Lead generation was, is, and will always be the ultimate objective of all the sales and marketing activities in a business.
Over the years, many tools have been used for lead generation and lead nurturing but businesses have preferred AI chatbots over others. This is because chatbots are a low investment lead generation tool with high ROI.
55% of businesses that use AI chatbots for lead generation have generated more high-quality leads. Lead generation chatbots (also known as sales chatbots) are unrivaled when it comes to connecting and engaging with prospects. Humans may miss a lead, but AI chatbots cannot.
The major reasons behind this love for AI chatbots from companies are its 24×7 availability and powerful customer engagement.
As soon as a person visits a website, their first interaction happens with a chatbot. Businesses must not miss this opportunity of generating a lead by not deploying a chatbot on their website.
Why should businesses use AI chatbots for lead generation?
Simple, because AI chatbots are the best for lead generation.
Communication is the key for any global business. Clearly, a company that communicates effectively during the first interaction wins the game. Using chatbots gives businesses an opportunity to build a positive perspective in customers’ minds and become a leader in the industry.
There are a number of reasons to use AI chatbots, but all of them revolve around one thing and that is effective communication. Specifically, in terms of lead generation, businesses should use chatbots because:
1. Qualifying leads
AI chatbots help in qualifying leads without human intervention. Automation can help to qualify leads before letting them into the sales funnel. By setting up a specified set of questions as a gateway, businesses can get only qualified leads.
Also, AI chatbots can automate communication for the complete sales cycle, from awareness to delight. They can assist customers through bot prompts throughout their journey, no matter how short or long.
They can also save a lot of time by automatically scheduling meetings with qualified leads, and pushing them down the sales funnel instantly.
2. Better ROI
AI chatbots provide better ROI. By performing many functions and solving many business problems, chatbots prove to be an asset for companies. To top all the reasons, it is an investment that makes customers fall in love with your brand.
Using a chatbot to its fullest potential, businesses can be flooded with qualified leads. Chatbots have the capacity to handle multiple leads at the same time, so businesses don’t even need to worry about the bandwidth.
3. Better customer engagement
AI chatbots deliver powerful customer engagement. With constant, contextual, and omnichannel communication, businesses amaze their customers. Such customer engagement is very rare and equally important.
If companies have a powerful customer engagement strategy, they can become a lead magnet for their customers. Thankfully, lead generation chatbots can do it all for you.
AI chatbots are there for customers 24×7, educating them and solving their sales queries. They understand customers’ requirements and nurture them accordingly.
Along with these eye-opening reasons to integrate AI chatbots into your business and automate your customer experience, we would address the use cases of AI chatbots in lead generation and how to use AI chatbots for lead generation.
How should businesses use AI chatbots for lead generation?
Traditionally, acquiring leads is 10 times more expensive than converting the leads that you already have. Using AI chatbots for lead generation can significantly reduce the cost and effort that goes behind attracting customers to the top of the funnel.
Let us figure out the use cases of AI chatbots for lead generation and how should businesses go about integrating them into their strategy.
1. Understand and create a user persona
The foremost factor while strategizing for lead generation is understanding the target audience for your product or service. Based on the demographics, interests, geography, occupation, and some other factors, businesses need to identify their user persona.
Once identified, this user persona can be synced with the chatbot. Using this information, chatbots can help in generating qualified leads.
Automating chatbots for surveying customers using a set of questions can help businesses nurture only the leads that be converted. While the interaction, chatbots can understand the customers’ requirements and segment them based on the company’s products and services.
By clearly stating the user persona, your company and the chatbot can focus on a specific target market instead of the whole community.
2. Segmentation and personalization
Once you have qualified leads at your disposal, it’s time to segment the list of potential customers. This task can also be automated using an AI chatbot.
Using segmentation along with AI chatbots, companies can personalize their marketing messages as per customers’ mindsets.
For example, if a customer is Jewish and wants to buy a Hanukkah candle holder. Segmentation will make the chatbot understand that the company is not supposed to upsell its famous decorated Christmas tree to this customer.
A personalized list of Hanukkah preparations can be upsold instead. Customers feel loved with such personalization and retain the brand for a longer duration.
3. Simplify the process of collecting user details
Customers feel filling out a form is a piece of work and usually try to opt-out. They don’t want to put effort into a product or service which they are just visiting.
