The Ultimate Guide to Chatbots for Lead Generation
There’s life beyond Facebook Messenger. Here’s how to take the most out of it.
Instant messaging and chatbots are probably the fastest-growing trends and one of the most powerful weapons for marketers today.
On the other hand, Facebook is running as one of the most popular channels to engage users, but not all are rainbows when it comes to Messenger marketing, which causes alternatives to show up.
This guide brings everything you need to know to design Conversational Experiences for Lead Generation outside of Facebook. Here is what we’ll see in detail:
- PART 1: Why Instant Messaging and Chatbots are the future of Marketing
- PART 2: How we converted our SaaS homepage into a chatbot and grew lead conversion by 4x.
- PART 3: How to create a lead generation machine with chatbots and send this data to a Google Sheet or your CRM.
👉 By the end of this guide, you will have your own chatbot setup and ready to convert and generate leads at scale. Jump to this section 🏃🏻
1.- Why Instant Messaging and Chatbots are the future of Marketing
It’s a fact: Instant Messaging Marketing and chatbots are set to become the main communication channels in the next few years.
Every new marketing channel that opens represents a huge opportunity for you to exploit and leapfrog your competitors, enjoy incredibly low CPCs, and experiment with different ways of reaching out and connecting with your clients.
In the 2000’s, marketing was dominated by SEO and SEM. Then came social networks and social ads. In the past few years we have all shifted from desktop to mobile and, although we download fewer apps that we used to, we are checking our smartphones and chatting all day long.
Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat… Messaging apps have over 5B monthly active users and will become the main lever to transform the relationship between businesses and consumers in the near future.
“Be where your customers are” is more than just a basic principle of marketing, it is the reason that compels businesses and the public to meet with each other.
“Instant messaging is the next big hit in marketing.”
However, this communication channel has a big issue: Instant Messaging doesn’t scale. When you reach a certain volume, one-to-one communication becomes too expensive.
That’s where chatbots come in. And they do at the perfect time: with AI is reaching its sweet spot, Zuckerberg feeding their popularity, and success of the mobile first trend that clamors for an alternative to forms and popups.
Chatbots’ potential goes way beyond customer service and presents a huge opportunity for sales and marketing.
How can they help marketers? Chatbots can improve user engagement, convert a higher percentage of your web traffic, and become a staple of lead generation.
No matter the sector or vertical you’re in, most of your customers probably spend a lot of their time chatting (and they are often better at it than they are using a web browser!)
So, it is highly possible that chatbots already are — or soon will be — an essential part of your marketing strategy. You’ve probably toyed a bit with Facebook Ads and create your Messenger bot. If that’s not the case, I strongly recommend you take a look.
Any marketer can appreciate the access to target Facebook’s 2.2 billion users, with a wide variety of options and keeping a very sensible CPC, but…
- What if you don’t want to create your bot in Facebook Messenger?
- How can you drive traffic directly to a bot from your clients’ Google searches, using your competitors’ Twitter followers, or Google Display remarketing features?
📗 We will use a chatbot as a Landing Page to turn visitors into leads. Then, we’ll use the information collected to update a Google Sheet row or create a new contact in your CRM to finally switch on your Lead Generation machine.
2.- How We Transformed Our SaaS Homepage Into A Chatbot And Grew The Lead Conversion 4x
In our case, we discovered it almost by chance. We wanted to test our live chat solution in a lead generation/sales scenario, to gauge how much it would be able to convert.
At first, we could hardly break a 3% conversion rate. But one morning, while reviewing our active traffic campaigns, we discovered that we had been running our live chat with a huge unexpected bug: every time a new visitor entered, the chat opened in full screen, completely blocking the website. Visitors had only one choice: to chat.
When we checked our stats in the evening, we believed there was some sort of mistake. We had reached a 9.6% visitor-to-trial conversion rate. That was 3X to 4X our usual live chat conversion!
This is how Landbot.io chatbot builder was born (a tool for creating conversational landing pages and generating leads.)
If you visit landbot.io right now, you will see that a typical SaaS product landing page it is not! You might immediately ask yourself “Where are the usual Features, Pricing, and Team sections? There isn’t even a contact page! 😱
Well, all those sections are in fact available at some point of the conversation, but they are only visible when they become relevant to the user.
Do you want to guess what the main reason is for not having a traditional website for Landbot.io? Again, the reason is conversion.
“Every time we tried to replace our bot with a more traditional website, the bounce rate goes up, the visitor time on the page goes down, and our leads/visitors ratio suffers.”
However, as in any landing page, what really matters in any marketing campaign is the offer we present to our audience.
If you want to get a web visitor to volunteer their email address, you need to offer something relevant to them. If you don’t, no system will be able to convert that lead.
In Landbot’s case, as in most of SaaS offerings, we offer our visitors the chance to create a chatbot and add it to their websites to improve their landing pages conversion rate.
