The Essential Guide to Use Chatbots for Lead Generation

Many tools and methods are available to generate leads but most businesses prefer the chatbot over others as it certainly has more benefits.

In fact, bots have no match when it comes to user engagement. They have literally transformed the way brands and customers interact with each other.

To top it all, bots can help companies acquire leads without a big investment. In fact, 55% of businesses that use AI chatbots go on to generate more high-quality leads.

For that reason, a lot of companies take the automation route and use bots to provide 24×7 support, offer quick answers and deliver personalized responses as and when needed.

Chatbots for lead generation is one of the best tools that help marketers to connect and engage with their prospects in 24×7 even when the sales team is busy or not available.

How do Chatbots help with Lead Generation?

The use of chatbots is growing in improving sales, customer support, marketing, and customer experience. Lead qualification bots can boost operational efficiency and bring cost savings to businesses while offering higher satisfaction to customers. If used aptly, chatbot business benefits can flood you with leads.

Deploying lead generation chatbots can ensure many advantages for your business.

Automate sales conversions – You can automate your sales funnel with chatbots to prequalify leads by asking specific questions and based on their response direct them to the right team for further nurturing.

Better return on investment (RoI) – Lead qualification chatbots bring in business opportunities by creating effective chat experiences for your customers. They can prove a great investment to enrich, differentiate, or improve your overall service.

Being active round the clock – Chatbots are always-on to engage customers with immediate answers to all the sales queries, so you can qualify leads by asking questions as per your business needs and know the intent of the visitors, and use it for lead nurturing.

How to Use Chatbots for Lead Generation?

AI chatbots can be a great tool to enrich your business with high intent leads. If your business is ready to implement the virtues of conversational AI ( artificial intelligence), it will surely reap the rewards in terms of quality leads. You, however, need to devise and embrace the right lead generation bots strategies to achieve the intended targets of your business.

Brands are using conversational lead generation chatbots in various ways to enhance customer experience and drive sales.

Understand the target audience better
Segment your customers
Auto qualify leads with chatbots
Replace forms with lead generation bots
Schedule appointments 24×7 with lead bots
Educate your audience with chatbots
Ensure hybrid support for complex sales conversations
Build strong customer relationships
Engage visitors who intend to bounce

Let’s discuss each of the ways in detail;

1. Understand the target audience better

Many businesses make the mistake of attempting to convert an audience they don’t have much understanding of.

Well, you should not tread that path ever as it’s paved with mistakes!

For any business, it is hugely important to first understand the target audience better, know their interests, and then aim them as potential leads.

This is where lead qualification bots prove very handy — they not only help in understanding prospects better but also in segmenting them, which is imperative for any lead generation campaign.

It acts as a secret recipe for marketers to create the right content for prospects.

How to use lead generation bots to understand the audience better?

Bots help you identify the interests, likes, dislikes and create more engagement, resulting in more leads.
You can run chatbots surveys to engage customers by asking questions to get a better view of the best and least performing products.
Marketers use the right content at the right time to move the leads into the funnel as a chatbot can segment your audience based on the answers they provide.

2. Segment your customers

Segmentation is a strategic practice of profiling the audience as accurately as possible to ensure relevant content to them. It also makes it easy to use customer data to create meaningful audience segments.

The main objective of segmenting customers is to deliver marketing messages that are relevant to the users. After all, you can segment based on so many factors like demographics, interests, age, gender, etc.

Lead qualification chatbots have many use cases as they can easily segment the audience based on the data they provided and help generate more qualified leads. When the audience is segmented with AI chatbots, it helps you in nurturing the leads.

If you want to targets the audience with a fitting solution, you first need to know the particular category they belong to.

For example, if your user celebrates Christmas, the lead generation chatbot can show the best gifts available for the customers. Also, over time you can create certain answers based on the fragmented results, so whenever your users are looking for particular answers, you can be prompt with it.

