5 Practical Tips to Create a Powerful Lead Generation Chatbot

Chatbots and lead generation; name a better duo.

Ok, chatbots and customer service are up there as well, I'll give you that. Still, generating leads is one of the most common chatbot use cases.

It's easy to see why.

A chatbot may sit on your website (or any messaging platform) and convert users day-in-day-out without you needing to lift a finger. Pretty appealing stuff.

As we all get very excited about the prospects of generating lotsa leads, allow me to drop some knowledge bombs on you first.

Here are five highly practical tips that will increase your chances of creating an efficient lead gen chatbot. Let's get started.

1. Plan your lead journeys

Speak to any chatbot implementer. Ask what their number one tip would be to create a great chatbot. Doesn't even have to be a lead gen one.

The same thing consistently pops up: plan the journey.

Lead generation is all about the journey you're going to take your future customers through. Ask yourself these questions:

• Where does the journey start? That could be an FAQ, a welcome message, a button click, a DM through Instagram, etc.
• How long is the journey? That could be one message (straight into lead gen) or ten messages (qualifying the user).
• What information are we gathering from the user? More on that in our next point.
• How does the journey end? That could be a thank you message, throwing the user back to another conversation, encouraging them to ask more questions, closing the DMs, etc.

That's a lot to think about, I know. But it's worth it.

Here's what a properly planned chatbot user journey might look like:

Yours might be simpler or more complex. The point is to go through this exercise before you start building. I recommend using a tool like Miro to build out the journeys,

This planning malarkey is an essential part of building a chatbot. So much so, in fact, that I often dedicate a lesson to this during our partner onboarding sessions.

2. Define the information your chatbot will capture

Unsurprisingly, this is an important step in building your lead generation chatbot.

What constitutes a lead?

As you are reading this, I am confident you have some idea of what a lead should look like for your (or your client's) organisation. Typically, this might be:

• Their name
• Their email address
• Their phone number
• Their country
• Their job title

This is a pretty good place to start.

The reason you really want to think of this beforehand is, whatever you're capturing will impact your build.

Variables

Are you planning on capturing three, ten, or 25 pieces of information from your users? You'll need your chatbot to store these answers. Thankfully, ubisend's got the good: variables.

Create a variable for each piece of information you plan on gathering. Additional tip: try to stick to a naming convention.

Message types

Messages come in many shapes and forms. Using ubisend, you can send up to 13 different message types including carousels, images, and videos.

To create an effective lead generation chatbot, take the time to think about engagement. Which message types would be best suited to encourage the soon-to-be customer to enter their information?

Composers

You know what else might drive engagement (and leads)? Bespoke composers.

Composers are the fields users type their answers into. Most platforms don't allow you to be very creative with those. A default 'Type here...' might be all you get.

With ubisend, however, you can use features like the Date & Time Composer which allows users to pick a date to, for example, schedule a meeting with your sales team.

As you can see, the information you plan on gathering through your chatbot may have a huge impact on the chatbot you build. Take the time to discuss with your team, define the essential information they need to qualify a lead, and get building.

3. Create a CRM integration (featuring AirTable)

Chatbots are all about efficiency.

You don't want to do all the amazing work above, set everything up perfectly, and then have to rely on humans copy-pasting precious lead information into your CRM.

Absolutely not.

My practical tip #3 is simple: make sure you integrate your chatbot with whatever CRM you work with. You want to, at all costs, ensure your leads are sent to the right place.

Given the two points above, chances are you're building a chatbot that is very specific to your needs. And that's the way it should be! You don't want some random run-of-the-mill lead generation chatbot that captures information you don't care about, in a format that doesn't work for you, and only integrates with a CRM you don't even use.

Instead, you want your very specific chatbot journey to send the very specific information it gathers to your very specific CRM.

Thankfully, ubisend can help with that.

Our integrate anything policy allows you to create an integration with any third-party software (as long as they have an API). Because you have full control over the integration, you can send the exact information you need to your CRM.

In this video, for example, we built a simple lead generation chatbot that integrates with Airtable's CRM.

Our chatbot gathers our lead's information such as name, email, phone number but also their preferred time and date to speak to a human. Thanks to our API toolkit, all this was nice and easy to set up.

Whether you're using Airtable, HubSpot, Salesforce, or some obscure CRM I've never heard of, take the time to consider the integration. Trust me: you don't want to lose out on any leads.

4. If possible, create one lead gen conversation

As you define your user journey, you might find there are, in fact, multiple journeys your users might go through.

Let's say you're a marketing agency. Your services are chatbot building, web design, and SEO audits.

It might be tempting to create three different lead generation conversations here. It might even be the right thing to do, if you expect your chatbot to capture vastly different information from leads depending on the services they're interested in.

My recommendation is, if you can, to centralise your lead gen conversation into one.

Create one central lead gen conversation, then create the other journeys leading up to it.

The reason for this is simple: less admin work.

As you build your lead gen chatbot, you'll quickly realise you'll want to iterate on the most important part; the part where you capture info from the users.

If you build 17 different flows, each of which has its own little copy of the lead gen flow, you're making a lot of work for yourself when you decide to test out variations.

Instead, if you build one flow and 17 others pointing to it, you only have one central lead gen flow to tweak. This also applies to sending leads from FAQs to your lead gen flow, for example -- makes things a lot easier.

Of course, this may not be applicable to your specific build.

5. Set goals, track metrics, and review

Reviewing the performance of a lead generation chatbot is very easy. Does it generate leads, yes or no? Does it generate enough leads, yes or no? Can it be improved, yes or no?

These questions are easy to answer.

I published a comprehensive guide on goal setting for chatbots, which I recommend you read.

Once you've gone through that, you'll have a clear understanding of what you want your chatbot to achieve. It's then simple enough (at least with ubisend) to set up custom metrics and start tracking its performance.

Finally, you'll want to review those frequently. How frequently depends on the traffic going through your chatbot, of course. I'd recommend a review every 5,000 to 10,000 chatbot users to start with.

Iterate and stay on top of it.

A chatbot can become your business' best lead generation channel. It's a matter of setting your expectations, building the right flows, and integrating for maximum efficiency.

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