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AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, welcome back to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield, and I am so delighted that you’re here today.
Before we get started, you know that I love to hear from all of you so thank you for all of the messages and DMs on Instagram. I love them! Sometimes it’s hard to keep up but I do my best so if you want to chat I’m usually hanging out on Instagram in the DMs. I’m just AmyPorterfield on Instagram.
I also love to read your reviews in iTunes. I learn so much about all of you and what you want and need in terms of your marketing from your reviews so I want to give a shout out to John Mikesh.
John left me a review in iTunes. A big thank you to you, John. He wrote:
“I love listening to people who can break down a topic to the simple and practical elements. This is a solid podcast that I will be listening to on theregular!”
That’s music to my ears, John! Thank you, again, so very much. I’m lucky to have you as part of this community and I hope you’re going to feel that way after this episode because I feel like my guest did a really good job today of breaking it down.
Today we’re going to dive into all things chatbots. You know I’m all about automating what I can inside of my business. Using chatbots is a prime example of an automation strategy that I definitely want to dive into more and more.
Since I began using chatbots not only have they kicked up our customer service experience but they have also increased sales to my evergreen programs. You may not know what a chatbot is just yet and you may not know much about it or how to get started. But I’m pretty sure you’ve already interacted with one.
My guest today is Andrew Warner. Don’t tell Hobie but I might have a business crush on Andrew. Andrew is from Mixergy, the popular podcast where he talks with top start-up entrepreneurs.
Andrew is obsessed with chatbots. He told me chatbots are the future of online engagement. It sounds like something that could be helpful for your business. I hope that you are all ears because we’re going to get into so many great details that you must know before you get started.
If you’re on the fence with chatbots and you don’t like the idea of automation and think it’s maybe a little bit too robotic then keep listening. You know I love the human touch in my marketing. So, if I’m using chatbots then I want you to be open minded to using chatbots as well.
As you listen today thinking about where a chatbot might make sense in your business too. Maybe you don’t have that need today but in the coming months, after you launch your online course or your membership site or you begin selling your physical products online then you might be at the place where your customer service needs to be at a larger scale.
If you want to reach out to people at a whole different level and you want to make sure you’re getting in front of the right people then a chatbot can do all of that.
Before we have Andrew join us I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by my free masterclass, How to Confidently Create Your First Profitable Course in 60 Days.
If you’ve been thinking about creating an online course or if you’ve had an amazing idea for an online course for a while but you’re just not sure where to get started this free masterclass is perfect for you. All you need to do is head over to https://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/courses.
I won’t make you wait any longer. Let’s talk all things chatbots with Andrew Warner.
AMY: Andrew, welcome to the show. I’m truly looking forward to talking all things bots with you so thanks so much for being here.
ANDREW WARNER: Thanks so much for turning on video. I told you I wore a nice shirt. I wore a jacket for you.
AMY: He did!
ANDREW: Everything you do is so beautifully done and polished. I said, “I cannot appear like a schlep. I’ve got to show up.”
AMY: You guys, right when I came on Skype I was not planning on being on video. I am literally in workout clothes and here he shows up. I said, “Andrew, you look so handsome in a sports coat.” Thanks for bringing it today.
ANDREW: I’m glad you’re willing to do video. I need the human interaction. If it’s just me talking into a mic I feel like I’m a robot but with me talking to you and I get to see you smile and I get to see when you’re not excited about what I’m saying it helps me adjust and be more of myself so I’m glad I get to see you.
AMY: I’m glad you got me out of my shell. You know I don’t love video but I thought, “Come on Amy, don’t be so vain. Get on video.” So here we are. I know my listeners can’t necessarily see you but I took a snapshot of you so they could just see how dapper you look. We’ll include it in the show notes.
Before we get into all things chatbots I want my listeners, if they’re new to you, to kind of learn a little bit about who you are. We always talk about how you earn a living so can you give us some details?
