What Your Marketing Strategy is Missing: 24/7 Lead Generation through Chatbots

More than ever businesses are using chatbots to assist customers in their purchasing decisions. With the right programming, chatbots can be an effective sales assistant who is always at hand to respond to customer queries. This is a win for customers and a win for businesses with the added boon of saving on staffing costs (according to IBM, chatbots can reduce staffing costs by up to 30%). Moreover, managing customer and prospect relationships with chatbots improves customer experiences and can increase revenue by a whopping 67%!

Back in 2016, a survey conducted by Oracle predicted that by 2020 80% of businesses would be using chatbots. The usage of bots in business is now at a sizable scale, and more investments and advancements in technology are increasing its usage. Chatbots for businesses have also spilled over into the social media sphere, and with the average person spending 38 minutes on social media per day, the chatbot experience is quickly becoming a must in customer experience. So how exactly are marketers and business owners utilizing AI-based platforms to ultimately boost their leads and sales? Below is a snapshot of some key benefits of AI-powered chatbot applications in marketing today.

Producing Quality Leads

Chatbots have the ability to better understand and effectively segment an audience in less time than their human counterparts. It’s crucial for a business to understand the needs and interests of its target audience. A chatbot add-on not only helps in understanding potential leads better but also has the ability to segment audiences, which is imperative for any lead generation campaign. It also provides important information for marketers as it allows them to create the right content for their prospects to better nurture future relationships.

This process involves the bot discovering the customer’s interests, likes, dislikes through AI conversation. Chatbots can produce surveys to engage customers and to find out a business’s most and least popular products. The gathered information can then be used by marketers to produce tailored content created around the audience’s interests to move the leads into the funnel.

A chatbot can also be programmed to segment an audience based on the answers they provide. The factors that impact their answers are demographics, age, interests, gender, occupation, etc. The primary goal of segmentation is to allow a business to identify warm leads faster and deliver marketing messages to the relevant users. Unsolicited marketing no longer works. In the absence of a significant bond between the marketer and the customer, the unsolicited marketing message will go to the spam folder and the banner advert suppressed by the browser.

New Platform Opportunities

Social media platforms like Facebook that have over 2.7 billion users worldwide have become the playground of B2C and B2B marketers. Prudent sales teams have seized the opportunity to use the massive potential that lies within the world’s most popular social media network. A statistic worth noting is that 74% of high-income earners use Facebook far more often than any other social media platform. An interesting case study also showed that chatbots reaching out to potential customers through the medium of Facebook Messenger had a 98% open rate, this is in stark contrast to cold emails only receiving an open rate of only 22%. Facebook has proven itself to be the ideal gateway to reach and engage your ideal customers, particularly in the realms of B2C.

Increased Engagement

Because bots can be programmed to interact with more personality, brands are leveraging this to create fun ways for customers to engage with their brand. If you have a standard help bot on your website, you can encourage it to ask the people who land on your site to sign up for your business through the Facebook Messenger application. Email is still an accessible and relevant way to generate leads, but social media is closing in fast. Depending on the customer’s persona, they may prefer to get marketing messages through the Facebook Messenger application over traditional email. It is important that a business is presenting that option to potential customers when they land on their website.

Excellent Customer Support

Businesses are increasingly turning to chatbots to streamline their conversational commerce and customer service. A chatbot engages customers almost immediately by providing instant sales-related help to customers and builds trust between the user and the brand. This alone increases the credibility of your brand increases. By using lead generation bots and human assistance in a balanced way, you can deliver a better experience. Leading companies like Amazon use chatbots as their primary customer support. Users can ask questions relating to the shopping experience or products, and the bots provide a suitable answer instantly. You can warmly welcome your visitors by using a personalized message to grab the attention of the customers. Bots can greet, whenever a new visitor or returning visitor comes to the landing page. Greetings are the best way of welcoming visitors that opens many opportunities like new sales or building relationships with prospects. The bot also collects basic information from the visitors that can be used in the future.

Site visitors who are quick to leave your page may be doing so as they have a query that cannot be answered in real-time. Lead generation chatbots are designed to intervene before the customer exits and abandons their virtual shopping cart. When immediate assistance is available to the customer to help them make a quick buying decision the customer exit rate from business websites drops rapidly.

Also, if a service rep isn’t available for transfer, chatbots can also perform follow-up functions. They can schedule meetings with customers and assign your reps cases that need to be completed. Some bots can even send follow-up emails to customers after they solve their cases. Task automation like this creates a more consistent customer experience and helps your team keep track of unfulfilled customer needs.

Conclusion

Chatbot technology has changed the B2B and B2C marketing game, saving millions in costs once spent on human resources, time wastage, and inefficiencies. The technology is increasing business ROI by enhancing lead generation and supporting other B2B marketing strategies. The world of business is changing and so are your customer’s demands, chatbots are quickly taking the lead as the best way to engage and sell to your customers and should be a part of every solid marketing strategy today.