Companies around the world find it difficult to generate leads and since it has a direct connection in ringing the cash registers, the process of generating leads cannot be slighted. While most businesses buy random email lists or hire companies that give them qualified leads, nothing works like having your potential clients come to you. In this time and age when there are a million companies that want a share of the pie, if you don’t have a clear-cut strategy to attract a stream of clients, you are in for a tough ride.
According to a study by Demand Metric Research Corporation, the three most commonly used B2B lead generation strategies are email marketing, event marketing and content marketing and most of the companies are not happy with the results either. But there is another method that is getting popular by the day because of its advantages and its ability to handle highly specialized tasks- chatbots (also called as lead bots). Think of lead bots as a self-service option where your leads can interact with your brand without any human intervention.
There was a time when marketing was dominated by SEO, SEM and the likes. Now, there is a huge drift towards content marketing and it obviously works, which is why in a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, more than 91 percent of B2B marketers are in various stages of employing it. Once you lure your potential customers in, the next step is towards collecting the lead’s information, which is where lead bots work like magic.
How do Lead Bots work?
A conversation with a lead bot works the same way you see a mind map structured. There are specific directions taken and each destination takes a particular route. Alexa, Siri, Echo Dot, etc, all of these are lead bots too. Based on the questions that you ask, there are pre-fed answers which is delivered in a conversational tone. The best part about this is that the potential lead feels as if they are in conversation with someone from your team which is why the conversions of a lead through a lead bot is usually higher.
Here is a quick demo of lead bot for a digital marketer who wants to convert his website visitors by offering a service.
Benefits of using Lead Bots
Lead bots are the ultimate marketing tool because it engages with your potential leads in the form of conversations. Even when your employees are not at the office, your leads can converse with your lead bot which will advise them on their next course of action based on their message prompts.
Here are some of the benefits associated with using lead bots for your business:
- They are operational 24*7 and 365 days and are therefore ready to talk to your customers always.
- A lead bot can simultaneously handle any amount of requests, there is no need to increase the capacity or create more number of templates.
- Lead bots can keep track of data, trends and metrics thus helping you create processes and predict trends
- You can integrate lead bots on all web platforms, whether it is native HTML, WordPress, Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce and more.
- It saves you a lot of overheads by helping you keep the number of support staff on your rolls to a bare minimum.
Here are some Use-Cases for Lead Bots
- If you are an event management company, you can let your visitors get more information about you including price, packages and more.
- Give the opportunity for people to interact and enquire about the type of courses you offer if you have an education consultancy and use the lead’s information to pitch more products.
- Drive visitors from your mobile app’s visitor to the playstore using a chatbot. Makes it easy to guide users to the right channel with almost zero effort.
- Get feedback from patrons who dine from your restaurant. Use the feedback to offer even better services to them.
- Use chatbots to make it easier for your e-commerce site visitors to make a purchase decision and also let them browse your products without having to rely on erratic internet speeds.
There are many more possibilities of how we could use lead bots, only if you could let your imagination run wild. If you can build a service around lead bots that a lot of people will be dying to use, you are gold!
Things to Consider before using Lead Bots
The very first thing that you need to have before you start to employ lead bots for your business is this- belief in lead bots. Yes, it is understandable that the negative implications are there if any issues crop up because a human is not responding on the other end. But do not worry, the bot doesn’t create its own set of responses that has nothing to do with your business.
Here are the most important steps that you need to consider when getting started.
Define the Use Case
While there are a lot of interesting use cases when it comes to using lead bots, you need to be clear about the reason behind using them. Is it to increase the number of visitors to your website? Is it to solve customer service issues? Is it to capture leads? Once you are clear about its objective, only then do you need to go and implement the next step since you will be able to visualize when you have a specific goal in mind.
Channels to Use
You need to create different bots for different channels like your Twitter page, Facebook page, Website and more. Why? Because your potential lead’s knowledge about you depends on the platform they choose to visit you. The one with the most awareness about your offering are visitors on your website which is why it is important to create a lead bot for your website. In fact, you should be creating more than one bot if you have different purposes of using them. For example, a customer service lead bots’ content will be different from the one that will be used as a lead magnet.
Define a Content Strategy
The kind of content that goes into the bot will define the experience a visitor will have with your business. This is something you need to keep in mind and make sure that each question goes through several iterations and makes business sense. Think about the objective of your customers in visiting your site, this way you can predict the kind of questions that they will have and use it to frame them. Use the help of all stakeholders to draft questions that can be found relevant.
Collect Lead Information
No matter the kind of interaction that happens with the bot, the final step should be collecting information from the leads, including name, email ID, phone number and so on. Nurturing these leads and bringing them into your fold as a customer over time is what a business needs to do.
Using Lead Bots to Increase your Business Engagement
In the future, we can even see websites and apps being replaced with bots. Bots reply instantly while it might take a lot of time for websites and apps to even load. They completely change how users interact with your brand.
You can build an email list with lead bots by setting up a bot to record user information. Companies can give better offers since it gets real insights on what customers prefer by understanding the most used keywords.
Once you configure your chatbot, the costs to keep it running are extremely low and the advantages that it offers is extremely high and it helps you save a lot of money. Also, a chatbot is always going to treat customers in the same way as it does not have to undergo mood swings since they are always bound by rules, something that we humans are not immune to.
Chatbots have the capability to automate tasks, thus saving time and being more productive for each of the stakeholders. The reason for the incredible popularity of Chatbots is thanks to the proliferation of messenger apps and its consumption.
Why your Business should use Lead Bots as well?
Lead bots have been proven as the go-to method which yields the highest number of conversions through its conversational interface. While the only disadvantage with a lead bot is that it might be disappointing for users who come to you looking for a human to interact with. In fact, you can navigate through this problem by using a message prompt on the bot itself where a user can ask for a human being to talk to.
Chatbots might not be the ideal option for all kinds of businesses, but its functional prowess is unmatched as a service for customer service, lead qualification and so on. The best part about lead bots is that you can keep the conversation flowing 24*7 without any human intervention. If you can understand the psyche of the customer deeply, you can draft content, including questions and the subsequent answers coming out perfectly well where the user might even think they are talking with a real human because the conversation sounds so real.
Every business thrives when it has the ability to generate and collect leads. Collect.chat has been able to solve this problem. You can start converting your visitors to qualified leads with absolutely zero effort thanks to our solution. It is no wonder that more than 80% of businesses wants to use leadbots by 2020, according to a survey by Oracle.
