In this era of technology, it comes with no surprise that most businesses are leaning towards automation. The last few years have seen AI (artificial intelligence) advance by leap and bounds. Organizations are incorporating different AI applications to revitalize their businesses. One of these applications is chatbots, an AI-based program that converses with humans via audio or text. In this article, we will discuss what is a chatbot for marketing and how you can use chatbots for lead generation in your business. Go through the following examples to understand the use of chatbot for marketing. chatbot for marketing

What are Chatbots?

Before getting into further details on how you can utilize chatbot for marketing strategy, let’s first discuss what chatbots really are. A chatbot is software-based on conversational AI that automates the process of interaction between your business and customers. They can be designed to manage different situations such as asking customers about their preferences and needs and responding to them accordingly. The more advanced type is an AI chatbot that can understand different situations and help the user with responses that are generated on the go. But mostly chatbots have pre-programmed responses in the form of a built-in conversation tree.  You can find tons of paid and free chatbot services available in the market to integrate with your business. You can use these pre-programmed and ready-to-work chatbots for lead generation and other marketing purposes.

How to Use Chatbots for Marketing?

Chatbot marketing has become an essential part of the marketing strategy of almost all types of businesses. According to recent stats, about 40 percent of people prefer chatbots while purchasing something online. Not only do they make sure that not a single customer that reaches your website leaves unanswered but they can also help you to increase your conversion rate.

There are several ways you can use Chatbots for marketing and some of the most important ones are as following:

1. Quicker Lead Generation

A perfect combination of chatbots and lead generation can flood your business (small as well as big) with new leads. The following points explain how chatbots help in lead generation.
  • Allow you to understand your audience better by generating more data from conversations
  • Enable you to perform audience segmentation
  • Build a relationship
  • Replace (boring) forms
  • Educate your audience in the least possible time
This way you can nurture your leads by sending people helpful and valuable information. Finding the right information will help the customers to sign up for your services and purchase your products. Real-time one-to-one communication makes chatbots more powerful as compared to email marketing. So, adding it to your digital marketing arsenal is a must.

2. Efficient Customer Service

If you want to take your customer service game to the next level then you must start utilizing the power of chatbots. It can help your business a great deal especially if it receives many service requests. Not only can you use Facebook messenger as the main customer service portal but you can also integrate third-party chatbots to your official website.  Consider a potential customer who is interested in buying your product or availing of your services. They call you to inquire about additional information, only to be repulsed by the waiting time. Chatbots have made quite a few value additions in the traditional call centre industry. Companies are leveraging them to automate their customer services. A chatbot does not inconvenience customers with long waiting times and is quick to answer multiple queries with precise, short, and informative answers. A chatbot can narrow down the issues that your customers are facing to a specific category and direct them to the right customer representative. This way, all the hassle of asking customers regarding their problems is eliminated.  [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38sL6pADCog[/embed]

3. Valuable Customer Insights

Another use of chatbots in marketing is the analysis of customer data. When customers interact with humans, then humans cannot memorise their details or perform complex calculations simultaneously. However, chatbots are not limited by human capabilities. They have the ability to store huge amounts of data from customer interactions. Afterwards, they can run business intelligence operations on the date acquired. This means that a chatbot’s machine learning algorithms can provide insights into consumer habits. Once the data from an extensive list of customers is accumulated and gathered, marketing strategies can then be tailored to suit the needs of individual customers.

4. Personalized Advertisements

Suppose you have a customer (Mr A) who regularly shops from your e-commerce website. Mr A often purchases graphics cards, mouse, headphones, and other computer products for PC gaming. What if there is a tool that can analyze Mr A’s spending habits and preferred list of products to offer him customized ads for similar products? When chatbots collect personal information from customers, they can assist in marketing to create personalized advertisements, thereby boosting sales conversion. Whether you have a new business or you manage an existing business, contact us and sign with us today. We market businesses and allow them to gain higher recognition in the online space through high-quality content.

5. Enhanced Sale

You can also use chatbots to lead more customers to the sales pipeline. Not only can you collect the email addresses of your customers for the newsletters but you can also use chatbots to schedule appointments for consultations. It can lead to an excellent start to your customer journey. Moreover, not many people like to answer marketing calls, and adding chatbot functionality will be an easy way for such people to start a conversation. You can also advertise your new products and services to your targeted audience on different social media using chatbots. One of the best functionalities that you can achieve by using chatbots is improving the shopping experience of your customers. Chatbots can assist people in finding the right products according to their preferences and needs. So much so, there are AI chatbots available that even allow people to make purchases directly.

6. Chatbots for FAQs

Along with adding a separate FAQs page to your website, it’s important to add a chatbot to your website to answer the FAQs in real-time. Consider adding the most common questions with their answer to your chatbot. This way, your website visitors will get the required information in a more interactive way.

What Not to Do in Chatbot Marketing?

Along with the practices that we have mentioned above there are also some important things that you must not do in your chatbot marketing. Even if you have integrated a powerful chatbot functionality into your business, you’ll still need a marketing team.

