Have you ever noticed how more and more often we expect answers and instant solutions, even outside of working hours?
The demand for digital services is growing and companies need to keep up. For this reason, marketing teams are constantly looking for new ways to optimize the customer experience and increase lead generation online. And that’s where chatbots come in.
These virtual assistants are able to turn your website traffic into qualified sales leads, offering 24-hour support 7 days a week. A nice advantage, right?
In this guide we’ll give you an overview of chatbots for leads: how to use them for this purpose and how to easily set them up.
What is a chatbot for Lead Generation
Have you ever thought about how useful it would be to interact with customers even when your sales team is not available? Lead generation chatbots do just that: they automate conversations between companies and their customers, often using AI and machine learning or a simple drag-and-drop interface.
These chatbots follow a conversational approach to gather customer information, guide them through the buying process and qualify leads. They allow site visitors to navigate through an options tree and actively keep potential customers involved, preventing them from leaving the site without receiving any conversions.
Moreover, chatbots are an efficient tool throughout all the purchase process, helping build relationships and engage customers and prospects 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In short, thanks to chatbots you will never lose a lead again, even outside of working hours.
How it can help you
Chatbots are revolutionizing marketing thanks to AI, by improving the customer experience and changing the way brands and people interact both digitally and physically: thanks to personalized answers, contextual interfaces and intelligent virtual assistants, Chatbots are reducing the need for dedicated human resources, saving companies money. Let’s see how they can help you in your daily work.
One of the great benefits of chatbots is to speed up the sales process, enhance the email automation system and offer a robust and unparalleled customer support. With proper implementation, B2B companies can not only increase sales, but also improve customer journeys and retain them for the long term. Chatbots are also efficient tools for lead generation, offering an interactive platform for resolving questions or starting business negotiations.
Another strength is the ability of chatbots to qualify leads in few seconds. Instead of asking for the customer’s email and waiting for a response, chatbots facilitate instant communication and direct users to the official channel, such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp Business.
Finally, chatbots greatly improve the B2B customer experience: most people today prefer instant messaging to communicate, and this is also reflected in business interactions.
Lead Generation Chatbot: how to use it
To make the best use of chatbots for lead generation, the first step is to create buyer personas: you can’t define your customers with only one value: each has a unique profile to monitor. Start by narrowing the target by criteria such as age, gender, country, profession and so on. This process of creating a buyer persona is fundamental: it is the exact replica of your ideal buyer, and can be more than one.
Once you have created the buyer persona, you need to enter into the customers’ heads to understand what drives them to act. Remember that the goal is to create a smooth user experience flow, with different touchpoints across various channels of interaction; knowing what your target customers are looking for makes it easier to create accurate and attractive solutions. As customers become more informed, so must you as a solution provider.
The next step is to profile and segment leads accurately. Filtering and segmenting leads allows you to create a conversation flow suitable for any type of profile that might be attracted to your business while browsing your website, app or social network: in this way, you can catch the specific needs of each segment.
In the B2B industry, chatbots can automate this process and provide customer insights from every angle, helping the organization better understand customer trends. With a good use of buyer personas and a well-defined segmentation strategy, chatbots can become a powerful tool to improve your lead generation and optimize the customer journey on your site.
Creating buyer personas, understanding their needs and accurately subdividing them with chatbots can make a big difference in your lead generation strategy.
When it is appropriate to use it
When is it appropriate to use a chatbot for lead generation? Well, this tool can support not only the final part of your conversion funnel, but also the entire customer journey. It can create awareness, educate site visitors and help them in the decision process. Moreover, collecting data, chatbots help you better understand your target audience and identify potential customers thanks to the collected information.
You may think to replace static forms with interactive and proactive chatbots, which allow you to engage and cultivate a relationship with your potential customers. Here’s how to use chatbots in your marketing funnel:
At the beginning of the funnel, use a chatbot to promote content downloads and improve lead capture in the awareness phase. In the middle of the funnel, chatbots can promote subscriptions to newsletters, webinars and other consideration content; using chatbots to promote newsletters, for example, can increase subscriptions.
At the bottom of the funnel, after identifying high-intent leads, chatbots can be used to book a demo, a meeting or start a free trial. Lead contact information can be sent directly from the chatbot to your sales team.
It’s clear that chatbots are an efficient marketing automation tool for simple tasks like scheduling a demo session with your potential customer. Not only do they support marketing and sales, but they also help customer service teams to support users.
However, chatbots are rarely able to answer complex questions or complete the final steps of the sales process. That’s why a human touch is often needed: in the end, chatbots and live agents can work as a team, supporting each other in building positive customer experiences.
Before implementing a chatbot, it is important to decide what its role will be: generate leads by collecting certain information or cultivate relationships with existing customers who visit your page.
How you can use Klondike for Lead Generation
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its algorithms, Klondike simplifies the classification of leads based on personal and corporate information of the customer. This means that you can classify and assign leads much faster and more accurately, increasing closing opportunities.
Klondike allows you to automate these processes of classification and allocation of leads, saving valuable time that would normally be used in repetitive tasks: AI algorithms help you assign leads to your sellers in an automatic way, based on your preferred criteria, so you and your team can focus on what really matters: your customers.
