6 Creative Ways to Generate Leads with a Chatbot
61% of marketers rank lead gen as their biggest challenge (source).
After all, no leads?
No sales.
With the industry realising that typical outbound lead gen strategies are failing to bring in results (source), it’s time to look to more modern options.
At the pinnacle of cutting-edge lead gen strategies lies a single tool, chatbots.
Chatbots provide a new avenue for prospects to engage with your brand and, most importantly, a new avenue to bring in leads.
80% of marketers that utilise automation options saw an increase in leads, and of that 80%, a further 77% saw more conversions (source).
With the faster-acting side of business reaping the benefits chatbots bring, here are the chatbot lead gen strategies that have proven most effective.
1. Harnessing the power of a full page chatbot
Full page chatbots are, as it says on the tin, chatbots that take up the entire page real-estate.
The medium removes all on-page distractions, providing the prospect with a single avenue to communicate - your chatbot.
Here’s how a full page chatbot can be the difference between bringing in quality leads and falling short:
- Distraction-free content. Boost leads through sharing website content, a PDF, a diary booking embed, whatever you know your prospects like to engage with, minus the typical on-page distractions.
- Rich and beautiful media. Similarly to a typical widget chatbot, full page chatbots can share images, gifs, songs, and videos within conversations. Where they differ is how this content is displayed. The full page medium provides full focus to the rich media, helping it stand out and helping portray the feeling of quality behind it.
- Make your business stand out. Full page chatbot designs are stunning and heavily under-utilised. Once you’ve tailored brand colours and tone of voice, prospects will remember the time they engaged with your brand. In short, you become more than just another website.
The full page medium provides a huge range of avenues for businesses to generate more, better quality leads. Here’s a quick video showcasing a full page chatbot in action, it also discusses a few full page specific ideas you can put in place:
What to remember: Full page chatbots remove all distractions, solving the ‘cut through the noise’ challenge most lead gen strategies face. Plus, your competitors almost definitely aren’t utilising a full page chatbot (yet). This is how you make your business stand out.
2. Page-specific offerings
Any chatbot platform worth its salt will provide you with a myriad of conversation triggers. ubisend has thousands of trigger combinations for you to choose from.
A popular and effective trigger is ‘user is on the webpage example.com/pricing.’ When a prospect lands on your pricing page, you can increase the likelihood they will convert by pre-answering any questions they may have.
With URL-aware triggers, you can create conversations that dazzle prospects with webpage specific content. You can provide directions on your contact page, answer FAQs about your features, or share a case study bundle when someone is reading your testimonials.
The only limit is your creativity (well, and the number of pages on your website).
What to remember: When a user is on a specific webpage, you have a rough idea of their thoughts and intentions. Chatbots help you appeal to these, increasing the likelihood they’ll convert.
3. Catching those ‘hot’ leads
95% of website visitors won’t return (source).
With this in mind, you can’t let the remaining 5% slip through the net.
Expanding on the URL aware triggers we mentioned earlier, there’s also a range of triggers such as ‘when the user returns to the chatbot.’
Use your creativity, your knowledge of the target market and the content at your fingertips to create personalised experiences for return users.
You can share content relevant to what a visitor looked at when they were last on your website, offer a return visitor discount, or promote a flash sale.
Providing you have a flexible chatbot platform, such as ubisend, you’ll be able to spend hours experimenting and refining your techniques with a range of powerful options.
You have all the freedom in the world to discover what works for your target audience and quickly scale it.
What to remember: Provided you opt for a decent chatbot platform, you’ll be able to create personalised experiences for regular website visitors. The more powerful the platform, the more creative you can be with your return experiences.
4. Reigniting social
Every marketer or salesperson knows that social brings in leads. It takes time, resources, a dedicated team, and months (if not years) to get your social presence to a place where it’s consistently bringing in leads.
Why? Social is, by design, a communication platform.
Prospects expect conversations, engagement and regular content.
Managing this on a small budget or with a small team is difficult, which is where chatbots come into play.
Innovative businesses use chatbots to respond to direct messages, comments on posts, and more.
After crafting compelling copy and conversations, your chatbot can engage with your social audiences round the clock.
Launched a new campaign? Feed a few custom FAQs to your chatbot to help feed the hype.
What to remember: Chatbots help teams of all sizes turn their social presence into a steady stream of leads.
5. Breathing new life to downloadables
Spent time and effort creating a killer ebook or whitepaper?
Leaving it just sitting on your website is, to put it bluntly, a waste.
The smarter businesses are including their pre-existing content within chatbot conversations.
A prospect asks a question, the chatbot answers it and directs them to a relevant downloadable for more information.
For the prospect, they simply discovered a handy guide or ebook.
For the person behind the chatbot, they created a clever conversation that gives the prospect what they wanted and more.
You can do more than simply linking to the downloadable. Chatbots can include relevant content from the downloadable within the conversation, providing a taster and increasing the likelihood they will convert.
For brands that use form submissions for downloadables as a lead source, chatbots help increase their form conversion rate by promoting their content within conversations.
For brands that rely on downloadables to increase the likelihood of a lead converting later in their lifecycle, chatbots help increase the visibility of their content.
You no longer have to rely on a prospect stumbling across the content themselves, or a team member sharing it at a relevant time.
You can create ingenious conversations that promote your content at key points to increase the value it provides.
What to remember: Chatbots provide a natural avenue for you to get more value from your ebooks and whitepapers. Craft custom conversations that showcase your previous work in all its glory.
6. Becoming smarter than the competition
This last point’s a little different, it’s not a direct technique you can employ to convert more leads.
However, it will help you convert more leads across the board.
Chatbots provide a range of data and metrics for you to analyse. Every interaction, conversation, and fleeting comment is stored and displayed within your platform.
You can use this information to develop your customer personas, inform your tone of voice, better define the pains your prospects face, and more.
Chatbots are a passive data source, autonomously collecting information and displaying it within a visual dashboard for easy analysis.
Similarly to Google Analytics, you can use this information as you see fit. You can spend hours analysing and extracting key insights to improve the entire business’ focus and direction, or you can dedicate a short period of time to simply checking everything is running smoothly.
Chatbots are the flexible tool you use to improve your lead gen in the way that suits you.
What to remember: Chatbot platforms such as ubisend allow you to create custom metrics. Track what matters to you and become smarter than the competition.
