The modern-day consumer is more connected and online than ever before. This makes customers more demanding as a result, seeking convenience, personalisation and the right message at the right time from brands that they choose to buy from. Various factors such as the covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and new generations entering adult life have led these changes in consumer behaviour, impacting both ecommerce and B2B companies.
One tactic that marketers can adopt to engage with the modern-day consumer online is chatbots. When used correctly, chatbots can be a useful tool in your digital marketing toolkit to generate leads, enrich data, drive revenue growth and provide a personalised customer experience. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the benefits of using chatbots within your strategy to drive measurable results.
The Power of Chatbots in Digital Marketing
24/7 Availability: Never Miss a Lead Again
50% of customers are less likely to spend money with a business which takes longer to respond than their expectations. Gone are the days in which you can only respond to messages during business hours - chatbots open a way to interact with potential customers anytime.
Using chatbots from a provider such as HubSpot gives customers the ability to get in touch with you 24/7 with automated responses, depending on the answers you provide. This ensures your business can qualify and capture leads outside of traditional working hours and provides a much more convenient experience for your audience. When users have this sort of experience online, they are more likely to stay engaged on your site too, boosting user engagement and satisfaction.
And, if customers do need to speak to a human, any queries that the chatbot cannot handle can be handed off seamlessly to the relevant team to pick up. This also improves the customer experience, as a live agent can have access to the history of what has been spoken about before, therefore being much better equipped to have more valuable human interactions.
Try the IVy chatbot on our website
Lead Qualification: Streamlining the Sales Funnel
Salespeople have a higher chance of converting opportunities into customers when leads have been pre-qualified before reaching them. Chatbots can be a powerful tool for pre-qualifying leads in the early stages of the customer lifecycle. By asking targeted questions, they can determine if leads are genuinely interested in your product or service and are ready to move forward. This is a highly effective tactic that we have employed with our clients many times. For example, within your chatbot, you could provide options for a user to select whether they are interested in your service or looking for a job. It’s likely that the latter won’t generate any revenue for your business and can be disqualified straight away, allowing you to focus on the leads that truly matter.
Personalisation: Engaging Visitors on a Personal Level
There are countless personalisation options that you can employ when implementing chatbots as part of your strategy. This will improve the user experience and therefore, generate higher engagement and conversions as a result.
Here are some ideas to personalise your chatbots:
- Using contact or company names – where known! – Address users by name if they’ve legitimately shared it with your business – otherwise it may come across as a bit creepy.
- Personalise your message based on lifecycle stage – This is a valuable tactic that we’ve used with our B2B clients. Depending on what stage a contact is in, you can personalise their interactions. For example, a contact may be stuck in the ‘lead’ stage, and you want to encourage them to book a demo to become an MQL. Using personalisation in this way helps to move contacts down the funnel faster towards generating more revenue for your business.
- Tailor interactions based on page data – A contact looking at a product or pricing page will likely be further down in the funnel than a contact looking at an educational blog. You can choose to personalise chatbots based on the pages they are on, and what they have interacted with previously.
- Leverage purchase history to upsell and cross-sell – Depending on whether a user has bought from you before, you may want to consider customising the chatbot based on previous purchase behaviour to suggest products or additional services, or offers if they are a loyal customer, leading to increased revenue.
Personalisation relies on having the right data in place, so think carefully before applying it everywhere as getting this wrong can have the opposite effect and lead to a poor user experience. Remember, it can be rolled out in stages if needed!
Innovation Visual has years of experience helping businesses like yours adopt personalisation within their chatbot strategy, which leads to increased leads, engagement, and revenue.
Cost-Effective Solution: Reducing Operational Costs
Chatbots offer a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to reduce operational expenses by automating routine interactions.
By handling repetitive tasks such as answering frequently asked questions and qualifying leads, chatbots minimise the need for extensive manual input. This scalability allows businesses to manage a high volume of customer interactions simultaneously without the added expense of increasing staff. Additionally, chatbots help optimise resources by freeing up human agents to focus on more complex, value-driven tasks. While there is a cost to set up and time needed to enable chatbots, once you have the functionality, they can keep running in the background, leading to greater efficiency gains, reduced operational costs, and higher ROI over time.
Offer Multiple Touchpoints
While some of your customers may prefer to pick up the phone or go on social media to find answers to their problems, others will prefer to use live chat or chatbots.
Chatbots provide a great alternative way for customers to contact you, increasing convenience, improving the experience, and fostering loyalty over time.
Seamless CRM Integration: Capturing and Managing Leads Efficiently
Chatbots provide seamless integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, ensuring that lead data is captured, organised, and easily accessible for follow-up. This real-time enrichment of records improves the efficiency of lead management, sales hand off and offers more personalised engagement. For example, you may want to enrol the contact in a workflow when you’ve gathered a specific data point.
In addition, syncing with your CRM allows improved reporting and attribution capabilities, allowing you to understand whether chatbots are helping drive revenue and how they are being interacted with.
Enhanced Data Enrichment: Refining Your Marketing Strategy
Chatbots play a key role in enhancing data enrichment, gathering valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviours, and engagement patterns. By collecting this real-time data, businesses gain a deeper understanding of what customers are looking for, allowing for more precise refinement of marketing strategies.
Additionally, chatbots support continuous data collection, which contributes to long-term strategic planning and more accurate audience targeting. This ongoing enrichment enhances the effectiveness of your campaigns both short-term and long-term.
Chatbots as a Game-Changer for Lead Generation
In summary, chatbots are an invaluable tool for businesses looking to streamline lead generation, lead qualification, improve customer engagement and drive revenue growth. The use cases for chatbots are extensive and can be implemented as part of a wider omnichannel marketing strategy both short-term and long-term. The main benefits are:
- 24/7 availability allowing for instant responses and improved convenience
- Personalisation of interactions
- An improved customer experience
- Enables efficient marketing to sales hand off
- Seamless interaction with your CRM for improved reporting and real-time data enrichment
- Cost-effective and scalable
- Offers cross-selling and upselling opportunities
- Increased revenue
Case Study: 155% More Leads for Citron Hygiene
Innovation Visual implemented an award winning, personalised chatbot in partnership with our client, Citron Hygiene. Through the implementation of a custom chatbot using a lifecycle driven approach, we were able to capitalise more effectively on overall website traffic, which resulted in a massive 155% year-on-year increase in chatbot-generated leads!
Discover more about our award-winning collaboration.
How We Can Help
We are experts at building comprehensive digital marketing strategies alongside our clients, which includes the design and implementation of thoughtful chatbots. So much so, that our innovative team have even won a HubSpot Product Excellence Award and a Silver Drum Award in their B2B: Technology-Led Innovation category for it! Don’t miss the significant revenue opportunities and growth potential that implementing chatbots in your marketing strategy can bring.
If you want to find out more about how you can include chatbots in your marketing strategy, reach out to Innovation Visual and our team of experts who can help.