ANDREW: Yeah, sure. I’m someone who, when I graduated from school, I noticed that email was becoming the way that most people are communicating so I started an email newsletter that was just like a joke a day and then a trivia-a-day newsletter and then an inspiring quote via email.
All of this stuff seemed ridiculous at the time but I knew people would subscribe and want content via email. Sure enough it got into over 20 million subscribers over 20 million in boxes. It’s huge.
AMY: Oh my gosh! That number’s crazy.
ANDREW: You want to know something crazy? We got over 80% open rates on the emails we sent out.
AMY: What?
ANDREW: Huge audience. Huge open rates. Then the revenue followed. It was over $35 million dollars in sales and then we (me and my kid brother) eventually hired more and more people and sold the business back in 2003 and I took a bunch of time off.
Then I said I was at a stage in my life where I always wanted to interview and write a magazine and I wanted to do something like that. I discovered podcasting in 2008 and I said, “This could be a way for me to interview people and do the kind of stuff I love.”
To this day I read biographies nonstop. This could be a way for me to create it. I started creating it and I did it just for a legacy. Then I was persuaded to add some advertising to it and my audience has known that I had g one into advertising kicking and screaming.
I didn’t need to money. I felt it was distracting. But what I discovered was that having ads made it more professional and feel less like a hobby to people. When I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses the audience doesn’t want to see this as my money pit, me spending money just to do this little hobby.
The fact that they see that it supports itself and is producing hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads and then more money from membership makes them feel like this is a real thing and allows me to also say, “I’m not putting my own money into it anymore. This is going to stand alone.”
That’s where I am right now. The site is called Mixergy. I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses and I occasionally talk about what I did with email marketing back when I had that business.
AMY: I am a huge fan of Mixergy so it’s an honor to have you here and I love to hear your story, for sure. Moving into the chatbots, I want you to first kind of just set us up. Tell us in simple terms what a chatbot is and how it works.
ANDREW: I know we’re going to give people a video so they can see it for themselves in under 60 seconds. I created a chatbot for your audience that they can check out at https://botacademy.com/amyporterfield so they can see it.
But I’ll describe it. Imagine a landing page for a yoga studio. The yoga studio says, “We created a guide to teach you how to do a handful of yoga poses. Press this button below to get it.”
The user presses the button and immediately, it feels like magic, but their phone immediately vibrates and they look at their phone and there’s an alert at the top that says, “Here’s the guide I promised you.”
They tap the alert at the top of their phone and Facebook Messenger immediately opens up, there’s an image of the yoga studio they were just interacting with, and it says, “Hi,” and if it’s you, with will address you by your name, Amy. If it’s me it will automatically know my name is Andrew.
It will say, “Hi, Amy, here’s the guide I promised you. Can I give it to you here in Facebook Messenger and keep teaching you in Facebook Messenger?”
The user presses a button that says, “Yes,” and as soon as they press a button that says, “Yes,” they wait a second and then they get the guide right there. They can tap to open the guide. They can read it right there in Facebook Messenger. They can save it to read it on their phone later. They can share it with their friends via email, text message, Facebook Messenger, etc.
The beauty of this is that if a week later the yoga studio has a discount on membership they can message everyone who subscribed to their chat experience and say, “We’re offering a discount,” or, “We’re offering a free session. Come into our studio and learn, “ or they created another little guide or another way to teach you via gif, via video, via PDF to teach you how to do yoga.
It’s a way of connecting with people similar to what I did with email back in the early days, similar to what I still do with email, and will continue to do with email but in the chat apps that people love. And that’s as simple as it is.
AMY: I love that you explain it in simple terms. Like you said, we have a short video in the show notes to walk them through exactly what you explained. But, I like to lay it out there before we get into all the details.
My listeners are a mix of those in their first couple of years of business. Then there are some more seasoned entrepreneurs with a multiple six-figure business as well. Tell us who exactly should be using a chatbot and what sort of chatbot application they might start out using as a tool in their own business.