1. Don’t Rely on Your Chatbots Completely

It’s not a good practice to entirely rely only on chatbots regarding your business marketing. We still haven’t reached the point where chatbots can completely take over your marketing. If you want to have a successful marketing strategy, you’ll need to have a human touch to it. 

2. Don’t let Chatbots Manage Entire Customer Service

You need to make sure every now and then that all the chatbots are working properly especially in your customer service area. Moreover, the chatbot has successfully identified the problem that a customer is facing, it must redirect the customer to your customer representative (human).

3. Don’t Overdo It

Undoubtedly using chatbots for your business marketing is fascinating but you must not overdo it. Don’t send too many marketing messages to your customers (spamming is never good). Try to keep it natural and steady so that people pay attention to everything that they receive from your business. 

List of Free Chatbots for Different CMS

If you own a start-up or a small business then you might not have enough budget to go for paid and highly advanced chatbots. That’s where the following list of free chatbots for different CMS will come in handy. 

Benefits of Using Chatbots in Lead Generation! 

First of all, you need to consider your lead-generating chatbots as a part of your marketing or sales team. The sole assignment of such chatbots is to come up with more leads for your business. The best thing about chatbots is that they can work 24/7 and 365 days a year without taking a break. You can assign different tasks to your chatbots such as collecting certain information about the customers, generating leads, or even qualifying them. Here are some of the most important benefits of using chatbots in lead generation.

1. 24/7 and 365 Days a Year Availability

According to recent research, about 50 percent of the customers want a company to be available every time. While it’s not always possible to have a dedicated customer care team available all the time, chatbots eliminate this problem completely. Without taking any break they can work continuously and it can help your business a great deal to confirm more leads.

2. Instant and Consistent Answers

There are always multiple people in the customer care team and not all of them can have the same personality. That’s why not all the customers get consistent answers every time. But that’s not the case with chatbots as they can answer tens of thousands of questions simultaneously and all of them will be consistent. This way, not only all the customers will be dealt with equally but it will also make sure that no customer needs to wait for even a single second.

3. Endless Patience

All the customer care teams once in a while have customers who are frustrated and sometimes customer representatives also lose their patience. Not only does it reflect the bad image but it also increases the chances of losing a customer permanently. On the other hand, chatbots can work with the level of patience that no human can offer.

4. Personalized Customer Experience

It’s impossible to make sure that all the human customer representatives work exactly the same way. After all, they are not your hairdresser that can keep the track of everything. However, chatbots can deal with every customer in a more personalized manner. They not only know the previous history of each customer but they also remember each and every bit of detail within no time. 

5. Programmability

As mentioned, chatbots are programmable which means you can enhance, modify and upgrade their functionality according to your unique needs. Not only can you automate the repetitive functionality but you can also program them to achieve advanced search functionality.

How do Chatbots help in Lead Generation?

The chatbots used in lead generation are essentially the same as other bots, but with a few added functionalities and tweaks. They are specifically designed to generate more leads and the most common steps that the chatbots for lead generation use are as followed: 

1. Collect Information

The first and by far the most important thing in generating leads is collecting the right customer data. Firstly, chatbots collect and save the data from the conversating that they have with the potential leads. In order to collect your customers’ (or potential customers') information, the chatbots use a conversational and smart approach. This functionality especially comes in handy if your chatbot is connected to your lead management system or CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Otherwise, it will be very difficult for you to collect the necessary data about your customers in one sweep. Moreover, chatbots can also categorize the data according to the information that helps you in your overall marketing strategy.

2. Builds Customer Relationship

The only way that a customer sticks to a certain business if s/he trusts it. That’s why building a positive relationship with the customers is very important and chatbots help you a great deal to achieve it. Not only can you gain the trust of your customers by using chatbots but you can also keep interacting with them regularly as well. When the people will have the instant support and answers that they need, the level of trust in your business will also grow which will eventually improve your conversion rate. 

3. Forms Replacements

The most common method that businesses used until now to collect the data of potential customers were online forms. But the fact of the matter is that not most people are fans of this method because it’s time-consuming. However, chatbots can replace such online forms completed by asking users about their email addresses, phone numbers, demographics, age, interests, etcetera. Later you can use this data to target the right people to sell your products and services in a better way. 

4. Educates the Audience

The delivery of the right information plays a vital role in generating more leads. Customers don’t actually purchase any service or product if they don’t have sufficient information and knowledge regarding it. That’s where chatbots come into play as they make this process easier and simpler. Not only can they educate and inform people about your services and products but they can also guide people to buy them as well.

5. Approach Customers at the Right Time

After collecting the information of your potential customers, chatbots offer your services and products to your potential customers at the right time. You can also use this process to adjust it in a way that enables you to qualify your news leads further. It especially helps in those situations where you offer a complex service or product that requires some complementary questions.  Final Word  There you have it. This is everything that you need to know about chatbots as they are undoubtedly one of the biggest inventions of automation in the realm of business marketing. Not only do they allow you to manage different processes such as assisting customers, sending invitations, etcetera, but they also allow you to speed up the marketing process. We hope that this article will help you to understand the importance of chatbot for marketing and to find the right option for your business as well.