Do you know chatbots can help generate leads for your business? Recently, new tools called chatbots are created to simplify the communication between humans and computers that have hit the market. In banking, chatbots and virtual assistants are some of the industry’s most innovative tools designed to simplify the interaction between humans and computers. A perfect mixture of two can overwhelm your business with leads. For this, you should adopt chatbot lead generation strategies – inspired by conversational lead generation. Chatbots have become extremely popular in the US. If you want to know how chatbots can help to generate leads. Then read this article carefully.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a piece of software that helps to automate customer service. The chatbot is an artificial intelligence software that can start a conversation with users in natural language through messaging applications, websites, and mobile apps. Why are chatbots powerful in lead generation? A chatbot is often portrayed as one of the most advanced and promising expressions of interaction between humans and machines. However, from a technological point of view, a chatbot only represents the natural evolution of a question-and-answering system leveraging natural language processing. Formulating answers to questions in natural language is one of the most common examples of natural language processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.
What is conversational lead generation
Conversational lead generation is growing among companies because it helps them gather valuable data and improve market research in the shortest possible time. A look at conversational marketing statistics hints at their efficiency. With conversational marketing strategies in place, companies don’t have to wait for potential customers to fill up lead generation forms and send them to the former. With the current alterations in their tech and tone, the customer finds the communication at par with that of a real human. However, the flaws of real human conversation, such as delays or improper behavior, can be eliminated with well-programmed chatbots.
Why it is getting popular
Chatbots can be integrated into applications or websites and have even begun to appear in instant messaging services like Facebook Messenger. Chatbots can also help to eliminate some of the repetitive tasks affiliated with the call center and business environment. The easiest way for any business to upgrade their customer service is to monitor consumer data and collect insights. Generally, implementing an intelligent chatbot is much more affordable and faster than hiring employees, or creating cross-platform chatbots allows organizations to handle a range of customer communications at once without overspending on employee costs.
15 reasons why chatbots will help you generate more leads in 2020
- A better alternative to chat agents – A chatbot can be a better alternative to chat agents, live chat agents can manage at most three to four discussions simultaneously, whereas, chatbots can function with no upper limit. Chatbots are less prone to errors and can improve consumer experience by responding to customers with accurate answers. Chatbots can effortlessly give quick replies to all the incoming chat requests in comparison to chat agents. Many companies have been keen to develop fast automated systems that make the lives of many professionals more comfortable and easier.
- Automation to manage complete marketing funnel – The sales funnel is an important part of the road map of the buyer’s journey. This process begins the moment a lead arrives at a company’s landing page and ends when the lead makes the decision to buy the product or service. The sales funnel consists of four different phases – Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action. It is possible to automate your sales cycle or at least part of it using a chatbot. A good sales chatbot can be trained to present different offerings based on the answers it receives from the prospect.
- Customized drip sequence to manage multiple conversation types – It is very difficult to manage multiple conversations for a human. Chatbot has the capability to have multiple concurrent conversations. A conversation is where the chatbot interacts with a person, and supporting multiple concurrent conversations means that the chatbot can have multiple different conversations with different people at the same time. This makes it efficient and scalable.
- Quick replies to repetitive questions – In a human-based or semi-automated customer service department, you can free agents to form answering the same questions over and over again. This can be done by training the chatbot with the asked questions and respective answers, so when asked again the answers to these repetitive questions can be given within seconds. You can also provide suggestions and show what topics are covered – quick replies. By doing this, the users can become more interested in a conversation, so you have higher chances that they will leave you a message. And, in the end, become your customers.
- Segment/Label the audience – It’s very important to segment audiences. Segmentation plays a significant role in managing your content relevant. It also improves your lead generation strategy. For instance, suggesting US residents a tour package, valid for the Indian citizens can spoil the customers’ reality. Your chatbot can segment the audience based on the data they provided. It does so on many factors like demographics, interests, age, gender, etc. If a consumer belongs to a particular category, you can deal with him with the solution you have for that section.
- One-to-one conversational experience – Chatbot can consistently engage with customers to provide one-to-one conversational experience. Imagine offering a human and friendly conversation to all your users. This strategy can help you to convert more of your leads into customers, and hence improve your conversion rate.
