?
- What call-to-actions do we need to deliver to the audience?
Think about all the options (possible responses from your leads) you need to take into account in your flow. If you wish to segment your audience and plan to ask questions about their business / profile, keep in mind that your flow is going to have variable choices and therefore numerous branches.
After you answer these questions, draw your flow in any mind map you prefer. There are quite many of them. We use and recommend Miro. It’s a simple and convenient tool for building sales funnels and other processes.
Having a visual map of your funnel, you can easily and quickly transfer it to the BotHelp platform, as well as show and discuss it with your colleagues.
A few life hacks on creating a map:
- Decide on different shapes, colors and other design marks
- Number the messages on your funnel. This will make it easier for you to migrate them seamlessly to BotHelp
This is an example of our chatbot on Miro, you can chat with it here.
On this diagram, messages are marked in different colors, to which one or another message type is applied on the BotHelp platform. Yellow blocks are regular messages. Green are questions with conditions, with the answers depending on which direction the dialogue will go further. These marks will help you reproduce the funnel on BotHelp.
Creating content for chatbot
After you developed the logic of your flow and decided how to build a dialogue between your bot and your subscriber, start creating content. Think about what tone of voice you are going to use, what messages you want to send. Your tone of voice can be formal or informal, with a sense of humor or without it!
Think about lead magnets and any useful information you can give to your audience. One of the goals of the chatbots is to create trust with your brand.
If you want to let your audience know more about your company and products, share some use cases and feedback from your customers.
Content is an essential part of your flow. It is the start of what your audience will see when interacting with your chatbot.
Download the map of our chatbot here to check the content.
Building funnel on BotHelp
When logic and content are ready let’s move on to actually building a chatbot on BotHelp.
If you are making a bot on Telegram, Facebook or Viber, you will need just a flow on one messenger that you can then copy to another. For WhatsApp you will need to create a flow from scratch.
Check our Knowledge base to understand how to start.
Let's have a look at the exemplary bot on the BotHelp editor.
This is how the beginning of a message thread looks like on our mind map. Yellow blocks are regular messages, an orange one indicates the end of the message chain, whereas with a green block there’s a condition. We lead the customer one way or the other depending on his answer.
And here’s how the same flow looks like in Bothelp.
It looks a little bit different for WhatsApp. On the WhatsApp flow we don’t use buttons. We use conditions to forward a user to one of other flows.
As already noted, BotHelp is created as a no-code platform so that everyone could create bots within just a couple of hours with no technical background.
When you register on BotHelp, you will find useful information on how to start working with the platform. Also, you will receive onboarding emails explaining all the tools available on the platform. In addition, you can watch videos on our YouTube channel.
Testing and launch of the bot
Before you launch your bot, be sure to test it. The way the flow looks on the map and how it works in real life can differ a lot.
Therefore, pay attention to testing to eliminate all errors. If you make changes to the bot during tests, do not forget to add these on your map as well. This way you can easily remember everything and make the next edits to your bot when needed.
On BotHelp you can launch your flow from a mini-landing page and from a widget on your website.
Here is an example of how it looks.
Ready to start building your own chatbot?
.png)
.png)
.png)