ANDREW: I’m going to say the #1 no-brainer use for a chatbot is anyone who is doing a webinar or something that’s time sensitive. I did a webinar with my friend, Brian Harris, for his audience.
I had people register to show up to the webinar. I looked at how many people registered and I think we had 857 people who registered to get this. After they registered we said, “Great, you give us your email address so we can remind you. But, if you hit this button I could send you a message via Facebook Messenger the minute I go live.”
Here are the stats on it. The people who got email, 42% of them opened. That’s a really high open rate, 42% open, right? The people who opened up the chat, 82% of them opened. It was 82.7% actually opened the message.
I said, “I’m going live now. You registered.” How could they not, they open it.
In email the click rate was 15%. So 15% clicked to say they were going to see the webinar they registered for. On chat, 37% clicked. We’re talking about way more people who are clicking, more than double the people are clicking and opening and going to see the live thing.
That’s who it’s greatest for.
AMY: This is huge. A lot of my listeners are into webinars because webinars are my thing. They come to me and say their biggest challenge is that people are not showing up live for their webinar. They register and then they don’t show up.
We all know that they have good intentions of watching the replay and they likely never will. So you just gave us a strategy to pretty much wipe out that fear, concern, or challenge.
This is huge but I want to get really specific really quickly and ask you if you are running a Facebook ad that says, “Register for my webinar,” and that’s how this is all starting?
ANDREW:
Yes. We do a lot of different things but the #1 thing we do is have a Facebook ad that says, “Register for my webinar.” People hit the link. They got to a standard landing page. We happen to use ClickFunnels but we have used LeadPages very effectively and other platforms too.
It just says, “Here, register.” We ask for the email address first. Then on the confirmation page we say, “You’re registered. Hit this button so that we can remind you to show up.”
When they hit the button they are now also confirmed on Facebook Messenger. That answers the big question that people have for us which is, “Are you telling me that email is dead? Should I be replacing email with chat?”
Most people aren’t ready to do that. I don’t think the world is ready. If email is working for you keep it. Keep the standard landing page. On the confirmation page just say, “Hit this button and I’ll be able to remind you via chat.”
People will hit that button. The vast majority will because they want the reminder. It’s just one button to press.
AMY: This is something I’m doing 100%. I will be letting you know how it goes because it’s a game changer. Thank you for that. I feel like we could just end this but we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s keep going.
You’ve already given us some good examples. But can you give us a couple of examples of companies that are currently using chatbots successfully and tell us what’s working for them and how they track their success.
One more thing I want to add to that. If you could give us a big name company, someone that we would all know, but also on the flip side if you have an example of a lesser known company or entrepreneur that operates on a smaller budget (because that’s my audience) I’d love some of those examples as well.
ANDREW: I’m going to give you one. The reason I got into chatbots was one of my listeners, a guy named Shane Mac, created a business. I said I would invest in it and I put some money into the company.
I wanted him to see what I thought the future of chatbots would be. He’s not going to listen to me if I write him an email or text him or say, “Here’s what I think.” I had to create my own chatbot. I had to create my own experiences to show him.
So Shane Mac created a company called Assist. He created a chatbot for Sephora. I’m about to tell you something, Amy, please do not create this. Tell your audience, “Do not create this.”
Don’t be intimidated by this. This is just a vision of the future and for me to show you the big companies are already using chat. Here’s what you can do. I’ve done this.
You can go to Facebook Messenger and search for Sephora.
AMY: So guys, if you don’t know Sephora, it’s a company that sells cosmetics and such.
ANDREW: Thanks actually. You go to Sephora. They sell cosmetics, like you said. If you walk into a Sephora store they will do a makeover. They’ll actually let you try on the makeup.
For something like that you want to see it on your face before you buy, not just see it on a website. So what do they do for Sephora? What Assist did was, they have this thing that lets you see the different makeup they have. I wish I could show this to you. Maybe I could add this video to your people too.
