Who Else Wants Leads on Auto-Pilot?
Three lessons learned from building one of the fastest growing chatbots of its kind.
Two months ago we built the freelancer chatbot “Ease-e Bot” which helps remote talent in the US find quality gigs in the areas of Marketing, Software Development, Design, Writing, and many more fields. It has since been featured on the front page of BotList and ProductHunt while growing organically to a point where it is Ease’s most valuable acquisition channel for contractors.
In this article, we’ll reveal the three lessons we learned about building a chatbot that actually converts.
Before that, though, we’ll answer why we chose to build a chatbot in the first place. We were looking for a way to incentivize contractors to subscribe themselves to a list so we could build a talent pool that we could ping. High open rates, low development cost, and ease of deploying the tech were our main motivators; the results speak for themselves!
Ease CEO Nathan Harris explains, “Open rates on email average 10–30% whereas Messenger open rates are around 90%-99%. If you’re thinking about building a list, consider making Facebook Messenger one of your main platforms!”.
However, building a chatbot for the sake of building a chatbot is not the cure to everything- as with every product, you need to keep the end goal in mind for your launch to be successful. Here are the three things that were most vital to our success with the Ease-e Bot.
1) The bot is directly related to our main business goal (aka generating revenue)
Any product requires resources to maintain. Don’t just build a bot for the sake of it. Know how the bot helps generate revenue or helps impact your core business, otherwise it will just turn into a web property that you need to maintain. For example, a bad use of the chatbot for Ease would have been to build a todo-list app for freelancers. Whereas a bot that notifies freelancers about new gigs in their respective fields aligns perfectly with Ease’s core business and each user on the bot represents potential revenue for Ease. Make sure the bot serves your overall business goals!
2) Have a strong value proposition for your users to subscribe to the chatbot
Make it a no-brainer for users to subscribe to your messenger bot. Just like with a newsletter you need to find a strong value proposition to get users to subscribe to it. With Ease we made it a no-brainer for freelancers to subscribe: which freelancer doesn’t want to get more gigs? What the user wants to get out of using the chatbot is exactly the same as what Ease, the business, wants to get out of them. Ease wants more freelancers to apply for gigs. Freelancers want more gigs. That perfect alignment of wants and needs is a big puzzle piece in Ease-e Bot’s success in gaining traction. An example of bad alignment would have been if the business wanted, say more freelancers, while what the freelancers wanted was a tool to track their account receivables, or their project timelines. In this case, the two parties (Ease and freelancers) would have wanted two different end goals, and we would have created a never-ending tug-of-war between what Ease wanted and what freelancers wanted.
3) Follow up with leads and build real relationships
We have a dedicated person on the team responsible for funneling people into the bot (from Facebook and Instagram) and then following up with them. Chatbots are great to automate part of a funnel but we have found that the best way of converting them is to have actual people in the background monitoring conversations and following up with people for the last parts of the funnel. Don’t fall into the trap of wanting to automate everything in your customer acquisition funnel! Your bot might be great at acquiring leads, but humans are still better at building relationships and taking leads through the last steps of the conversion funnel. For example, we always give contractors on the bot the option to message Ease CEO/Founder Nathan Harris in person if they have any questions. This step has proven vital in building trust with leads. In the end, humans still trust humans more than bots.
Ease has been able to automate a big portion of its freelancer acquisition process.
Since launching the bot and being featured on the front page of sites like BotList and ProductHunt, Ease has caught the attention of press outlets like Huffington Post and Inc.com . The business is now setting its sights on reaching $1MM in sales over the next year, and will continue to leverage the Messenger chatbot to fill up the freelancer roster.
If you’re a freelancer looking for more work, feel free to sign up today here and find out more about the Ease journey here.
