One of the most powerful marketing tools – a way to engage company clients and build a stronger relationship with them. Competitions, lotteries and quizzes. Either with prizes worth thousands of dollars or created on a smaller scale. They can be built and managed faster, easier and cost-efficiently in chatbots. Since you are reading this article, you’ll get to know what opportunities they offer. And how to create them step-by-step using the Chatbot Creator platform.
You can create and manage a contest within a platform in Chatbot Creator. The panel enables you to freely arrange and create columns for competition entries and as a result, collect entries from users. Using the platform you can:
1. Create a contest
Choose the type of contest, based on:
2. Manage entries in the Chatbot Creator competition panel
The Chatbot Creator contest panel allows you to easily and quickly manage competition works. Before the start, you can adjust the panel to your needs. Here you can:
3. Sending push notification to participants of the contest
You can easily set push notifications to participants in Chatbot Creator: winners, those who didn’t win, all of them, or those who started but haven’t finished the competition. It’s a great and effective communication tool. You choose the right target with one click and create a push message. Automatically and easily.
What’s more, you can download all data automatically in xlsx (Excel).
Creating a competition takes 2 steps in Chatbot Creator: setting a contest in the “competition” panel and creating a contest flow in the “build a bot” tab.
It’s really intuitive so with this guide you’ll be able to do it fast and conveniently. Let’s begin.
Basic settings in the Competition module
It’s about time to set up columns in the table, where your chatbot will place information from the contest participant. Your table by default will include the first and last name of the participant, the submitted entry and the date. The rest can be customized to suit your needs.
The table will appear in the competition panel after your contest is published. Here you’ll see all of the submitted works and be able to mark people. It’s a crucial moment because the table is your contest management center.
We are still in competition module. You simply add a column label (name) that will appear in your contest table. Then choose the type of information that will be collected.
For example
If you want to hand over 3 prizes, you have to make 3 columns called 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place (or however you want) and then set a columns’ type for “check the winner”. Now you’ll be able to mark your winners and send them a notification about the victory.
You can also add additional columns and data from users such as:
You can create up to 10 columns.
Setting competition's columns
The last step you take in competition module is clicking on “add a competition button”. Voila.
The next view is your contests’ list where you’ll see all the submitted contests. You can duplicate or delete each of them. All the about information when it starts/ends is found under the name of the contest (depending on whether it is active or not). From this point you can still change it, duplicate it or delete it. You can also enter the contest and view all users applications.
Now let’s move to the second part – creating a block with the contest to add messages that would be displayed to users in Messenger.
Start with adding a welcome message:
Write what participants can do in the competition chatbot and explain what this is all about to them. By adding new messages you can create a conversation flow – here you can show them prizes.
Example of Welcome Message in the block
You should also inform people about the terms and regulations of your contest or – if needed – set a gate which they have to accept to enter the competition.
Example of regulation form in Chatbot Creator
To collect entries you have to connect your contest created in competittion module with a bot structure. To do so, prepare the block to which users will be redirected if they agree to take part in the competition. Then within its structure:
Here you will see your additional column you’ve chosen in the competition module.
You have to set variables under which the data should be collected in the column. Let’s assume that you want to collect participants email. You simply add a variable eg. {{participants_email}} in the box next to the name of the custom column that you set in the competition module. Check out how we do it in the video below.
Setting variables to additional competition's column
In a conversation flow we have to collect data which are gonna be saved under your „extra” variable. In our case we’ ask a users for „email” before asking for uploading entry. We have to collect this data before the window with contest.
Collecting additional contest data
Now you can customize and change the chatbot’s default answers. You are provided with options, as seen below:
You can add buttons for each of the answers . If participants get this message they can move to other places (e.g. with the option of returning to the main menu).
Changing default answers in Chatbot Creator
Don’t forget about adding a goodbye message.
For example:
Thanks for submitting your photo. We will inform you about the results of competition.
Remember to save everything on production – if you don’t, work may disappear. Get into the habit of saving every step you take. If the chatbot is connected to a Facebook profile, the contest will be published at the date you set in 1 step. If someone submits an entry (in our case, a photo), it will appear in the contest table with columns in Chatbot Creator.
The contest table – as you saw at the beginning – is placed in the competition module. The table contains the participants’ data that we wanted to collect:
You can choose people who will get contest notifications from the level of your table. Everything happens automatically. We can inform participants that e.g.:
What’s really great is that we will also able to send messages to a specific group of people who took part in the competition.
Options that appear here include:
After clicking, we are redirected to the broadcast (push notifications) panel and we already have the ID of the users to whom this message should go in the message recipients list. We do not have to do it ourselves, the system does it for us. All entries can also be downloaded automatically to xls – for example Excel.
To know more about sending push notifications, read this article on the Chatbot Creator blog.
We have come to the end of our journey. Now you can organize a chatbot contest creation in Chatbot Creator. Let’s talk for a while about the advantages of such a solution.
It would take a few pages to describe the features of contests in Messenger chatbots. But why waste words. Let’s put it briefly – why actually organizing competitions in chatbot works?
If you have additional questions – whether technical or connected to design or the copywriting part of chatbot creation, you reach us on Facebook or by e-mail.
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