I could hit a button. Here’s winged liner and red lipstick. I hit a button in Facebook Messenger, they are chatting with me but I hit a button that says, “Try it on.”
Right now you can’t see it but my lips have red lipstick on them.
AMY: Stop it!
ANDREW: I’ve got to talk. I’m a New Yorker. I talk a mile a minute. But lipstick is moving with my lips. It’s as if I’m looking in a mirror.
AMY: Oh my goodness.
ANDREW: That’s beautiful but I could slide over and see how it would look with more subtle makeup. Now it’s really subtle makeup.
AMY: Do you look good? Do you like it?
ANDREW: No I don’t. It doesn’t go well with my little bit of scruff. I shaved and I still have scruff.
AMY: That would be a little weird.
I might do it to say, “Look at how silly I look on Facebook with makeup on.” Regardless, they are getting some morality from it. They are getting a lot of try-on use and, when you’re ready to buy, you can buy right there on Facebook Messenger. That’s the future for all of us.
AMY: That’s so good. Now this is going to sound like a really stupid question and I can’t help myself so I’m going to ask you. It’s Facebook Messenger. I’m a little old school so I’m on my desktop more than I’m on mobile when I’m on Facebook. So, is this working on desktop and mobile?
ANDREW: This particular experience doesn’t but what I described earlier, what I want your audience to do, will absolutely work on desktop. We’ve had people come to me and say, “Andrew, my audience doesn’t have Facebook Messenger on their phone. My audience doesn’t have smart phones.”
First of all, 1.3 billion people are using Facebook Messenger every month. We all have it on our phones. Facebook’s done a really good job pushing us to do it. But let’s suppose they don’t have phones at all.
Let’s just imagine a world where your audience happens to not have phones at all. The next time they go to Facebook.com they are going to get the alert on the top of their screen and the chat in the bottom right of their screen in a little chat window that gives them the PDF guide from the yoga studio I mentioned earlier.
It will give them the recipes I’ll tell you about in a moment from the keto company. It will do almost everything. It won’t do this, what we’re talking about here with trying on makeup.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t want people to do it yet.
AMY: Cool. But I asked for a big company example and that was a brilliant one. Okay, give us a lesser known.
ANDREW: At Bot Academy we train people to create agencies where they create chatbot experiences for their clients. One of our graduates is a guy named Nick Julia.
He connected with Harlan, the founder of Completely Keto. Keto is a style of diet that is heavy on protein and light on carbs.
I’ve seen some people here come to my house in San Francisco who won’t eat a lot because they are on keto and they look beautiful so I get it.
AMY: Me too. I get it.
ANDREW: Harlan, from Completely Keto, said, “Let me try this chatbot thing.” So Nick created a chatbot that does basics. It teaches what keto is. For a lot of people keto is a mystery.
Even if you know it you want to know the recipes, how to actually live it and created the food. So he created one for Completely Keto. He gave me a breakdown. First of all, he got subscribers. People said, “Yes, I want to learn about keto.”
They get the messages via Facebook Messenger. He sold $315,000 worth of products and that includes $100,000 worth of books. It includes $60,000 in a continuity program. The first month only is going into the $315,000 total that I’m giving you.
I asked him how many subscribers he got. I come from an email world. Something that’s just been going on for three to four months doesn’t usually get this unless it has massive subscribers.
Get this, he went in and looked at his dashboard and he had 9,108 subscribers.
AMY: To make over $300,000?
ANDREW: To make over $300,000. That’s the difference between chat and email. Chat is less busy. He’s not competing with every other diet email that’s going into his users’ inbox. That’s what’s happening in email today.
That’s what’s happening all over online. It’s white space. It’s calm space. The messages are shorter than email so people are more likely to engage with them. And, after a while you send them a message and another message.
You teach them and you build trust and you build a relationship and then when you sell they can buy right there in Facebook Messenger. It’s incredibly effective.
AMY: That’s so good. I love these examples. It’s perfect. While you’re telling me all of this I know some of my listeners are thinking that chatbots aren’t for everyone and for every situation.
