Introducing Outbound Bots: Proactively reach out to contacts

Outbound marketing has been there for ages. It all began with pamphlets in the 16th century, where people would write on topics and distribute them on small pieces of paper to groups of people.

It was an effective way of communicating with a large group of people. Although originally designed to share important information on local affairs, it was quickly adapted for commercial applications i.e. advertising products and services to a local audience. To scale even further, people even started using airplanes as a method to distribute flyers to a larger audience across long distances (You must have seen this in movies).

Keeping this in mind, we thought why not build a feature that lets businesses proactively reach out to their contacts with a pre-defined set of messages.

Doing this would help scale the reach of a business because you are no longer limited to the number of website visitors you have. As long as you have a sizeable list of contacts, you can reach out to them at any point in time, even if they are not on your website.

And that’s how “Outbound bots” was born. An easy way for businesses the leverage the most frequently used messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp to scale up your business outreach for a variety of use cases.

We leveraged our most desirable feature i.e. our no-code bot builder to make it super easy for anyone to build their own personalized outbound bot.

Where can I use outbound bots?

Outbound bots are particularly helpful to engage with lost contacts or to nurture your sales-qualified leads effectively. Also, you could see a ton of use cases to keep your existing set of customers happy.

Every business these days most definitely does outbound in one way or the other, leveraging the conversational angle in this will help extend the results that a business would receive with just a few tweaks.

Not to say that these are the only use cases of outbound bots, but based on our initial research and cost-benefit analysis, here are some use cases where you can leverage outbound bots: 

Promoting a new offer

As a business, you are always adding new products and services or providing offers to existing products. Your end goal is usually to notify your pool of existing customers that have already bought your product about this new product or offer.

As you already have the product, you would probably buy it.

Similar to a drip marketing campaign, you can create a series of messages that you can send across SMS and WhatsApp with outbound bots so that you can promote that new offer/product.

Expect to get a high response rate as people are more social than ever.

Collecting feedback

Every business needs or shall I say demands feedback. Without feedback, you would probably keep doing the same mistakes over and over and losing out on new business opportunities and improved service.

Let’s consider an example, you own healthcare clinics and want to collect feedback from the patients that visit your facilities for treatment.

• The patient leaves your clinic after performing a specific function (say paying an invoice).

• Your outbound bot proactively sends a text or WhatsApp message to that patient after a delay of a couple of hours (They need to reach home, right.).

• The patient feels cared for and engages with the bot to give their feedback.

• Collected feedback is shared with your internal systems/email.

And just like that, you would automatically receive valuable feedback from all of your patients.

Enriching lead information

Everyone gets inbound leads every day. Prospects fill out a form or talk to a chatbot and the business gets a lead.

The most common thing that happens after this is after post few hours, the prospect gets a call from your sales rep and asks some probing questions, before handing the lead over to an account executive.

With an outbound bot, here’s that scenario rollout,

• Prospect fills out a form.

• Outbound bot sends them a text message after a few mins with a personal touch.

• Prospect gets astonished with your response time and engages with the bot.

• Bot gathers some crucial information that would help your AEs.

• AE can then review that information and perform the next steps.

Get more information from every prospect, and generate true Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

Cart abandonment recovery

With the number of e-commerce websites popping up, one thing’s for sure everyone will have thousands of options to choose from.

Every e-commerce struggles with one key challenge, a visitor abandoning their cart after spending some time choosing those items.

To get that order, your outbound bots can proactively send out a personalized offer with a coupon that the user can utilize to fulfill their purchase, overcoming the price barrier.

Even if the user does not take any action from the first message, you could define a series of messages offering a wide variety of offers, one of which would surely convince the user to purchase the product.

These are just a few of the possibilities that we could think of, but I’m sure you can see the potential use of outbound bots for your business.

Some cool features we’ve added to the Outbound bot

There are a lot of new things we’ve added to make it easy for our users to design and run their outbound campaigns at scale using Outbound bots.

Below are the major features that we have added to our Outbound bots.

Trigger the bot: 

You can trigger the bot in one of two ways, either upload a CSV file or call our webhook with the data payload that you want to send.

Build your flow with no-code

True to our roots, our no-code bot builder makes it effortless for anyone looking to build an outbound bot workflow. Just click and add action blocks to make your own tailor-made outbound bot.

We’ve introduced the following new action blocks,

• Send WhatsApp - to send a WhatsApp template message

• Send SMS - to send a template message

• Delay - to add a wait time between blocks

• Branch - to personalize messages using conditions

Add delays between two messages

It’s not always a good idea to immediately send follow-up messages, maybe you need to add a slight delay in between. Add hours or days in between message blocks using delay.

Branching your flow based on conditions

Personalize your entire workflow by sending separate messages when your contact does not respond to your message or sees it does not engage back. Creating a personalized flow helps you get better conversion rates.

Review the analytics data and improve your bot

Look at data and see which messages work and which do not. Use this data to analyze and improve your workflow for better conversions. You can further even see the specific list of contacts that have performed a certain action like “Replied to a message”.

Well, there you have it.

If you are a business that wants to leverage the benefits of most common messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp, “Outbound bots” are the perfect solution for you.

Get started by defining a few message templates and workflows and see the impact a personalized channel can have to your business.