AI chatbots can help you simplify the process, and make customers give out their details without putting effort.
Predefining a set of questions that you need from a prospect and automizing them with the help of a lead generation chatbot can help you convert more and more visitors into leads. Your top of the funnel will always be overflowing with qualified leads.
4. Automate scheduling appointments
Converting warm leads into potential customers is the basic functionality in sales. AI chatbots don’t leave a chance of leaving a customer just hanging in without any engagement.
If the leads are qualified, chatbots can schedule appointments instantly and automatically. This feature gives companies an edge over their competitors by giving customers a zero-effort process of conversion.
By pushing the leads forward, AI chatbots also help the sales team by doing the mundane tasks of scheduling appointments as per customers’ convenience. This reduces the churn even for sales development representatives in the company.
5. Pushing relevant content and educating the audience
The aim of content marketing is to provide relevant content to the customers exactly when they are looking for it. What can be a better time when customers have visited your website and are looking for information.
Based on the queries of prospects, AI chatbots must be able to share relevant product knowledge with the customers. Educating customers about the USPs of the offerings pushes them through the sales funnel and validates your services in their minds.
Also, it is a great way to market your content and ask customers to share the knowledge once they like it.
6. Seamless agent handoffs
In case of complex queries in regards to products or services, leads can easily get in touch with the human personnel.
The use of AI chatbots for lead generation cannot replace humans. It can just ease tasks for employees and help them in increasing their productivity. Tasks that need human empathy and do not come under the training data provided to the chatbots need human attention.
A seamless transition takes place between the human agent and the chatbot. It provides all the data and information about the history of the customer. Also, it provides the human agent with the data and information regarding the interactions so that the human agent knows everything that had been going on.
7. Generate leads even when you’re offline
Because lead generation chatbots are never offline. Once installed, they are at work forever.
On a public holiday, or at an odd timing, lead generation chatbots can attend to prospects 24×7, round the year. Your prospects don’t need to wait for anyone before turning into a lead for a business.
This feature builds long-lasting trust and relationships with the prospects. Customers can trust you because you are always available and at service.
Out of a number of benefits of using AI chatbots, their round-the-clock availability is the most useful for customers as well as businesses.
8. Reduce bounce rate
Pull in customers intending to bounce from your website. Using AI chatbots and engaging with customers during their session on the website can impede them from leaving.
Understanding requirements and personalizing conversations can engage customers for a longer period of time.
Understanding the cons of their website or app from the customer’s perspective is quite difficult. With the insights given by AI chatbots, businesses can understand their shortcomings and take the necessary steps to improve customer experience.
AI chatbots can improve lead generation and increase the conversion rate up to 25%. Businesses must start using conversational AI chatbots for lead generation and many other use cases. It will definitely give a competitive advantage and a well-developed customer experience.
Yellow.ai can help businesses build a strong and contextual interconnection between the webpages and chatbots helping customers find the exact information they are looking for through a chatbot
There is an immense capability in lead generation AI chatbots. We just need to start using them and explore the outcomes. Let us look at the future of lead generation using AI chatbots.
Future of lead generation and AI chatbots
Predicting the future is different, here we are giving numbers to prove that lead generation and AI chatbots are here to stay and are loved by customers.
Here are some statistics depicting the take over of traditional sales and marketing tools by conversational AI:
a. 80% of the companies have already used or plan to deploy chatbots by 2020.
b. By 2020, 85% of human interactions will be managed without a human.
c. The average retention rate of users after one month of bot usage is 40%-60% while for apps it is 20%-40%.
These statistics are 100% true and in fact, these numbers might have increased many folds by 2022.
Implement a lead generation and lead nurturing strategy for your business today.
With Yellow.ai, customers have multiplied their revenue and seen the difference just within 2 weeks of deploying conversational AI.
We can provide conversational AI solutions for conversational commerce, customer engagement, and customer support automation. Businesses can win with the best customer experience and customers can glide through the buyers’ journey.
One of our customers was facing difficulty in driving sales and increasing revenue from physical stores due to the pandemic. With Yellow.ai AI virtual assistant their revenue took a leap and they saw immense growth.
Are you ready to use AI chatbots for lead generation for your business?
Schedule a demo with us to know more about our offerings and solutions. If you are self-reliant and wish to build your own lead generation chatbot, you can easily visit our no-code bot builder studio and make your own chatbot.
