How Lead Generation Chatbots Can Help Your Business Acquire More Customers

Conversational marketing has become a major driving force behind customer purchases, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. In 2019, about 17 percent of consumers made purchases using conversational marketing solutions. That number more than doubled to a whopping 41 percent by 2020, according to Drift’s 2020 State of Conversational Marketing report. […]

Conversational marketing has become a major driving force behind customer purchases, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. In 2019, about 17 percent of consumers made purchases using conversational marketing solutions. That number more than doubled to a whopping 41 percent by 2020, according to Drift’s 2020 State of Conversational Marketing report.
And the increase didn’t apply just to purchases. The percentage of consumers scheduling meetings and subscribing to mailing lists via conversational marketing solutions also doubled from 2019 to 2020. This massive uptick has certainly caught the attention of many businesses that want to improve their lead generation efforts.

At the forefront of this new wave of conversational marketing solutions are lead generation chatbots. These bots use powerful automation technology and data retention capabilities to strengthen consumer relations and identify better leads for businesses.

Whatever type of leads you’re looking to pursue as a business, chatbots can help you find them with greater accuracy and success. In this article, we explore three primary benefits.

Automatically qualify leads at scale

Before someone ever signs up for a demo or downloads an e-book, a bot can help your business identify whether they’re a qualified lead.

By asking the right questions, a lead generation chatbot is able to get valuable insight into how warm or cold a lead might be. Following are a few examples of preset answers you can include in your chatbot script to find out what a consumer is looking for.

Preset questions and answers can help your bot determine where someone is in their customer journey. Are they simply interested in learning more about what your company does, or do they already know the business and want to book a product demo? The answer will help your marketing and sales teams tailor their approach to that consumer, based on whether they’re closer to the top or bottom of the sales funnel.

Chatbots can also help get more detail about leads than a standard lead generation form you send to consumers via email. Conversations with bots result in 15 percent more net new leads than traditional lead gen forms. People are generally more willing to have conversations with bots than they are to fill out a form. As a result, bots are a more effective way to capture warm and hot leads that are (or may soon be) purchase-ready.

The best part of this technology? Bots can communicate with hundreds of consumers at the same time, so there aren’t long waits that might discourage potential customers.

Get a more accurate assessment of consumer needs

Pulling consumer insights isn’t always a simple task. It can be difficult to motivate consumers to take time out of their day to fill out a survey about their experience with your brand.

By sparking conversations with consumers on your website or social media pages, lead generation chatbots can more effectively get insight into product preferences.

What makes this type of chatbot effective? For one, it should only interact with the consumers who interact with it first. The fact that the chatbot isn’t asking anything of the consumer is likely to make the consumer feel more at ease and more open to sharing information.

Program your chatbot to naturally ask survey-like questions within the chat itself. Compared with a survey, the bot’s questioning will feel more like a two-way conversation to the consumer. At the same time, the bot is pulling useful insights about consumers’ needs without being intrusive.

ChatBot, an all-in-one platform to build and launch conversational chatbots without coding, keeps things interesting when surveying users about which features they want to learn more about. They use colorful emojis and bolded one-word descriptions, so consumers can click through with ease to find the answers they need. This approach makes it easy for customers to share responses, and it adds a bit of fun to the traditionally stiff survey experience.

Along with providing closed-ended questions, leave room in the chatbot interaction for consumers to write out specific answers. Sometimes a consumer issue may require more detail than the this-or-that logic many bots currently offer. The open-ended answers that your bot receives should be regularly reviewed by your marketing and sales teams so they can tailor specific answers to consumers.

Help find the right product for your customer

When a consumer visits your website, they often don’t know what they’re really looking for. That said, they know they don’t want cookie-cutter answers. In fact, the Drift report notes that almost 20 percent of consumers said that personalized results were key to having a positive experience with a conversational marketing solution.

Lead generation chatbots can help consumers find the product they’re looking for without adding additional pressure from sales reps. Bots function as trusted advisers without the need to meet business quotas.

If your company offers multiple products, design your bot to narrow down the options and explain key features. This conversation design can help users get a better sense of the scope of products or services your business offers and which ones might be the best fit.

If you want to add even more value for consumers, you can combine bot convenience with live rep support, as in the Chorus.ai example. The company’s bot offers to set up a quick tour, during which a live rep will go over product options in more detail. Since the consumer is already interested in the company’s products, it makes sense for the bot to suggest setting up a call with the sales team at this stage.

In other cases, a consumer might be on the hunt for a particular product, and the bot can help them realize that another item could be a better fit. The conversation may result in an upsell, but more importantly, the consumer gets the product they really need.

Build your lead generation chatbot today

These chatbots aren’t meant to be used as blatant sales tools to simply pitch consumers on different product offerings. They function best by sparking conversations and taking consumers’ needs into consideration before making suggestions. If you want to get started building your chatbot, check out our guide to building a chatbot in four simple steps—with no coding experience.