About Simone

Simone Stolz is responsible for CH Media ‘s newspaper marketing. Simone’s responsibilities include the acquisition of new newspaper subscribers.

Simone first came into contact with the topic of chatbots three months ago during a CAS course on marketing automation at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW ). This gave rise to the idea for the chatbot in subscription marketing, which is currently online on the Luzerner Zeitung website.

Use of chatbots in subscription marketing

For Simone, the subscription store is an important channel of the respective newspaper website. One challenge for users on this site is to find the right newspaper subscription. This is often because the process of finding a subscription is not intuitive. Should it be print or digital? Which region best covers the reader’s interests? And what is the difference between a digital and a digital+ subscription?

In this process, chatbots are the ideal tool to guide users to the desired subscription with just a few questions. The chatbot should act as a digital customer advisor and replace the classic subscription columns, where users have to compare the various offers themselves.

Implementation

Initially, Simone alone set up the dialog between the chatbot and the customers and modeled it in the chatbot tool aiaibot.com. She then showed the dialog to various people from the work team. This enabled her to optimize the chat dialog and better adapt it to the target group. The Luzerner Zeitung chatbot was completed within three weeks and was live on the website after one month. If the user decides to interact with the chatbot, they answer four to five questions depending on the path and are ultimately offered a specific subscription.

In the subscription finding process, a chatbot must be able to map the questions that you would ask a customer so that you can offer them the right product. There are three subscription types on the Luzerner Zeitung website. In the dialog, questions are asked about the reading, region and days of the week. This makes it easy to find out what the ideal subscription is for the user.

Results achieved

The figures from the Luzerner Zeitung are quite impressive. In four weeks, there have been over 10,000 impressions and between 100 and 200 interactions per day with the chatbot. This means that almost every second user who comes to the Luzerner Zeitung website and sees the chatbot interacts with it. The chatbot has also led to the first subscriptions being taken out. It will be interesting to see which subscriptions users select via the chatbot. Specifically, two to three subscriptions were taken out per week.

Further development opportunities

In order to set a focus, the chatbot was initially implemented on the Luzerner Zeitung website. In future, the chatbot could be used on the websites of other regional newspapers in order to achieve comparisons between the various dialogs. To this end, the personality of a bot can be expressed more strongly in dialog, for example by responding to regional events. This allows readers to identify more strongly with the respective newspaper.

A further step would be to add another chatbot to the landing page of the proposed subscription. The entire purchasing process should therefore be accompanied by the chatbot in a “chatbot journey”.

The use of chatbots in subscription marketing therefore offers added value for the company and the user. It is therefore important to strengthen knowledge about chatbots and give listeners tips on how they can integrate chatbots that actually provide benefits.

Learnings

1) Chatbots are helpful in the subscription finding process because it is often not intuitive.

2) A chatbot must be able to map the questions that you would ask a customer so that you can offer them the right product.

3) The chatbot acts as a digital customer advisor in the subscription finding process and replaces the classic subscription columns where users have to compare the various offers themselves.

4) The use of chatbots in subscription marketing offers added value for the company and the user.

It’s best to listen to the podcast episode with Sophie Hundertmark and Simone Stolz for yourself. Have fun![vc_empty_space height=”40px”]

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