The Ultimate Guide to Boost your Marketing Strategy with a Lead Generation Chatbot

Hardik Makadia
9 min read

Imagine walking into a store to buy a laptop. It would help if you could meet someone with the right level of expertise and experience to guide you through the purchase. However, you see products but no one to talk to when you enter. The only person who is present doesn't have the said expertise. What happens at the end is you lose a customer?

This was just an example of how you can lose a potential conversion for your business. When you are an online business, you don't even know who walked into your store and what they were looking for. You need an active person who can continuously connect with everyone who walks in, help them find the right product/service, and improve conversions.

It is unlikely to find a person with that energy level to support hundreds of walk-ins. That's why you need a chatbot. A lead generation chatbot can be the connection between your business and the potential lead. They can guide the user through the opportunities and help them identify the most suitable solution. 

This article will take you through a lead generation chatbot and help you build one. 

What is a Lead Generation Chatbot?

When you are marketing to multiple customers with varying interests and personalities, your lead generation strategy should be on-point. With a lead generation chatbot, you create a flow that can recognize your customer's needs, personalize the interactions, and spark interest. The ultimate aim is to converse and convert.

These chatbots are designed to help the user understand the company, know the right places to search for essential guides, and check if the product/service fits their needs. And if it does, then conversationally collect qualifying details about the person like budget, authority, need and timeline to purchase.

It is taking traditional conversational marketing to an altogether new level.

Need for a Lead Generation Chatbot

With the growing digital audiences visiting business websites, it becomes very important for businesses to be available to their audience at any time of the day or night. With COVID, your prospects are working remotely with different timezones and coming to your website. 

To leverage all the surge of traffic from digital channels, it is a no-brainer to have a lead generation chatbot spark a conversation with these visitors and generate a sales-qualified lead.

Here, we will cover some of your website's top advantages of using them.

Bolsters Customer Engagement

Let's retake the store example. When you walk into the store and see no one you can talk to, you would most likely tend to walk out. You cannot decide without a discussion. This leads to customer attrition or lost business opportunities as they call it. 

It becomes more challenging to keep the visitor rooted in the site when you have a website. They may not even read through the content that you have presented on the site; it may not keep them engaged on the website. 

They can converse, mention the requirements, and get the required data immediately with a chatbot. This real-time conversation/interaction can help increase engagement and improve the customer's journey. Eventually, the customer will connect with the business to the point, which will, in turn, make their stay rewarding.

Access Real-time Insights

When you interact with the customer directly, you can take the conversation where you want. You can improvise based on real-time interactions. For example, if you asked, "what are they looking for on the website?"

No two potential customers would have the same answer. Your following conversation would be based on this answer, and it can help you resolve their issues better. You will also know why they come to the bot and what problems they are likely to face. It will help you optimize the bot and improve the conversations.

Increases Conversion

How likely are you to purchase the product when someone talks to you about its pros for your business? Most likely! Your customer is no different. Even if they are unsure, a conversation can make them want to complete the purchase.

When you have a simple call-to-action with emails and phone numbers, it is less likely to help with conversions. However, when you get the customer to converse with a chatbot or your messenger, they may convert faster. They are more likely interested in real-time conversations. 

When you introduce conversational marketing, it is compelling, teaches a new route to conversion, and helps you generate leads for your business.

Personalizes Customer Experiences

Technically, this is the most important job that the chatbot performs. It helps you customize the user's journey on the website and offer them the solutions they need.

Now go back to when you collected information using lead generation forms. Your audience might fill it out; however, it is possible the visitor went away without filling out the form. 

With Chatbots, you can interact with every visitor, know them better, and understand what they want and the pain points they are facing. It will help you hold better conversations with the customer and convert them faster. 

You can provide the information they need, offer them the best-fit solutions, and improve their journey.

Steps to Build your Lead Generation Chatbot

If you are convinced your business needs a lead generation bot, below are the sequence of steps that you can follow to build your own bot using a chatbot builder.

1. State your business goals

Start by answering- why do you need a chatbot? 

Do you want to add a new channel for getting leads? 

Would you like to replace your lead generation forms with real-time interactions? 

Do you plan to book appointments with prospects using the chatbot?

Whether it is one or all of the above, the goals will help you determine the outline for your chat workflow.

Before you begin building your lead generation chatbot, it is crucial that you take an excel and write the current leads that you generate through your website and how many do you expect to get from the chatbot. 

It may not be very useful now, but once you have the bot live for a few months, you can review the leads collected by the bot and see if it met the goal that you had set out for. If not, find avenues or create strategies to up this number.

2. Determine the lead type

As a marketer, you would know that there are various kinds of leads that a business receives. You will need to determine the kind of leads you expect to generate from the chatbot before proceeding with building the lead generation chatbot. Your conversation flows and travel will be defined according to the lead.