I know my listeners well. They are thinking they are so impersonal, Andrew. They are so robotic. I mean, the word “bot” is in there. When do you think people like to interact with chatbots and when do they not?
ANDREW: Let me answer the robot part first and then I’ll break it down. For the most part what we’re doing is marketing automation. Just like when I send out an email from Infusionsoft, which I don’t like because it’s overwhelming, it’s automated. I wrote it when I went out with our writers to Arizona and spent two hours writing it and thinking it through.
That happened over a year ago. It’s automated. The same thing is happening with chat, for sure. But a few weeks ago I said, “I’m going to take one Friday and respond to every single person who interacts with my chatbot.”
I sent a message to all of them, 16,000 people I had at the time. I said, “I’m here in a coffee shop. Here’s a photo of me in the coffee shop. Hit reply and let’s chat about anything.”
I got responses. I specifically said that I wanted to create a new continuity program that helps people who want to have chatbots talk to other people who have chatbots. I don’t know what it’s going to be, “Hit reply and talk to me about that or anything.”
Within 24 hours 256 people responded back to me via chat. Within a week almost 400 people responded to me via chat. It was overwhelming.
AMY: That’s crazy.
ANDREW: I was sitting there. My eyes were going to bleed from responding. Then my wife happened to want to go to Berkeley. I said, “Okay, let me just hitch a ride with you.” I got in the car with her and went to Berkeley and sat in a different coffee shop in Berkeley.
It helped to change things up. I don’t think I would ever do it again where I would say “anyone” could respond but I’m absolutely going to encourage more people to chat back with me.
Responding to someone in chat is quick. It’s just like a one-off message that says, “Hey, I’m in a coffee shop. Thanks for engaging.” Somebody gave me a four-point message saying, “Here’s what your continuity program should have for me to pay for it.”
I responded to him with more detail. But it was never more than a few paragraphs of text.
You could see people actually buy. I did a blog post on Bot Academy where you could see my chat back and forth with Veronica who ended up buying from me. You could see it is personal. It is as personal or impersonal as you want it to be.
AMY: That’s good. It’s as impersonal or as personal as you want it to be. I’m going to link to that article you did there because I’d like people to kind of see what that looks like behind the scenes with you chatting and all of the details there.
One of the most brilliant things about Andrew is that he gives you data. He gives you numbers. Most people don’t do that. Andrew you make me nervous because I’m not good with data. It doesn’t come natural to me so I have to be very intentional.
I remember I was on your show one time and I was so nervous because I knew we were talking numbers and details because you live there. It’s really cool to see how your brain works and I believe everything you say because you have it all backed up.
ANDREW: You will see numbers and how many sales and so on in that blog post. The truth was it wasn’t an enormous number of sales but as you look at the bot experience I created you can see an emphasis on me wanting to get to know you.
Part of the problem was, I feel in my podcast at Mixergy people know me. They know my insecurities. They know my ambitions. They know my kids…a little… I try not to talk too much about my kids but they know me.
I felt like in chat they didn’t. So this was my first step towards that. Unfortunately, there’s no way to put a number on that in success. All I can do is say, “Here’s the exact number of people I chatted with. Here’s the exact number of people who bought,” and so on. They could see that.
Chat does not have to be impersonal.
AMY: Everyone just remember that because I want you to embrace this. I’m getting excited about the strategy and I hope my listeners are too.
I’m sure some of my listeners will want to go ahead and start testing some chatbot applications right away. We’ve got a lot of go getters in the audience. So how do they do that? Mind you, most of my listeners are not computer programmers. Just like me, they are not techie and they don’t have really large budgets. So, give it to me.
ANDREW: If they want to try one I’ve created one they could experiment with. If they want to create one there are lots of tools for creating it and you don’t need a big budget. In fact, you don’t need a budget at all to do it.
They are funded, a large number of these companies, by Silicon Valley investors, the people who live right here in my neighborhood. Here’s what I recommend. There is a site called https://botlist.co. They have a tremendous number of software options that you can pick from to create your chatbot.