3. Auto qualify leads with chatbots

Chatbots are now a top channel for communication between brands and customers. The use of AI-bot can enable a business to engage users effectively, deliver prompt responses and solve queries in quick time.

The best part, you can leverage chatbot use cases to prequalify leads when your sales agents are busy or not available. In fact, a chatbot template for lead generation can help your business reach out to a bigger audience without involving the customer success team.

You can prepare industry-specific questions and bots can qualify your sales prospects by asking these questions. Lead bots can then direct the leads to the sales team or schedule an appointment for conversion.

Roof Ai, a real estate chatbot, is a good example of how to use the power of smart chat aka hybrid model to drive conversions and generate leads.

The lead generation bot from Roof automatically engages with your website visitors and converts them into your best customers. The bot is perfect for new agents looking to increase engagement with potential leads on the website.

4. Replace forms with lead generation bots

Truth be told, customers don’t like filling up forms on websites. They find it tedious as it’s neither exciting nor engaging.

So, your business is definitely on the wrong track if it still heavily relies on the traditional method of lead generation via form fill-ups.

And why would your business stick with a primary method whose chances of converting customers with lead generation forms are between 2.5% to 5%!

On the other hand, teaming up chatbots and lead generation can bring your business a good number of leads.

Bots can reduce friction and streamline the data collection process thus effortlessly boosting your inbound lead generation strategy.

Vainu, a data analytics service, is one of the fine examples of lead generation bots to engage users with rich conversations without the need to fill up a form. Their bot, — Vain aBout — asks qualifying questions and engage visitors by providing multiple options.

The visitors can quickly make choices by simply selecting the option most relevant to them. The bot also asks for their email address to book a demo or send a report at the end.

Why replace forms with lead generation bots?

Businesses that aim at collecting lead information should create a chatbot to ask qualifying questions and respond with new questions based on the previous answers given by visitors.
Lead generation chatbots can help companies acquire more qualified leads compared to a simple lead generation form.

5. Schedule appointments 24×7 with lead bots

Appointment bookings are quite common for B2B firms, hospitals, and healthcare as a lot of meeting-related requests often flood them day-in and day-out basis.

The good thing, these businesses needn’t worry about booking hassles or extra costs to hire resources to handle the incoming appointment traffic.

They can rather invest in chatbots and manage appointment booking at a fraction of the chatbot pricing that was earlier the norm.

When AI bots are used, customers can easily book slots for an appointment on the website and the booking notification would go to the relevant team.

This is how the whole appointment booking affair is easily streamlined to ensure benefit to both the parties – customers as well as the business.

Babylon Health, a famous British online subscription service, is a great example of how to use lead generation chatbots to offer consultation based on personal medical history, and also connect the potential customers with a live video for consultation from a doctor.

After signing up, you have to detail your symptoms to the bot. It will analyze the information against its database and provide you further steps and possible causes.

Note: While a bot is never a replacement for a physician, it can still add some value by asking relevant questions to personalize the experience for each user. That’s why healthcare providers can adopt AI chatbots for simpler functions to let customers easily book appointments and notify them with reminders.

Tips to use lead generation chatbots for appointment

Schedule appointments when your team is not available.
Automatically capture leads 24×7 by fill up forms.
Send email notification whenever an appointment is done along with customer contact details.
Engage your customers offline over a call and confirm the same.

6. Educate your audience with chatbots

Without adequate knowledge of your products, why would anyone like to purchase them?

And it’s your business that has to ensure product knowledge is easily available to anyone and everyone who shows an interest.

For that reason, educating the customers is always one of the key aspects of a successful conversational lead generation strategy.

And when it comes to educating the audience, automation is the best route available as it not only saves resources but also ensures amazing results. AI lead bots come in handy for such purposes.

Many top companies like Sephora, Spotify have added chatbots to educate their audiences about the products and services they focus on. It helps customers to make informed decisions.

Best practices in using bots to educate customers

Use bots to send promotional and educational messages like upcoming webinars, offers, discounts or send books to educate about your business.
Integrate your bots with CRM as it can help you amalgamate the data of every subscriber, thus making your lead management system more free-flowing.