For example, you will need to converse more and put in slightly more effort to convert when you have a cold lead. On the other hand, if you talk to a hot lead, you know they will convert, and your efforts will be more to correct them.

3. Define the conversation flow

This is where you will be spending a good amount of your time. The conversation flow of the chatbot is what determines how many leads you get. As we are building a lead generation bot, the more users speak with the bot, and the deeper the conversation, the higher the chances of you getting a qualified lead.

Primarily, what you should do, use a tool like Whimsical to put down your thoughts and create a rough sketch of what that conversation flow would look like. And once you have done multiple iterations of it, you can begin building the lead generation chatbot. 

While designing the conversation flow, make sure that you take care of the following,

  • Initiate the conversation with a warm greeting message

  • Keep the conversation short and crisp (Ideally, < 3mins)

  • Avoid using long message blocks

  • Use images and GIFs to keep the conversation active

  • Use buttons to collect answers to BANT questions

  • Automate lead notifications to your team via CRM integration

4. Build the Chatbot

There are several ready-to-use chatbot tools available in the market. You can research and identify the most-suited tool for your bot.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when finding the ideal bot builder for your business

  • It should be user-friendly and easy to use

  • Low learning curve to make it easy for your teammates to use

  • Shortlist no-code focused chatbot platforms to be independent from engineering assistance

  • Engagement options like buttons, carousels, calendars to keep conversations intuitive

  • Chatbot analytics to view business-centric KPIs to generate insights

  • Integrations with your internal systems like CRM and support ticketing systems

When you spend time and effort identifying the apt tools, you will reduce your efforts when using them.

The tools will help you train the bot to enhance customer satisfaction and engage with them appropriately. When developing the bot, make sure you go back to customer conversations and use the questions they ask in the workflow.

5. Validate the Chatbot Flow

Once you are ready with the workflow, it is time to test what you have created. Usually, there is a test button right next to the builder, which will show you what these conversations will look like from an end-user perspective.

You need to check if the conversation flow that you made is flowing smoothly and helping solve the problem that we set out for. 

Let’s understand why it is essential to test the flow:

  • Several people will interact with the bot on your website when you set up the bot. If the bot doesn’t deliver the correct answers, visitors may bounce. And we’re talking about thousands of your website visitors.

  • It will hamper your brand’s reputation, as people may not feel convinced of your chatbot and their experiences may be posted on social media channels.

  • When you test the bot, you will know if the flow is complex or straightforward. You can also evaluate and design the conversation flow accordingly.

  • When you set up the workflow, you have a set thing on your mind. Testing this before the bot goes live helps reduce the number of iterations involved.

  • Having feedback from a small group of testers could help validate your hypothesis of the chatbot flow.

6. Setup Notifications for Leads 

Leads are crucial for business growth. As a marketer, you should be aware of every lead coming your way, to make sure that there aren’t leads slipping through the cracks. As leads and their inquiries are short-living, chances are that if you miss out on reaching out to a prospect within a specific period of time, you may lose the opportunity to close the deal.

Despite having built a high converting conversation flow, you will not convert the potential lead because you didn’t know about it.

Hence, it is essential to set up notifications via email and SMS. Every time a lead is generated through the chatbot your sales team is notified about it.

Here are some ways your chatbot builder can notify you,

  • Email: Your common email address like “sales@acme.corp” gets notified instantly

  • CRM: Natively integrate your CRM with the chatbot platform to ensure that these leads are assigned to reps and added to appropriate funnels as they move through the lifecycle stages

  • CSV: Receive a CSV file every day containing the list of contacts, if you receive a large volume of leads. 

7. Review & Optimize

Building a chatbot is a continuous process. You will be faced with new questions and new interactions, based on which you will train your bot to answer better. Use the feedback to incorporate new learning and improve the bot outcome.

Say you haven't answered a particular question in your current bot flow. Your customer would need to connect with a human resource to learn about it. You can train your bot for this question; next time someone asks this question; they will have a response ready for them. 

Conclusion

Lead generation is a critical aspect of business growth. Every lead plays a pivotal role in scaling your business and adding profits. However, it is impossible to mark every visitor and convert them into sales-qualified leads.

A chatbot can help you manage your leads, ensure no visitor goes unnoticed and be your perfect sales partner. They will help you improve customer experiences and push them through the customer journey towards conversion.

You should build a chatbot that can offer personalized experiences and enhance user engagement.

From identifying the no-code tools to building the ideal workflow, there are a few steps that you should follow to get the optimal outcome.

If you want help getting a suitable chatbot solution for your business, you can connect with WotNot. Out chatbot experts will help you create the ideal bot to increase your business profits by several notches.

About Author

Hardik Makadia

Co-founder of WotNot. His leadership, pioneering vision, and relentless drive to innovate and disrupt has made WotNot a major player in the industry.

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