Casper Chat Insomnobot Snapchat

Casper, an online only mattress selling company, came up with two ‘Award Winning’ strategies of digital engagement, thereby gaining a competitive edge. Businesses today are highly customer centric and companies are heeding to the need to engage and support consumers and prospects in increasingly inventive ways which inspired Casper to do the same.

With Casper’s young and highly tech savvy team backing the business, they were bound to embrace whimsical technological innovations to engage their digital audience, much of it that worked to their advantage, helping them to reach a total revenue of nearly $200 million in just two years.

Casper is awarded the “MOST INNOVATIVE BRAND” award
at the 2016 Digiday Awards

SO WHAT INNOVATION DID CASPER BRING IN
to get themselves in the limelight?

WELL, THEY DEVELOPED:

INSOMNOBOT-3000:

Inspired by Taco Bell’s TacoBot for Slack, the Casper team came up with the witty conversational bot, Insomnobot–3000, to have very human like conversations with all the insomniacs. This chat bot however was very different than the others present. Here’s how:

• It is a conversational bot that is active only from 11:00 pm to 5:00 am keeping in mind the insomniacs.
• It can generate over 2,000 responses based on the category and emotion the keyword falls under.
• It is a “Text Based Bot” eliminating the dependence of the user to have an internet connection.

LINDSAY KAPLAN, VP OF COMMUNICATIONS FOR CASPER,
EXPLAINS WHAT MADE THEM CREATE SUCH A CHAT BOT:

“SOME NIGHTS, IT’S JUST IMPOSSIBLE TO FALL ASLEEP, SO I THINK CASPER WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT’S A FRIEND THAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT,”

SNAP HACKS:

The Casper team was the first to think of something like this. These snap hacks were meant to engage users by allowing them to be able to sit at home and do nothing while fooling others into thinking that they were having a blast. These included:

• Ten generic scenes like a dinner party, a nightclub etc. that could be snapped.
• These snaps included background music which could be muted or replaced.
• Each snap is 10 seconds long which can be cut short suitably.

THIS INNOVATIVE STRATEGY FOR SNAPCHAT USERS WAS VERY
WELL RECEIVED AS:

It drew OVER 200,000 USERS WITHIN 2 DAYS of its launch reaching out to prospects

Apart from being able to reach out to a wider audience in a whimsical way, these digital user engagement strategies were also highly praised by others in the industry inspiring many companies like Sequel, Pullstring and Luka to build bots with personalities.

THE FOLLOWING MARKET TRENDS ARE WHAT INSPIRED CASPER TO OPT FOR UNCONVENTIONAL USER ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES:

ACCORDING TO THE FIGURES RESEARCHED BY HUBSPOT, FRACTL AND MOZ:

These searches, online visits and customer reviews are only achieved if people are provided a solution for a problem of theirs or are engaged in an amusing way making them want to know more about the ones behind it.

The market today follows the rule,
“DON’T SELL TO CUSTOMERS, HELP THEM BUY”

This is exactly what Casper has been doing and has been doing it really well. Instead of directly asking the users to buy their products or showing the benefits of it, they continually strive to bring themselves to the attention of a number of prospects in respect to the purpose of their product. They have been very successful in these efforts of theirs showing everyone how a $200 million company sells mattresses.