You should not be coding right now. Unless you want to compete in this space in a heavy way you shouldn’t be coding it up. Amy, your audience wants to create an email list. Would you say the first step is to go code up MailChimp or code up Infusionsoft?
AMY: No.
ANDREW: Some people use MailChimp, some use Infusionsoft. ActiveCampaign is really effective and that’s the one that I prefer. Whatever it is, you say this software exists, go pick the one you like. Use the free version for a while and pay when you’re ready to upgrade. Same thing here. And https://botlist.co has it.
I happen to think ManyChat is the best when it comes to marketing automation. It’s the most MailChimp-like ActiveCampaign-like, Infusionsoft-like. It has all of those features in it. Full disclosure, I invested in that company.
AMY: You did! That’s what we use. I want everyone to know because I got very confused by that title. He is saying M-A-N-Y chat. ManyChat. Sometimes they think I’m saying something different when I say it but that’s what we use, Andrew. I didn’t know you were an investor. Very cool.
ANDREW: You know what, I knew that they were good. I didn’t trust them and we’ll talk about the mistakes people make. One of them is putting your subscribers in software that will not be around. It’s harder to take your subscribers and go to a competitor with chat than it is with email.
I wanted to get to know them. I found his investor who is a friend of mine and said, “You invested in him. Make an intro. I want to get to know him. Do you trust him? Give me some insight.”
He gave me insight and I took Mikael Yang, the founder of ManyChat to lunch and got to know him. I used his software a bit. I then got to know him so much I said I trust my subscribers here and I would also like to invest. I actually said I didn’t want to invest.
He said, “Andrew, we really want a partnership here. We want you to be on board because you’re using it so much. You should invest.”
Then I wondered why I didn’t want to invest. It was a mistake so I invested in a couple of rounds. I like them but, full disclosure, I’m an investor. There are tons of options out there. You can go to https://botlist.co not .com and see a bunch of options.
My recommendation for everyone who is listening is to create one. I had someone on my team who was on a call with me on Zoom who said, “I actually never even created at chatbot.”
I said, “You’re working with me here at Mixergy and we’re building chatbots. How did you not create one?”
He said, “I don’t know. I’m too busy.”
I said, “Between now and our next call I want you to go and create your first chatbot.” She’s got a baby at home. She’s got a full-time gig. She’s got family. She’s got all kinds of stuff but she said, “Okay, I’m going to do it.”
She said, “In case we ever need it for another email or chat or something, here’s how long it took me to create it.” I believe she said, I could be wrong and we’ll publish an accurate number, it was 21 minutes to create her chatbot.
We’re not talking about a long period of time to create it. To get it good it could be a lifetime of constant polishing and improving.
AMY: Just like everything in business. Cool. You told us where to go. We know the one that you and I like the most and I’ll link to it all in the show notes. But you alluded to this so I want to get to it.
There’s got to be some mistakes that we should totally avoid. So, before we even dive in talk to me about some of those things that could cause some headaches if we’re not aware.
ANDREW: Number one is coding. I come from Mixergy. My audience is all about startups, tech startups. They love to code. I think it’s a mistake to say, “I want to send out chat. I have to code up my own competitor to ManyChat.” It’s just not worth it. Don’t do it.
Here’s another mistake. Too much artificial intelligence. When chatbot started the vision was that you could just go into Facebook Messenger and chat with a bot and say, “I want to take a flight to Tahiti and book me a room,” then the chatbot will respond and tell you the flights they have and that they can book you a room.
That’s coming. But, my friend Shane, from Assist, says they shouldn’t call it artificial intelligence. It should be called eventual intelligence. It’s not here yet. It’s always eventual so try not to make it too smart. Keep it simple.
Just like you broadcast event messages into email, broadcast event messages via chat. Just like you want people to respond occasionally, encourage them and invite them to respond via chat.
