Chatbots for Lead Generation

Lead generation is the strategy of generating the interest of prospective customers to increase future sales. Lead generation is vital to the customer acquisition funnel. Having a well-oiled customer acquisition and retention mechanism is essential for any business. The objective of customer acquisition is to create an organised and sustainable approach to keep acquiring new customers and grow revenue for the company.

Small businesses need to develop the idea of customer acquisition to grow. However, small businesses are often in the dilemma of having a traditional business development approach or a modern tech-based strategy for acquisition.

Chatbots have revolutionised visitor engagement and the lead generation process. It is the most sought-after channel for visitor engagement and lead generation. MSMEs, unfortunately, have an ill-conceived notion that adapting to a chatbot channel is complex and expensive.

Importance of Chatbots in Lead Generation

Improved Engagement:

Chatbots are inherently programmed to converse and engage. It is this attribute that makes chatbots productive. Chatbots engage visitors through 'chats', and in the process, ensure that it understands the visitor intent and conveys vital service or products information in return. This way, if not anything, visitors spend time on the website and get to know the business better.

Tailor-Made Experience:

Chatbots can be programmed to the benefit of the visitor. Chatbots can talk about everyday things or can talk about business-specific things. Irrespective of the posture, Chatbots can capture essential visitor data.
Consider this, a website with a mundane call-to-action button, followed by an unresponsive form to enter data and a thank note for entering, versus a website with a lively chatbot that is conversing with you like a virtual assistant. And the conversation is tailor-made to the visitors' advantage. A funnel can be set up to lead the visitor through a step-by-step acquiring strategy.

From a visitor perspective, this doesn't look forced. Chatting with chatbots can be a seamless process for the visitor to go from being a visitor to a customer.

More Conversion:

Let us agree upon this; we all love being taken care of. We all like it if someone is providing a 'concierge' service. Also, a website has too many distractions for a visitor. A visitor, however knowledgeable, will find it hard to navigate and unearth the true value proposition. The average rate of conversion on a website is less than 3%. With this intent, businesses started setting up a help desk chat window on the website to engage visitors. This ensured higher conversion, but it came at a higher cost. Setting up a human-driven chatbox round the clock costs a business more than they care.

Chatbots provide the perfect, cost-effective alternative to manual chat boxes. Chatbots do the same engagement and provide the same concierge service as humans do. It comes at less than 10% of human resource expense as a cherry on top.

Ease of Use:

A survey conducted by an SEO-tool company suggested that visitors don't find what they want on a website 97 out of 100 times. So despite UI/UX progressing as far as it has, the numbers are concerning if this survey is to be believed.

A Chatbot presents an approach where the visitors NEED NOT search for what they want; instead, they could request what they want. A simplified process makes the visitors find what they want and business to convey what they want—a win-win for both parties.

Cost:

We have discussed the cost-effectiveness of a chatbot in some of the points above. To add, yes, Chatbots are hyper cost-effective - you can get a chatbot as low as $0.2 a day ( or 20 cents a day). That is less than a cup of coffee in a small hotel somewhere roadside.

Ease of Building:

Building chatbots on ObiiBot chatbot builder is very simple, requires no engineering or coding skills and has an easy Do-It-Yourself (DIY) drag and drop interface. We have designed the interface keeping in mind the intent of the small business.