Bots for Business

Building Bots with Landbot

Designed to power conversational brand experiences, Landbot helps businesses generate leads and provide better service using chatbots. Landbot tools are easy for anyone to use. Through a simple GUI, you can build customer-facing chatbots that qualify leads, collect feedback, or assist in your sales process.

Bye-bye, contact forms. Chatbots are taking over. At least, that’s the direction many web and UX designers appear to be heading. The thinking goes that consumers don’t want to fill out online forms—they want conversational experiences. And those conversations need not be with humans. Bots are well suited to the task.

Landbot is one organization that’s wholly dedicated to this vision of bot-driven customer communications. By replacing certain types of web-based customer interactions with its flagship product (known as Landbot, naturally), companies are attempting to meet all sorts of business goals, including increased lead generation and better customer satisfaction.

Let’s explore what Landbot has to offer, including use cases, integrations, and analytics, along with what it takes to get started with Landbot.

What is Landbot bot, and what is it used for?

Based in Spain, Landbot is one of several popular platforms that inject a conversational feel into otherwise routine experiences, like filling out forms. Instead of adding text to a form field, Landbot lets you chat with a bot. The bot prompts users to provide specific information, which is then shared with an appropriate human agent.

Landbot also supports the creation of conversational landing pages. Instead of greeting users with static text and images—standard fare for a landing page—the bot invites them to start a conversation. Users activate the bot, and a dialogue begins. To see how this works, look no further than the Landbot homepage.

As your bot captures users’ attention, it can offer them the same information they would have found on a landing page. The difference is that they are actively engaging with your brand—and they’re doing so as soon as they arrive at your site.

Using the native tools provided by Landbot, you can also build chatbots that:

• Interact with existing customers.
• Prompt website visitors to get in touch.
• Streamline conversations with vendors.
• Enhance partner communications.
• Help internal teams work together.

In other words, Landbot is a chatbot application that can be business-to-consumer or business-to-business. It isn’t a chatbot framework for building sophisticated, AI-powered bots, although it is packaged with native bot-building tools. And, although it’s not a chatbot messaging application, it does insert a bot-powered app into your existing website or proprietary communication channel.

Although the included tools are flexible, the most important Landbot use cases (and those which are most showcased in its product literature) are lead generation, customer support, and e-commerce. In other words, you can think of Landbot as an extension of your CRM capabilities.

Landbot bot examples

Job recruiting chatbot

If you’re wondering what a chatbot-powered landing page looks like, check out this example from Intero. A Silicon Valley–based real estate company, Intero helps clients buy and sell luxury properties. To recruit licensed agents, Intero set up a landing page that’s also a Landbot experience.

After a couple of leading questions, qualified agents can submit their information and connect with the right person at Intero.

Lead-generation chatbots

One of the most publicized Landbot use cases is lead generation. This is an area where it competes with other platforms, such as Drift, which utilizes a conversation-driven (and chatbot-centric) approach to engaging with potential customers.

Flowbot is one example of a Landbot used for lead generation. Instead of qualifying leads based on responses submitted via web form, Flowbot asks straightforward questions and gathers the appropriate information. In this case, it’s a lead-generation conversation geared toward business owners who also want to improve lead generation.

Eventually, Flowbot gathers enough information to qualify you as a lead and directs you to a person.

Another lead-generation bot that also serves as a substitute for a website’s foundational content is the Landbot chatbot for 18 Coffees, a consulting firm. From the homepage, you’re prompted to activate a chatbot capable of explaining all there is to know about the company.

That being said, the 18 Coffees bot is still a lead-generation bot. If you indicate you’re interested in consulting, the bot lets you know to expect a follow-up email.

Building chatbots in Landbot

Building bots with the Landbot GUI

After creating a Landbot account, you’re immediately ushered into a GUI bot-building tool where you build your bot.

There are all sorts of styling options. You can choose from various color palettes, themes, avatars, and animated GIFs. Of course, the most important options involve what your bot’s purpose is (whether it is lead generation or something else) and how you want it to appear on your website (as a landing page, a popup, a chat window, or another type of embed).

After completing those basic steps, it’s time to create your bot’s dialogue. The GUI makes it easy to visualize what you’re doing, add steps to the conversation, and test your bot before adding it to your website.

This process highlights the proprietary Landbot interface for creating straightforward chatbots intended to serve a specific purpose. If your goals align with what these tools have to offer, that can be a very good thing. However, if you need more control over your bot’s behavior, like integrated natural language processing (NLP) or more granular access to the bot’s backend, a full-featured chatbot framework might make more sense.

If you’re considering building a bot with Landbot, keep in mind that the “chatbot as landing page” approach is most compelling when you’ve got a dedicated domain for your chatbot. Deploying your Landbot creation to its own domain, such as a .BOT domain, makes a lot of sense when you’re creating a landing page that’s also a bot-powered conversation.

Luckily, Landbot tools make it easy to build a bot that can live and thrive on its own domain, while also providing a standalone interactive experience.

Enhanced capabilities with Landbot APIs

At the highest Landbot price tier (we’ll look at Landbot pricing in just a moment), you get access to Landbot APIs—a platform API and a channel API.

For most cases where you’d build and deploy a bot using Landbot, having API access won’t be particularly useful. It does come in handy when you need to create a custom experience that’s integrated with other applications that are critical for business operations, such as a CRM system.

The channel API allows you to integrate any communication platform with your bot and to manage it from the Landbot dashboard. This might make sense if you want to build a bot with Landbot and to deploy it to a platform for which Landbot doesn’t have an out-of-the-box integration. After deploying to your platform of choice, you can use the API to connect that channel to your Landbot dashboard.

Landbot integrations

At the lowest price tier, Landbot integrates with Zapier and Slack. Various paid plans give you access to other integrations, including Mailchimp, Facebook Messenger, Stripe, and Google Sheets.

The most expensive Landbot subscription includes WhatsApp integration, which could be a very compelling advantage for businesses that are active in European markets. WhatsApp, of course, is the most widely used messaging app in much of Europe and, for that matter, the world. That Landbot positions this integration as a top-shelf feature speaks volumes about the potential advantages of automating conversations with customers through WhatsApp.

How analytics work in Landbot

From the dashboard, to look into how your bot interacts with users (and vice versa), select Analyze. There are areas for:

• Metrics. View information about chats, leads, and conversions.
• Users. Learn their names (if provided), dates they interacted with the bot, and other information.
• Flow analytics. See the percentage of users who make it to different stages of the conversation with your bot.

Although it’s not part of the analytics dashboard, there’s another highly effective form of analysis that’s easy to perform using Landbot—the A/B test. Build different conversation flows with unique dialogue, and test both on identical user segments. The included analytics tools help you see which conversations were effective—and which weren’t.

Landbot pricing model

Landbot offers four pricing tiers:

• Free. Get 100 chats per month and 30 blocks per bot. You also enjoy Zapier integration, Slack integration, and the full analytics dashboard.
• $34/month. In addition to everything from the free tier, this plan comes with unlimited chats, Mailchimp integration, Facebook Messenger integration, and other features.
• $114/month. At this price point, you can add Google sheets integration, webhooks, and the ability to remove Landbot branding.
• $568/month. This level gives you access to both APIs and a custom integration module for WhatsApp. You also get custom onboarding and training.

How to get started with Landbot

Visit the Landbot homepage, start chatting with the bot, and sign up to start creating your own chatbot. It’s really that simple.

Explore the Landbot GUI to decide whether Landbot makes sense for your business. If your end goal is to improve lead generation or some other type of customer communication, there’s a good chance it will be a good fit.