Over the years, businesses have invented and engaged with various types of tools and solutions for enhancing their customer support and boosting their sales. Online marketing comes with the essence of lead generation for businesses, they have various strategies and tools to enhance their progress.
On the other hand, chatbots for businesses are becoming popular in the industry and businesses prefer chatbots over other tools to generate leads for their businesses, they believe chatbots have more benefits. Automated chatbots are efficient with many responsibilities which an user may have to perform manually.
But how do chatbots work for lead generation? How chatbots can be a solution to uplift the sales funnel? And how beneficial it can be? Let’s discuss all of it in today’s discussion which is ‘chatbots for lead generation and sales’.
Lead Generation Chatbots
Lead generation is a process of creating consumer interests and attracting them in the product or services of a business. With lead generation, a business can easily find out their potential consumers, which are known as leads.
Lead generation chatbots are basically computer programs which are used by business platforms to perform automated conversation between consumers and business.
These chatbots are typically made on technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) or NLP (Natural Language Processing), have the capability to communicate with consumers and create a potential conversation by understanding the needs of a consumer.
While being a productive tool through the purchasing process, chatbots build a connection with consumers by providing 24/7 services and support. As a result, 60 to 70% consumers admit that chatbots are best for their consistent services. Chatbots play a very crucial role when there is no live chat operator available for your website and make sure that you never miss a single lead.
How Chatbot Help In Lead Generation?
Nowadays, chatbots are very useful for businesses in many ways such as boosting sales, creating customer support, creating bonds with consumers and many more. In order to provide a grand customer service, chatbots are definitely a great asset. Lets see what is the contribution of chatbots in lead generation.
Understanding Audience
Lead generation chatbots make it simpler for you to understand your potential audiences. For example, you can easily choose a gift for your sister but you can’t for your neighbor right? Why? Because you know your sister better. Sameway, it won’t be easy for you to sell products and services when you don’t know the preferences of your consumers.
Chatbots create questions and quizzes to ask the audience and come up with their interests, likes and dislikes for you.
Segmentation
Segmentation is very important for maintaining your strategy to generate leadership. Based on the data you got about your customers, chatbots segment those data. Although, this segmentation depends on various factors such as age, sex, religion, demographics etc.
For example, if your user enjoys a sea beach, your lead generation chatbots can suggest to them the best summer suit to wear in beaches. Chatbots come up with a fitting situation for the audiences.
Creating Bond
Trust is the main thing of a business. Consumers gain trust when a chatbot keeps a constant communication with them and provides them with available help and services. Chatbots are always available for users to help them and make users believe they rely on a service or product, which is very helpful.
Not only inquiries about product and services but you can even use chatbots to provide a solution to your audience if they are facing problems with anything related to your product or services.
Consistency
Chatbots are always on to provide round the clock services for the audience. Whenever an audience visits the website and inquires about anything related to business and product, chatbots engage with them with immediate response about their queries. Immediate response is important for business to qualify leads. You can easily know what your visitor is interested in when they do inquiries and participate in the question answers of your chatbots.
Build Lead Generation Funnel Through Chatbots
Nowadays, most of the businesses use chatbots to boost their sales funnel but some of them miss the important part which is they don’t properly know the ways of building lead generation through chatbots. Let’s discuss one of the most important parts of our discussion which is, how you can build your lead generation funnel through chatbots.
Connect With Your Audience
In order to build lead generation through chatbots, you should definitely attract your target customers and connect with them. And chatbots are not capable of doing this step all alone.
You need to offer something interesting and attractive to your consumers in order to catch their attention toward you. A high quality content works most of the time to attract customers so make sure that you offer your consumers an attractive and high quality content or services. These types of approaches are commonly known as lead magnets.
And your chatbot can send them a message or a lead when your audience is going through the content. The audience might grow interest with this and might provide their details to come up with a touch for the lead magnet. Chatbots can usually ask the audiences for their name or email address for you to take things further.
Engage With The Lead
When you are done with getting in contact with your lead, it’s time for you to engage with that lead. Engaging with your lead is important for you to create conversions with your audiences. Also, having their contact is just a part of the whole big process, you need to qualify the lead or it won’t be of any use to you.
Now you might think, how can you qualify your lead?
Well, there are two ways of doing that, either you can continue the conversation by using your chatbot or, you can use the email that you got from your audience to engage with them.
The question is, Why email?