Nearly one out of five visitors create an account on Landbot.io. This is, we have a ratio of visitors to registered users close to 20%. And this is happening in our current initial phase, which is to say that both the source and quality of our traffic have much room for improvement. Not too bad for a B2B SaaS homepage, isn’t it?
All of this, thanks to chatbot technology’s ability to collect user information.
With good design practices in place, this tool will enable you to offer your users a completely unique experience, access to relevant content, and create a contact point that has a lot less friction than any web form.
Finally, let’s see how to design a conversation as a landing page (don’t try to replace a whole website 🙏).
3.- How To Create a Lead Generation Machine Using Chatbots As Landing Pages
3.0. Preliminaries
We’ll use these 3 tools to create our lead generation machine:
But first, you have to think how to design your chatbot.
As in designing any other type of marketing campaign, before getting to the practical aspects of implementation, we need to be secure that we have control of the assets for your “landing bot”.
Try to focus in accomplish only one chatbot goal
- Your main chatbot goal (generate leads, announcing an upcoming product or selling your services,…).
- Target definition and segmentation.
- Prioritized list of must-have “elements” or VIA: very important attributes (benefits, features, pain points)
- Chatbot personality and flow
- Copys and media
- Analytics, Testing & Optimizing
If you want to dig deeper into this area, I recommend the following article from our series on Creating Conversational Experiences or this Step-by-step Guide on How to Create a Chatbot for a website in under 25 minutes.
3.1.- Register a free Landbot account,
As easy as talking to a friend. You can do it here
3.2.- Create chatbot and build Flow
Once inside your account, click on Create a new landbot to start from scratch or pick one of the templates.
Starting with the Welcome Message, add more and more content to your flow in form of messages, questions, buttons or GIFs of any kind:
Your finished flow could look a bit like this:
3.3.- Adapt Design
Put an image, gradient or video to perfectly suit your brand needs.
Change everything you want, from the avatar to the font size, background or every single element’s color.
You can also ‘go pro’ and add some CSS (Custom Style Sheet) from the Advanced part of the Design section.
3.4.- Add Google Analytics tracking code (U-xxxxxx)
Settings is probably marketer’s favorite section, because it’s where they can not only customize the meta-title, the meta-image or the favicon, but add the Google Analytics ID. Do it here:
3.5.- Send events to Google Analytics when your Landbot capture leads
You will want to measure your chatbot effectiveness. You just have to send an event to your Google Analytics account from your bot.
Select the block that means a ‘conversion’ in your project (usually it will be your email capturing block) and add Integrations > Google Analytics Event
Add your GA tracking code and save it:
Let’s suppose you want to send an event with these parameters:
- Event Category: chat
- Event Action: Register
- Event Label: LeadLandbot
Fill the fields you need with your own parameters and click on “Apply”:
3.6.- Set up Google Analytics Events and Conversions
Now, back to the Google Analytics side, go to Admin section and select View > All data and click on Goals:
Move on to Goal details and set the event conditions according to what you’re configured in the Google Analytics code:
You will have a new Goal and you will be able to see it working also in real time tracking. You’ll be able to see the results in Conversion section and other multiple reports:
3.7.- Use Zapier to save Landbot Leads to your CRM
If you haven’t used Zapier before, it’s an amazing automation tool that connects the apps marketers use every day.
You will use Zapier to send data from your Landbot to a Google Spreadsheet (you can also add Mailchimp, Autopilot or the CRM you use). For connecting Zapier with Landbot, go to Integrations > Zapier:
Select the template you need, in this case we’ll use: Add a row to a Google Sheets spreadsheet from new Landbot responses.
Click on “Create this zap” in the pop-up windows:
Login to your account or signup if you don’t have a Zapier account yet.
Then connect your Landbot account and paste your Landbot token:
Select your bot and the block you want to use (in case you want to use more than one Zapier block):
Now, your trigger has been set and you can click on Fetch + Continue to test the trigger aka make sure that the account and landbot selected actually have a Zapier Integration block configured. (We recommend you to complete a conversation with your landbot so once in Zapier we can easily recognize every field because our conversation’ answers will be taken as an example):
We’ll use Google Sheets as the action of our Zap, and there we’ll map the landbot variables we sent to different columns in our spreadsheet.
You need to create this spreadsheet it first with your landbot variables as sheet columns:
Then go back to Zapier and select your spreadsheet document, worksheet and start adding your variables.
Then, click on “Continue” and test your zap. You will need to run a successful conversation in your landbot page, capturing all your lead information.
Go back to Zapier and you should see something similar to this:
After completing this process, a new row in your spreadsheet will be created, with the lead information.
Congratulations! 🎉
You are now the owner of a new lead from your chatbot landing page.
In conclusion,
You have everything you need to setup a lead generation machine: creating a talking website that converts, proving it with Analytics and automating the lead management process.
If you’re running a conversational landing page that’s seen some success with lead generation, I’d love to hear from your experience.
Want to test the chatbot I built for this guide? Click on this link and start the conversation. 💬⚡️
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