In 2019, more than 300,000 Facebook Messenger Bots were active on the Messenger platform. These chatbots are popular with customers too — more than 20 billion messages pass between customers and businesses using the service.
If you’re not familiar, a bot or “chatbot” is an artificial intelligence (AI) computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users over the internet — typically bots are used in platforms where chat functionality is enabled. This might be Facebook Messenger, website chat help center popups, etc.
Chatbots typically provide customer support to visitors who visit your brand’s Facebook page and message, or in the form of a small chat window on your website. By using artificial intelligence, a chatbot will analyze the question from the user and provide them with an appropriate response, so you don’t have to. In the age of billions of messages being sent and billions of people online every day, this is an important feature so that you don’t have to employ internal resources to respond to everyone. It’s also a great tool for your lead generation strategy…
We already know that using artificial intelligence is a great SEO tactic. So, how can chatbots work in favor of your inbound marketing tactics?
Chatbots keep visitors on your website longer and help convert your visitors to leads before they leave. One of the most challenging parts of turning a site visitor into a viable prospect is getting them to give you their information or fill out a form. Chatbots can be used as an effective online lead generation tool since you are automating the sales process while keeping your visitor engaged in your brand. This means you are maximizing the efficiency of lead generation. And what’s even better is this can still be done when your team is offline or busy on evenings and weekends. Therefore, chatbots work to bring in leads even when you’re you’re away.
Chatbots To Entice Your Website Visitors
One of the best lead generation strategies using chatbots is to welcome visitors to your website by automatically starting the chat with them. When you start the chat with them you can prompt them with a particular message.
For example, for new visitors, perhaps you prompt them with the following message, “Welcome to the site! Want a free copy of our 101 Best Marketing Tactics Guide?” Hopefully, the visitor will respond with a “Yes, please!” and then the chatbot’s response could be to prompt the visitor to chat back their email address so the downloadable guide can be sent to them. And boom. You just collected a lead.
Chatbots To Capture Your Visitors
Your website visitors most likely are searching for something in particular. But they grow tired quickly and will hop off your page if they don’t find it after clicking on two website landing pages. That means that if they can’t find what they are looking for on your site, they will head to a competitor’s.
You can prompt your visitor with different messaging on different landing pages with the attempt to solve for what they may be looking for. For example, if they are on your “About” section, your chatbot can appear encouraging them to stay connected with your brand by subscribing to your newsletter.
Chatbots To Offer Up Valuable Content
Let’s say your Facebook page visitor has viewed a video, your AI can then take their viewing behavior and offer up suggestions on what they may also be interested. For example, if they watch a video on website design tips then your chatbot can prompt them to download your whitepaper on “The Secret of Website Design.”
Chatbots To Reduce The Number Of Abandoned Carts
Another way to utilize chatbots is for cart abandonment. The cart abandonment rate is >75% but you can save even 30% of your sales with chatbots. If you recognize that your visitor has abandoned their cart, you can prompt them with a reminder, answer any questions they have, encourage a purchase, or even offer a discount. Once this has encouraged them hopefully they actually convert to a sale. This isn’t exactly lead generation, but we couldn’t help but to squeeze it in because we love the idea so much. And the end-game to lead generation is more CONVERSION anyway. :)
Chatbots For Survey Information Gathering
Even if you’re using the chatbot as a customer service tactic, you can also collect information from the consumers by implementing a chat survey. Here you can collect their email address and then use this to follow up with them at a later time. And you can ask a few questions that will help you create content around survey data that can be turned into a “State of the Union” guide to download for your lead generation efforts. Content (including blog posts and PR content) is best with your own generated data points because another brand can’t compete with this data or post the same data.
Collecting all of this vital information will help you understand your audience. This, in turn, enables you to identify the product interests, likes and dislikes of consumers, which improves your overall lead engagement strategy.
Get Your Business Set-Up For Lead Generation Success Today
Lead generation can be tricky, but if you’re in the market to employ a remote marketing team to help, we’re here. First Page can help you bring in new leads (and close them). Reach out to us so we can talk to you about how we've built successful lead generation programs for our clients (including one where we grew 10,000 leads in six months!)