Because, email marketing has a good ratio of opening by the audience and target consumers so email can be a good option to engage and there is a chance consumers may positively respond to this.
Make sure that you don’t leave the engagement cold with your audience, keep engaging with them to know more details about them. You can ask some concerning questions to learn more about your audience.
Ask Endowing Questions
If you are successful with engaging with your audience, it’s time for you to ask qualifying or endowing questions to your consumers. Your chatbot can make this step simpler by asking them questions in the way of a conversation, which won’t make your leads fill up a big form. As a result, leads are usually not interested in filling up forms anyway.
You need to make the process of asking questions simple and as quick as possible because leads get bored easily in this type of process. And the process can be easy if you add buttons.
Buttons are usually shortcuts for audiences to respond faster. All they have to do is click the buttons. It will save more time and the process will be finished before your audience gets bored. It’s a win-win situation.
You can ask relatable questions based on how they answer each question. This will help to improve segmentation of your leads.
Add The Data
Once you are done with collecting data and information of your audience and segmented them into another category, it’s time for you to add that collected data to your CRM or you can use your chatbots excel.
There are chatbots that can contest popular CRMs to even google sheets. This can help you to make the process totally automated. Chabots will receive the data and information about your audiences and will automatically register them.
Set Up Special Attention
Sometimes chatbots won’t be enough and you may need human takeovers for some leads to setting up special attention. In these types of situations, you should keep an option to take over the conversation, it is helpful to reduce leads getting away.
Use triggers for the chatbots and by them, chatbots can handover the conversation to a human representative. This plays a very crucial role when a customer requires customized conversation and with this, solving their any issues will be very easy.
How To Set Up A Chatbots For Lead Generation
If you want to set up a chatbot for your business website, there are some things you should take in consideration while designing the chatbot. Lets give you the idea about what step you should take to set up a lead generation chatbot.
- Step 1: Define Your Objects
Before you take steps about anything, you have to be certain about the goals and intentions of your company and you have to decide precisely what you’re gonna achieve by using that chatbot.
- Step-2: Decide Your Way Of Quality A Lead
Formulating the questions of your chatbots is very important, and to formulate those, you need to understand what information your sales team or company needs to qualify any potential lead.
You may ask, what kind of questions should your chatbots ask? Well, this totally depends on the objectives of your company and your marketing funnel. You might only want to collect the email of your audience at the top of the marketing funnel but as leads move further to the bottom of your funnel, your chatbot can collect more information and data.
- Step-3: Define The Tone Of Voice Of Your Chatbot
Tone and vocabulary of chatbots are key in knowing your audiences. This might sound like a small step to you, but it comes with great benefits.
Your chatbot should have a tone that will follow your brand instructions and with that it will keep constant communication and build trust among your audiences. On the other hand, the terminology or vocabulary of your chatbot should keep a record and match with the words your audience uses with your chatbot.
- Step-4: Decide Your Way Of Targeting Chatbot
You have to choose precisely about where and when your chatbot should popup or the right moment for your chatbot to be triggered. Well, there are some facts you should consider to target your chatbot, which are-
- The page visitor is on right now
- Previously visited website or page of them
- Demographic location of the audience
- Device they are currently using, such as, laptop, tablet or mobile phone
- Number of times they have visited your website.
- Step-5: A/B Testing
A/B testing is important because it will let you know which leads are responding to the messages of your chatbot. Also, it will allow you to know on which page or on what time leads respond the most. This will optimize the process of your chatbot.
- Step-6: Decide Your Chatbot’s Flow
Focusing on essentials is important. So keep the flow of your chatbot simple and while keeping your business goal in your mind.
- Step-7: Decide Handover Process
Decide where your leads should be handovered. If you don’t want your leads to go away, you should decide properly about lead nurturing. It might be the whole sales team or can be any specific sales team employee, you are the one who has to choose it. Check the data you registered on your CRM and the automated process of marketing will make the handover process smooth for you.
Final Words
Nowadays, building an online business is being challenging day by day because the competition between online businesses is gradually escalating. In the matter of conversation, consumers’ expectations are always at their peak.
There are competitors like you in online business platforms, some of them are bigger sharks too. In order to make your position among them, you have to properly utilize every single business idea and every marketing strategy to improve your sales funnel. And, lead generation chatbots are surely one of them. A lead generation chatbot can surely help you with the breakthrough of your online business.