That’s the next tip, don’t pretend your bot is human. If you go to the Completely Keto chatbot you will see it says, “My creator, Harlan, made me to help you with chat.” Don’t let people think that.
AMY: Okay, cool. We talk about that a lot with my audience where we do automated webinars. I always say that we do not have to pretend they are live. People are smarter than that. I like that we’re not pretending that this is not a bot.
ANDREW: In some cases it could look like it. Seth Godin saw what we were doing at Bot Academy and he had a chatbot created for him. It’s the Seth Godin bot. It’s his face. It’s his name on it. But, there is not the expectation that you are really chatting with Seth and he spent five seconds writing out a message just to you.
That’s how you keep things from feeling too…Like promising stuff you can’t deliver.
AMY: Cool.
ANDREW: Here’s another one. Sending out long messages. People will send out paragraph after paragraph via chat. I did a talk here in San Francisco in the Dogpatch area. Someone said, “Why not write long messages?”
I said, “Are you in a relationship?” She smiled and said, “Yeah.” I asked if she uses email or chat to communicate with her boyfriend. She said, “Yeah, I use chat to communicate with my boyfriend.”
I asked her if she would trust me enough to show me her chat messages with her boyfriend. She said yes. I looked at it and I didn’t read it out loud but you could see it’s a sentence from her and a sentence from him, a partial sentence from her, an image from him.
That’s the way we communicate with each other. That’s how we should communicate with our audience.
AMY: That’s good. That’s a good one. So brilliant.
ANDREW: Keep it short.
AMY: Can we get through them all?
ANDREW: Don’t code. Don’t do too much artificial intelligence. Don’t write long messages is #3. #4, don’t pretend your bot is human and is really you. #5, don’t pick the wrong software. You’re not married to it but it’s harder to switch.
AMY: That’s good to know. These are great mistakes to avoid. To wrap it up I thought it would be fun if you would tell us some cool or unusual things you can do with chatbots just so we kind of understand this world and what it looks like out there.
ANDREW: I always feel like Assist, ManyChat is great for today, Assist is always building a future for their clients. I got together with Shane, the founder for Drink, and asked what he was working on now.
It is finally published so I can tell you. He said, “Do you want to buy a beer for a random person at a baseball game?”
I said, “Of course.”
AMY: Yes! That’s fun.
ANDREW: He said he wanted me to chat with the company BrewToYou. I went to (not Facebook Messenger) iMessage on my iPhone and started chatting with BrewToYou. I hit chat and it said, “Welcome to BrewToYou, your automated beverage assistant. We’re serving until the 7th inning of this game today. Here’s what’s on tap.”
This is coming to me on iMessage because I have an iPhone. I tapped the little message and it brought up a full menu. I closed the menu because I didn’t want to use it as a cheat. I wanted to see how I could talk to a bot on iMessage from Apple. I just said, “Two Buds,” meaning two Budweisers.
I wasn’t going to say, “Two Budweisers, please.” Let’s see what it did. It said, “Two Buds,” parroting back what I said, “You got it.” Then it said, “Tell me where you are.” I typed in the section, the row, and the seat I was in and it told me to double tap the side of my phone to authorize Apple Pay so I could buy it.
I double tapped the side of my phone. Boom. It was paid. We’re talking about less than 30 seconds to have beer picked and paid for and then someone who I don’t know, a stranger at a baseball game, had a guy immediately come to him with the beer and hand him the two Buds I ordered. That’s the future.
AMY: I love this. That is so cool.
ANDREW: I want to say that because here we have artificial intelligence. They understood what “two Buds” means. Here we have not just Facebook, but Apple, the curator of curators, the people who will not allow just anything to happen saying, “We’re going to take a toe into the water of chatbots.”
This is not a human being it is a bot that Assist created. This is the future. If you don’t believe in it you should see that Facebook believes in it and Apple and iMessage does.
I know you recommend to more advanced businesses to use Slack. Slack clearly believes in chatbots.
