By Marina Avilés, on 16 June 2022
Chatbots improve aspects like customer service and order management. Did you know that you can also use them to generate leads for marketing?
Chatbots help you better interact with visitors on your website and can synthesize the process of capturing your data into leads. But to be really effective, you need to be able to take advantage of the opportunities for engagement and find the right balance between chatbots and human interaction. Here's how to use lead generation chatbots to get effective leads!
Benefits of Generating Leads With Chatbots
- They help you understand your audience. In order to meet the needs of your potential customers, you have to know them. Chatbots facilitate the process of understanding what your audience's interests, preferences, and needs really are. During the conversation, the chatbot can introduce surveys, ask questions, and personalize the interaction with the customer. Over time, the data collected through live chats will help you understand what your most compelling offers are.
- Build relationships with your customers. Chatbots help build customer trust through continuous communication. Users know they can get help when they need it, and that improves their experience with your brand. But it’s essential to find the right tone of voice for your chatbot and give the option to talk to a person whenever necessary to solve complex issues.
- Segment your target audience. Segmentation plays a very important role in getting the right content to generate leads. Luckily, chatbots can help you automatically classify your audience based on different factors and give them only the content and offers that are best suited for their profile.
- Replace forms. One of the most commonly used lead generation strategies for brands is to have users fill out a form in exchange for valuable content. But the problem is that no one likes filling out forms. Chatbots can be a great solution since the process of entering data into the form is replaced by a conversation.
- They help train your target audience. Chatbots facilitate the process of research and training around the brand since they can solve frequently asked questions and send links to useful resources.
10 Ideas to Generate Leads With Chatbots
Conduct surveys. Chatbots are an ideal way to ask visitors what they think about your brand or your site and get data such as their name or email.
Use a chatbot when you are offline in a live chat. If your website has a live chat option but you can't offer 24-hour support, you can program a chatbot to collect the visitor's data and let them know you'll get back to them as soon as possible.
Take advantage of the waiting time. As stated above, if all your live chat agents are busy, you can offer users the opportunity to leave you their email to contact them later instead of waiting.
Greet visitors. When a user enters your website, you can use the chatbot to greet them and offer them the opportunity to leave you their email. If they are a repeat visitor, you can offer them a special discount for your online store.
Offer the opportunity to talk on the phone. Although email marketing is a strong lead generation technique, remember that your potential customers may have different contact preferences.
Interact with users when they leave the website. People leave a website for many reasons. Use these occasions to activate your chatbot and try to get feedback or, if possible, the user's contact details so you don't lose the potential lead.
Interact with users who haven’t completed a process. For example, when the visitor has filled out a form but has not submitted it, or has an abandoned cart. The chatbot can intervene at this critical moment to ask if there are any problems and resolve issues that are hindering the process.
Generate leads through blogs and articles. If you detect that a user is browsing from one article to another, you can ask them if they have any questions and direct them to the appropriate post.
Use Facebook chatbots. Facebook chatbots are another useful resource for users to communicate with your brand through one of their favorite channels.
Interact with the user on specific URLs. For example, if you have a product page that is particularly relevant when it comes to generating conversions, you can place a chatbot on that page to make sure there is no problem with a purchase.
How to Generate Leads With Chatbots Step by Step
1. Combine Chatbots and Customer Service Agents in Real-Time
Real-time interaction is essential to generate leads as it helps you engage your website visitors when they are most receptive.
The chatbot can start the conversation at key points during the visit, for example, when the user has been on the site for some time or is visiting a specific product page. After resolving their questions, you can let them know that they can speak to a live agent when they are ready. When they contact the prospect, agents can rely on the chat history to gather information about the prospect to personalize the interaction for maximum efficiency.
2. Respond to Leads as Quickly as Possible
When a user performs an action on your site (for example, downloading an ebook), you should react as quickly as possible. The sooner you can respond to their questions and requests, the more likely you are to achieve a conversion.
Users have become accustomed to instant communication, and chatbots allow potential customers to communicate their needs faster and with minimal friction. If you also make smooth transitions between chatbots and in-person agents, you'll be ahead of the game.
3. Personalize Your Chat Messages
Just like any other marketing channel, chatbots get better results when they are tailored to users' unique needs.
You can easily configure your chatbot to create personalized messages by integrating it with your other marketing tools. You can use the information you already have about users to greet them by name and direct the conversation based on their history. For example, you can offer them specific content based on the pages they have visited or welcome them back when they visit your site for the second time.
4. Offer an Accelerated Path for High-Potential Users
When a user is ready to buy, you can't make them wait. Through your chatbot software, you can offer them an opportunity to speak directly with your sales reps by simply clicking a button. This way, you'll reduce bounce rates and ensure you capture more leads and conversions.
5. Use History to Continue the Conversation
Take advantage of information from previous interactions with the user to keep them interested. Your goal is to capture their attention, keep the conversation alive, and get them to convert in the process.
If you detect that a visitor is about to leave your website, you can trigger a chatbot to start a conversation based specifically on their interaction history. This way, you can solve specific problems that the potential customer hasn’t been able to solve through your website.
In addition, if the user has previously interacted with a bot or agent, you can use this data to find out where they are in the buying process and decide on the next best steps.
6. Train Your Sales Team to Chat
Chatbots can help you generate leads and optimize your sales process, but interacting with real people is still critical to retaining these leads and converting them into customers. Train your sales team on the best practices for managing bot interactions and stepping into live conversations. To do this, your team should have good knowledge of your products and website and should maintain a similar tone between chatbot, live chat, and brand branding.
7. Integrate Chat Into Your Marketing Automation
The best results come when you integrate chatbots with the rest of your marketing technologies, such as your CRM, your marketing automation tools, and your collaboration software, such as Slack, Teams, and Zoom.
This helps your marketing and sales teams stay aligned and share all the information about each user, from their first visit up until they become a customer, including all their interactions with chatbots and live chats.
