What Is Chatbot Marketing?

Key takeaways

Chatbot marketing involves using chatbots to interact with users, respond to their inquiries, and promote products and services. 

• A 2024 SAS report found that 52 percent of US marketers use chatbots for customer interactions [1].

• Marketing chatbots can increase the likelihood of making a sale, qualify potential leads, promote new products, and boost conversion rates.

• You can develop a successful chatbot marketing strategy by defining your marketing goals, choosing the right chatbot platform, and optimizing your chatbot based on feedback.

Explore how you can leverage marketing chatbots for your business, the benefits of using chatbots for marketing, and how you can get started with chatbot marketing. If you’re ready to start learning, consider enrolling in the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate. In this eight-course series, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of marketing and e-commerce, including building and growing e-commerce stores and tracking and optimizing your marketing performance.

Types of chatbot marketing

Chatbot marketing is a digital marketing technique where businesses use automated computer programs called chatbots to respond to customer queries, resolve issues, and promote their products and services. 

You can integrate chatbots across multiple platforms, including messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, websites, and mobile applications. You can choose a chatbot that uses predetermined rules or decision trees or one that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which has recently gained popularity due to its ability to resolve complex queries. A 2024 report by G2 found that 69 percent of surveyed companies were already using AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, given their ease of use and other benefits [2].

Grand View Research projects that advancements in AI and ML will lead to a 23.3 percent growth of the global chatbot market from 2025 to 2030 [3]. This report found that the sales and marketing segment had the highest revenue share in the chatbot market in 2024, driven by the growth of messaging platforms and marketing technologies, consumer preferences for tailored solutions, and increased demand for automation in sales and marketing. This growth signifies that businesses are increasingly recognizing the benefits of chatbot marketing in helping them improve conversion rates and refine their marketing strategies.

Various types of chatbots are available for marketing, each designed for a specific purpose.

Customer support chatbots

Customer service is one of the most popular uses of marketing chatbots worldwide. A joint study by SAS and Coleman Parkes Research found that 43 percent of marketers worldwide were using GenAI-powered chatbots for interacting with customers, with 52 percent of US marketers using chatbots for customer support [1]. 

These chatbots can automate the customer support process by answering common questions, resolving basic issues, and providing 24/7 assistance to customers with their queries. If the situation requires a more complex resolution, the chatbot can quickly transfer the chat over to a human agent.

Conversational marketing chatbots

In conversational marketing, companies interact with customers in real-time across communication channels such as social media to offer personalized experiences. Marketing chatbots equipped with conversational AI can learn the habits and preferences of a customer by communicating with them and then use that data to offer products and content from the brand that align with their choices. In this way, marketing strategies can address the needs of individual consumers. 

Lead generation chatbots

Extending conversational marketing chatbots, lead generation chatbots can help you qualify leads by interacting with consumers to collect valuable information about their behavior, urge them to subscribe, or answer their queries.

Product recommendation chatbots

These chatbots learn by using consumer data and conversing with users to provide personalized product recommendations, promote the latest products and services, and suggest products they might like during checkout, increasing the likelihood of purchase and average order value. 

What are the four types of chatbots?

In general, you’ll find these four types of chatbots in use:

- Menu-based chatbots: Users choose an option from a preset menu, prompting the chatbot to display another scripted menu of options to choose from until the user reaches the most suitable option, essentially functioning like a decision tree. 

- Rule-based chatbots: These chatbots use if-then logic and simple keyword recognition to understand the user’s queries and answer according to the responses preprogrammed for that keyword. 

- AI chatbots: Using ML and natural language processing (NLP), these chatbots can understand complex queries, ask follow-up questions if more than one option seems suitable, and learn and develop over time.  

- Voice chatbots: These chatbots use text-to-speech and speech-to-text technologies, often with AI or NLP, to understand spoken questions and respond to them verbally. 

A fifth type of chatbot, called hybrid chatbots, combines multiple chatbot technologies, such as rule-based and AI, to deliver the best possible experience to users.

How to use chatbots for marketing

You can use chatbots for various digital marketing processes, from lead generation to personalized recommendations. Explore which of the following might help you with your marketing needs:

• Taking orders: A chatbot can help with the purchase process by suggesting products, assisting customers through product catalogs, recommending additions to the cart before checkout, reminding customers about products on sale, and sending notifications for cart recovery, ultimately improving the likelihood of making a sale.