This is the future. We don’t have to give up email. We don’t have to give up the present for it. We should experiment with it and bring it into our business and make it part of our mix because if they are listening to you, Amy, they know about marketing automation.
They know about systemizing. They know about all of this. All of these features work beautifully in chatbots.
AMY: I absolutely love it. I didn’t think I would be so sold. I actually have to be very honest. When I wanted to have you on the show I told Jill, my content manager, I was regretting the decision, “It’s going to be so over our heads. Andrew’s really smart. This is going to be complicated. I think we made the wrong decision.”
You know, Andrew, I love you. I’m a huge fan. But I got nervous. We’re using chatbots a little but after this I cannot wait to send this to my team and say, “Okay, let’s bring it on. Let’s do more.”
It is very doable so thank you for that.
ANDREW: If you need help setting it up, especially if it’s for a webinar, I’ll get someone on my team to work out with you to set it up because I know that once you know how to do it you’re going to teach it to all of your listeners and all of your followers and all of your readers so it’s an investment in this platform because you’ve got good people and I want you to know how to do it and others to do it to.
AMY: Thank you so much. My students who are listening are like, “Yes, yes, teach us this,” so if I get to learn from the best I will do it for sure. So thank you for that.
Andrew, tell everybody where they can learn more about you and just stay in touch and learn more about bots and all that good stuff.
ANDREW: You know what, we’re actually going to create a chatbot for, I thought it was already up and running, but my team will put it together by the time this is published at https://botacademy.com/amyporterfield. They will be able to see what a chatbot looks like in our world.
They will be able to try it, beat it up, experiment with it, and then also use that to teach them how to create their own chatbots.
AMY: Cool. You have a program to teach, right?
ANDREW: Yeah, we do have a course where we teach people how to create chatbots, people like Nick Julia, Mary Catherine Johnson, and many others have gone through it and now they are so big in the chatbot space they are speaking at events and teaching this stuff to other people.
I don’t know that I want to promote it to your audience. Frankly, I’m not sure it is right for everyone. Some people don’t want to get as intensely into it as our people are. We get obsessed about teaching it.
But, if you just want to dabble check out our bot, check out our site, experiment with our blog post, create your own bot, we’ll help you out. If you ever do want to take it to the next level I’d be happy to have me and my team mentor you guys and help you build a chatbot.
AMY: Cool. Guys, I’m going to put all of these links in the show notes so you can find out everything Andrew has to offer. It’s so cool that he kind of set up something for free for us to look at so you can really get a taste for what it’s all about.
Andrew, thank you so very much.
ANDREW: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.
AMY: So there you have it. I hope you loved this interview with Andrew as much as I have. It was so much fun to dive into chatbots. I feel like he makes it incredibly doable and simple to get started and that’s exactly how I love to embrace new strategies. That’s why I’m such a fan of learning from Andrew.
Remember, all of the resources that he talked about in this episode are on my show notes at http://www.amyproterfield.com/227.
Also, if you haven’t done so already, please make sure you subscribe to my podcast. I’ve been doing some bonus episodes and I haven’t been talking about them through email and on social as much as I do on my core episodes.
If you don’t want to miss at thing you’ve got to make sure that you’re subscribed and you’ll be notified every time I have a new episode, including all of the cool bonus ones that are coming up soon.
All you need to do is go to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and make sure to hit subscribe.
Okay guys, I can’t wait to see you again next week at the same time, same place. We are going to be diving into the topic of finishing. I have a guest, Jon Acuff, that’s coming on the show.
He’s going to talk to us about how to get to the finish line when things start getting in the way, one of my most favorite topics actually, finishing what we’re starting. I think you’re going to love it.
If you loved the Brooke Castillo episode where we talked about doing B-work and not trying to be a perfectionist I think you’re going to love this conversation. It’s like an extension of that.
We get into a lot of juicy details around how to get to the finish line. It’s so very important so I’ll see you here again next week. Thanks for tuning in. Bye for now.
