Marketing Automation: Generate Leads With A Chatbot

The generation of leads remains a daily challenge for every marketer, because many different factors have to be taken into account. An emerging trend is the chatbot that works on the basis of artificial intelligence.

The lead targets are strict and have the sole purpose of allowing customers to convert as quickly as possible. This way the company can continue to grow. This obviously puts marketers under great pressure.

A chatbot is a 'talking computer program'. Chat is talking here and 'bot' is short for

robot. The chatbot automatically answers questions from customers or website visitors.

The chatbot is programmed in such a way that it understands what the customer says,

even though this is not literally what is in his knowledge base.

The chatbot can also ask questions to specify the problem. This way the chatbot can also ask for contact details, so that a human employee can make personal contact. This

offers opportunities for marketers, because this ensures that you can generate leads with the chatbot as part of your marketing strategy.

Experience the latest trends in marketing automation!

5 ways to generate leads with a chatbot

A chatbot helps your marketing team to convert anonymous website and social media visitors, to marketing qualified, or maybe even to sales-qualified leads.

1. White papers or E-books

A known way to get contact information from potential leads is to offer a whitepaper or an e-book, in exchange for a telephone number or e-mail address.

You can also have your chatbot available in the chat conversation that you have with a potential lead. In addition, the chatbot may, ask after sending the document, an e-mail address or telephone number. The chatbot asks for permission or contact with the potential lead, because this is mandatory to comply with the GDPR. The lead must therefore give permission for this.

This ensures that the website visitor has a pleasant experience with the chatbot and extra information, and you have valuable contact details of the lead that you can use for

further follow-up!

2. Schedule appointments

The leads that your sales department colleagues are about to jump into are hot leads that are open for a physical or telephone appointment. These are also referred to as sales-qualified leads, because these leads can be converted more easily than a lead that has downloaded a whitepaper.

You can use the chatbot to schedule appointments. By means of a calendar in the chat conversation, the potential lead simply indicates which day and time is preferred. These leads can be followed up directly by the sales staff in order to make this lead a customer. The best way to generate leads!

3. Tailor-made offers or advice

Other leads that make your sales department colleagues very happy are leads that want to request a quote or want customized advice. This too is something that the chatbot can

automate to some extent.

With a chatbot on your website, the website visitor can indicate what he is looking for and in which parts he is interested. On the basis of this information, the chatbot can, for example, draw up an offer or forward this information to a sales employee. Because the website visitor is asked to leave his contact details, this lead can easily be followed by a sales employee.

4. Send push messages

In Facebook Messenger you can have the chatbot send push notifications to your Facebook followers, in order to inform your followers of what is happening in your company or

organization.

Share for example blog articles or company news. This way you can immediately share content they are waiting for, resulting in a higher CTR than with a newsletter or via social media. You set which content you want to share, at what time you want to share it and with whom you want to share it. This content then automatically ends up with the right people on the right day.

Companies that use this option effectively are TechCrunch and HubSpot. TechCrunch knows from its Facebook followers what content they find interesting and keeps its followers informed of articles that the user has indicated to like. In this way TechCrunch can send personal content to its target group in an accessible manner.

HubSpot, on the other hand, uses the push notifications to inform people attending a particular event of new information about this event. A day before the event, they remind

visitors of the event with a link to the calendar app.

During the events, HubSpot keeps them informed about the program and they send links to view the sessions online. After the event, HubSpot sends a final message to ask how the visitors experienced the event. In this way they inform their visitors in a low-threshold way about the events they are attending, but at the same time they ask for feedback.

5. Display ads

A final option to use chatbots for lead generation is to implement chatbots in a display ad. This is a fairly recent development that has not yet been discovered by many companies.

With such an advertisement, the website visitor triggers with a question that can be answered directly with multiple buttons or by typing an answer in the text bar. The banner then changes into a chat window, so that you can chat with the chatbot. The chatbot leads the website visitor through a conversation flow, in order to create a suitable product range or schedule an appointment.

How successful is this way of advertising? It's difficult to say, because it is still fairly new. But It is clear that the user engagement is on average a lot higher than with other forms of advertising.

Export leads and statistics

You have generated leads via the chatbot and what now? You can easily export the leads from your chatbot or integrate with your CRM. In the latter option, the leads will immediately appear with their contact information in your CRM. This way you can automate more and more of your marketing!