• Promoting products, services, and campaigns: Chatbots can notify customers of current marketing campaigns, new products or offers, and loyalty programs, as well as provide personalized recommendations based on their purchasing behavior and preferences.

• Lead generation: By using a chatbot instead of an online form, you can obtain more information about client preferences, in addition to information such as emails and phone numbers, as the chatbot would engage the customer with follow-up questions, resulting in better quality leads.

• Providing news and updates: You can use chatbots to ensure your customers remain up-to-date about product launches, seasonal offers, and events by delivering marketing messages, newsletters, and updates directly to your customers, helping to drive traffic to your app or website.

Who uses chatbot marketing?

Many industries, including e-commerce, retail, health care, real estate, and finance, can use chatbot marketing to streamline their marketing campaign, provide customer support, offer product recommendations, and more. You may use chatbot marketing in different roles within the marketing department. Some of these roles and their median US salaries are as follows:

• Digital marketing manager: $130,000 [4]

• Content strategist: $109,000 [5]

• Marketing data analyst: $92,000 [6]

• Conversational marketing specialist: $63,000 [7]

• Customer support agent: $46,000 [8]

All salary information represents the median total pay from Glassdoor as of October 2025. These figures include base salary and additional pay, which may represent profit-sharing, commissions, bonuses, or other compensation.

Pros and cons of chatbot marketing

Using chatbot marketing can offer several advantages for businesses, from improving customer service to streamlining marketing efforts. The key advantages of chatbot marketing include: 

• Chatbots are available 24/7 and can provide instant and around-the-clock assistance.

• You can integrate chatbots into several platforms such as messaging apps, social media, and websites, allowing you to reach your audience where they’re most active.

• Using chatbots, you can automate repetitive tasks and manage a high volume of queries simultaneously, allowing you to scale operations without a proportional increase in operational and customer service costs.

• Chatbots can provide personalized marketing messages and tailored recommendations by analyzing customer preferences, increasing the likelihood of conversion. 

Despite their benefits, chatbots still have certain limitations:

• Chatbots, even those powered by AI, may not be able to understand complex queries, and customers may feel a lack of empathy or personalization if given a general response.

• Chatbots may require significant computational and financial resources to install and maintain, posing a barrier to widespread adoption. 

• AI chatbots may “hallucinate” and provide biased or incorrect answers, which can affect brand integrity.

What is the difference between AI and chatbots?

AI refers to computer systems that can simulate human intelligence to perform complex tasks that require human reasoning, decision-making, and creativity. In contrast, chatbots are computer programs that use predetermined scripts, decision trees, or natural language processing to converse with end-users. Chatbots may be rule- or menu-based, or they may be AI-powered. 

How to get started in chatbot marketing

An effective chatbot marketing strategy can help you enhance customer engagement and increase conversion rates. Follow these steps to help you create your first chatbot marketing strategy:

1. Define your marketing goals: Consider why you want to develop a chatbot marketing strategy, whether it is to increase sales, improve customer service, or build brand awareness. This will help you define the metrics for assessing your marketing chatbot’s performance. 

2. Choose a chatbot provider or build one in-house: You can use pre-built templates or low/no-code platforms to build your own chatbot. However, to save time and costs, you can use a third-party provider that offers AI capabilities and customization, such as Manychat or HubSpot.

3. Have live-chat options: Ensure that you provide the option to chat with a human agent for users who prefer to communicate with a live agent or when queries are too complex for the chatbot to resolve.

4. Customize your bot’s voice: Your bot’s tone should be consistent with your brand identity. For example, if you’re selling kids’ toys, your bot’s tone should be cheerful and lighthearted.

5. Design conversational flows: Define how your chatbot will interact with customers and plan conversation branches for common queries and fallback responses.

6. Collect feedback: Regularly review your customers' experiences with the chatbot. You can collect feedback by sending customer surveys or letting them rate their experience after a chat to better understand customer preferences.

7. Monitor and improve performance: Conduct A/B tests to check the effectiveness of different messages or analyze key metrics such as response times and conversion rates to gain insights into your chatbot’s performance. Continuously optimize your chatbot’s decision-making process and responses based on customer feedback and analytics. 

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