- Build Relationships – Chatbot helps to build relationships with customers. Trust is the foundation of a relationship. A chatbot helps you build that trust by having a regular talk to the audience. It engages subscribers by providing on-the-spot support and constantly being available to help them make the users think that there’s a brand they can forever rely on. This can be very effective for lead generation. Also, the chatbots are not pushy and they always take care of the customer’s preferences. For instance, for an e-commerce store, If the users find any issues associated with their shopping experience or their account, they’ll ask the chatbot how to fix it.
- Personalized follow-ups and broadcast messages – It is critical to find out what went wrong and then bring the human back into the chat. For this purpose, there is a specific solution known as ‘Follow-up Message’. Chatbots can follow up with personalized marketing messages and can send an automated message about an item it “discussed” with the consumer. A chatbot is readily available for an answer keeping the conversation on over a period of time in case the human takes no action. This is a time-saving method.
- Replace forms – Filling out forms has become a tedious task to do neither it’s exciting nor engaging. Chatbots can replace these forms in a super-effective method to produce leads that can cleverly ask user details within the discussion. This lessens the friction and streamlines the data gathering process for you. Users get it easy to give information in answer to an answer. Also when building a chatbot that can require any user’s name, email, phone, address and more provide autofill options, this way you can make the consumer do less typing, hence, fasten the detail giving the process too. This hence boosts your lead generation tactics.
- Engage users until they become lead – One of the most challenging parts of turning a site visitor into a viable prospect is keeping them engaged with your brand. That is engaged long enough to show them why you’re the right choice for their needs. A chatbot can also engage a visitor who tries to leave the website and ask them some questions that’ll end in getting a lead.
- Educate the audience – Education is an indispensable part of the lead generation process. Without knowing the product, the customer won’t buy it. This can be performed easily with a chatbot. Many companies use chatbots to educate their audience and make them regular subscribers with blogs. Chatbots make blog reading much easier, users just enter the term they want and the relevant blog pop-up ready to read in a few seconds. Chatbots also lets users find other content you’ve on your website easily.
- Automatically Book Meetings and Calls – Imagine if your sales team could step into the office each day with a full schedule of meetings already scheduled for them. You can now book meetings and calls automatically using chatbots; they can be connected to your sales team’s calendars to verify availability and automatically book meetings after a lead is qualified. This is the biggest advantage of chatbots.
- Cost-effective leads – Chatbots and live chat can both be powerful tools in any lead generation strategy. But when it comes down to cost, chatbots are the more suitable option for most businesses. The most obvious benefit to bot-powered chat widgets is that they’re much more cost-effective than hiring 24/7 support and sales staff. Making it a better opportunity for medium scale businesses.
- 24X7 availability – This is also one of the biggest advantages of chatbots. Chatbots can work for you 24X7 without rest which employees can’t do. On average people spend 7 minutes until they are assigned to an agent. Chatbots can reduce the waiting time. Since chatbots are basically virtual robots they never get tired and continue to obey your command at scale. This improves your customer satisfaction and helps you rank high in your sector.
- Monitoring & Gaining Insights – Many companies mainly use bots for image purposes in order to represent themselves as an innovative, technological business. Furthermore, bots can be installed as useful tools in all phases of the customer journey. Apart from their main tasks, bots can generate valuable data regarding customer insights. Chatbots can also collect data by asking survey questions.
What to expect from the rise of the chatbots
The chatbot will soon be able to provide more than customer service. With chatbot making communication easier, we’ll see a rise in the use of NLP for the chatbot to be more and more like a human that can read the text, analyze it and trigger an accurate response. We pretty much see it growing in this coming time as we all would prefer a personalized reply over an automatic response. The easiest way for any company to upgrade its customer service is to monitor customer data and collect insights. Chatbots can also collect information from consumer feedback and use that data to deliver insights into how you can improve your products and services.
According to Business Insider, 80% of the businesses will be adopting chatbots by 2023. If you want to grow your business, you must be a part of that 80%. You can generate leads with the usual methods too, but these chatbot lead generation strategies can get you more cost-efficient yet quality leads. After all, only effective leads will convert into paying customers. The bottom line is if you don’t have a lead generation bot, you’ll miss out on the opportunities of making effective leads and improving customer’s experience with your business. Chatbots are the present of business and their future is much more glorious.
