How to Generate Leads, Grow Your Business, and Thrive in the Era of Chatbot Marketing

Bots are the future. Bot-powered commerce is our modern-day apparent fortune. The bots are powered by artificial intelligence, understand complex requests, personalize responses, and improve interactions over time.

The era of chatbot marketing is here! There are 1.3 billion users on Facebook Messenger monthly, and they’re not just chatting with family and friends. Facebook released a 2019 study that says 65% of shoppers are “more likely to shop with a business they can message directly.”

Perhaps the most efficient way for your brand to take advantage of the power of this platform is with a Messenger chatbot: a piece of software that can converse in a human-like style. Bots can automate a number of different tasks to help grow your business, from support to marketing to sales.

For starters, let’s talk about how you can use a chatbot for lead generation: how you can attract and qualify leads automatically with chatbot marketing, and save user information for future follow-up.

1. Attracting potential leads

In order to qualify leads, a bot needs prospects to interact with. There are several ways to use a Facebook chatbot for lead generation:

• Connect the bot to your Facebook ads. Instead of directing users who click on your ads to a landing page, consider sending them to your bot in Messenger. The bot can immediately begin engaging them and gathering lead information. Otherwise, the user may end up waiting for a manual follow-up from your team hours or days after filling out a landing page form.

• Create Lookalike audiences. Once your bot has interacted with enough people, you can use the information it has gathered about them to create Lookalike Audiences. That way, you can set up your ads to reach new users who have similar characteristics to your best leads.

• Add the bot to your website. If you’re already getting good traffic to your website, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to bring leads to your chatbot for qualification. A simple plugin will allow you to embed a chat window with your Messenger bot on any page of your site.

2. Qualifying leads

Once a user reaches your bot in Messenger, the lead qualification process can begin right away. Plus, chatbots interact with users in an easy, conversational style, making the process of gathering lead information quick and painless for the user. There are a few different ways a bot can do this, depending on the type of information your business needs. It can:

• Access to Facebook profile data automatically. Messenger bots, of course, exist in the Facebook ecosystem. Users must have a Facebook account to interact via Messenger, so bots automatically have access to their profiles. This means information like their name, gender, time zone, and more are accessible as soon as they become a subscriber (which happens once they respond to a message from the bot). Unlike a web form for lead gathering, a bot doesn’t have to ask for the user’s most basic information—it already has it.

• Quiz the user on their preferences. If it’s a potential lead’s preferences you need to know about, bots can gather that information in a quick, frictionless way. They can quiz users on their needs or taste and save the results for your future use. For example, an ecommerce business that sells clothing could ask the user if they’re shopping for men’s, women’s, or children’s apparel. If a user selects “women’s,” it could ask if they seek business wear or casual styles. Then, next time the brand has a sale on women’s business wear, the bot can reach out to the qualified users who indicated that preference, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

• Ask for contact information. If leads for your business require human follow-up, a bot can help with that too. The bot for a real estate agent, for example, could ask the user qualifying questions about topics like their price range, preferred zip code or area, and a number of desired bedrooms, and request their phone number. The chatbot can then pass this information to a human agent via email so they can follow up personally.

3. Other ways to grow your business with a bot

Lead gathering and qualification is an incredibly effective application of chatbots, but it’s certainly not the only one. Once you’ve created a bot, you can equip it to perform all kinds of business-accelerating functions.

Use it to answer FAQs to reduce customer wait time and free up your human support agents. Set it up to make product recommendations and send cart-abandonment reminders for an online store. Have it follow up after the user completes a purchase, appointment, or service, and ask them to submit a review to help you attract more customers.

Analyze your business and decide where automation via bot could help you the most. Then, take action! The era of chatbot marketing has arrived—make sure your business isn’t the last to adopt this impactful new technology. Take the first step today by learning more about what chatbots can do for your business.