7. Ensure hybrid support for complex sales conversations

Both live chat and chatbot are now dominant channels for customer engagement. Each of them has a unique set of benefits that your business can leverage for lead generation.

However, you first need to understand the pros and cons of live chat vs chatbot as it can help you make the right decision to choose live chat, chatbot, or the balance of both.

The ideal strategy for your business is to identify website pages that require live chat along with lead generation bots.

It is better to use lead generation bots as the primary contact to engage customers, qualify leads and collect information before transferring it to the expert team.

Similarly, you should maintain a balanced experience of both the communication platforms where bots can manage simple queries while live support agents can handle complex queries.

Businesses can balance their services by using both technologies to generate more leads and enhance their customer experience. You can deliver hybrid support by giving customers the best experience of both worlds.

Parameters to select the channel for conversational lead generation

Response time – You can use a chatbot as a primary contact channel to deliver real-time responses for sales-related queries and ensure live chat for lead generation is leveraged for the complex queries that need human assistance.
Customer experience – Bots can engage users instantly and provide the answers they are looking for. When you are able to understand and meet your customer needs, the rate of conversion increases along with delivering a great experience.
24×7 support – If your business demands to be ‘always active’, bots are the best option. They can engage when your sales team is away by acknowledging the issue and scheduling appointments.
Cost factor – If you are a small start-up, the cost must be a concern. Bots prove to be worth investing in as they are easily scalable during peak hours with any additional costs of resources or infrastructure.

8. Build strong customer relationships

Many leading companies like Amazon use chatbots as their primary customer support team. This helps them handle customer questions easily, and provide a suitable answer instantly.

After all, when your business is always available, it does increase brand credibility in the eyes of customers.

And by giving quick and timely answers, you can take a solid step towards building a strong customer relationship.

AI lead generation bots can easily engage customers round the clock by providing instant sales-related help and build trust between the user and the brand.

By using lead generation bots and human assistance in a balanced way, your business can ensure a seamless experience for customers and turn them loyal.

How do lead bots help to strengthen customer relationships?

Greetings are the best way to welcome visitors as it can also open many opportunities like new sales or building relationships with prospects.
You can warmly welcome your visitors by using a personalized message and grab their attention almost immediately.
With a good bot name, you can greet, whenever a new visitor or returning visitor comes to the landing page.
The use of a bot can also help you collect basic information from the visitors that can be used in the future.

9. Engage visitors who intend to bounce

Not getting accurate information in real-time is often the main reason why customers leave websites and switch over to competitors.

Lead generation chatbots could be the best tool or strategy to minimize the rate of shopping cart abandonment or engage users while they are trying to leave your website.

Any type of business that sells online products can use the bot — also the eCommerce stores, where the bot gently reminds you that “your cart is empty” or “your favorite product is waiting in the cart”.

Apart from sending gentle reminders, chatbots also initiate conversations addressing customers’ concerns.

At times where users fill out the contact form but for some reason forget to submit it, chatbots can engage users and encourage them to fill out the form.

The best thing, lead bots provide real-time sales assistance which customers need the most.

Benefits of engaging visitors with lead bots

Reduced bounce rate – Providing immediate assistance when customers are on your site helps them to make quick buying decisions, thus reducing the bounce rate significantly.
Increased conversion rate – When bots engage customers with the right information at the right moment, they end up with a final purchase. Hence, it helps to increase sales conversion rates.

Boost Your Sales Funnel and Grow Your Business with Lead Qualification Bots

Customers have high expectations from businesses when it comes to communication. They wish for smooth engagement, prompt replies, and an always-on kind of support. Automation via chatbots can help your business redefine the meaning of engagement and also drive conversions.

Lead generation chatbots can serve as the best tool to leverage AI capabilities and increase the conversational experience of website visitors, therefore, converting your traffic into qualified leads. With chatbot integration, you can increase website engagement, boost sales, and maximize overall business revenue.

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