Better AI Chat Conversations to Turbocharge Demand Generation
November 18, 2022
It’s easy to understand why marketing and sales teams still using traditional marketing techniques are frustrated with low-quality, incomplete leads that consist only of a name, email and a phone number. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, forward-thinking businesses have employed various technology, tools and solutions to improve marketing strategies, elevate their sales funnel and enhance customer support. One such solution is the AI-driven chatbot—which is helping companies across a wide swathe of industry sectors to deliver immersive experiences, better engage users and convert more prospects into customers.
In a recent webinar, Botco.ai’s Director of Sales Joseph Terrell and Business Development Representative Don Duong joined Botco.ai Account Executive David Knack to discuss best practices to design campaign-relevant marketing chat flows, connect marketing campaigns to chat conversations and optimize advertising spend and strategies to organically gather more information about leads without risking form abandonment.
Turbocharge demand generation through conversational AI
Conversational AI, the next advancement in lead-generation technology, provides more comprehensive information such as location, service interest, timeline, budget, pricing, and even insurance eligibility. This provides sales teams with more context and better ways to prioritize who to contact.
“With the immense influence of AI in sales and marketing, chatbots have become a crucial tool to enhance the customer experience as well as transform the entire way in which brands and individuals interact on the digital and physical level,” said David Knack, account executive at Botco.ai, a conversational CRM platform that allows businesses to automate interactions with customers over chat channels, including Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Kik, Skype and Slack.
Companies of all sizes can have thousands of concurrent, meaningful conversations with their prospects and customers by implementing chatbots driven by artificial intelligence. With Botco.ai’s intelligent chat platform, it’s easy to put the power of AI, natural language processing, big data and machine learning behind lead-generation teams.
Added value and benefits of chatbots to turbocharge demand generation
“One of the things that we’ve seen over time is that combining these traditional marketing techniques with another type of marketing technology like intelligent chat or conversational AI can be a really valuable way to get more bang for your buck out of your SEO campaigns or your pay-per-click campaigns,” Knack said.
Another added benefit in addition to the ability to provide personalized responses, contextual chat interfaces and smart virtual assistants, chatbots have significantly eliminated the need for dedicated human resources, thus saving money for the company.
“It’s an exciting time to be at the intersection of AI and messaging applications as a new channel for marketing and lead generation,” said Joseph Terrell, Botco.ai’s director of sales. “For those professionals who are steadfast in sticking with traditional marketing strategies, it’s time to really level up the demand generation at your organization.”
Providing the digital experience to meet customer expectations
Without a doubt, customer expectations have really changed a lot over the last few years, and people expect a more efficient, effective, relevant digital experience. They also expect a digital experience that communicates the quality and the value of your brand.
“We know that organic website traffic and SEO are becoming more and more important all the time,” said Botco.ai Business Development Representative Don Duong. “So the important question is, what’s the impact of continuing conversations with your website? The value is encouraging intelligent dialog using conversational AI to drive lead generation, which ultimately will increase sales and grow revenue.”
Knack stressed that people have less attention span than ever, so they expect a personalized, dynamic website experience. He shared that if there’s any ambiguity about what the appropriate next step is, or if there are unanswered questions that somebody needs clarity on before they’re ready to move forward, they’re going to abandon a company’s website quickly.
“Overwhelmed customers take no action,” Knack explained. “If they can’t find the information they are looking for, they typically will go elsewhere. Similarly, underwhelmed customers will find an alternative. If your website is not providing the digital experience that meets your customers’ expectations or needs, they also are going to go somewhere else. We want them to take that next step with you and your brand and not go somewhere else. That’s why implementing conversational AI on your company’s website is so crucial to building demand generation and increasing sales.”
“AI-driven chat levels up the demand-generation playing field so that visitors to your website can ask their questions, get immediate answers, and not be sent to a link or to another document to find their answer,” Terrell added.
Delivering a personalized customer experience
When building the conversational AI funnel, Botco.ai takes the time to cohesively connect the steps.
“First, we really focus on connecting to ads and email campaigns…anything that’s driving traffic to your website,” Knack said. “We want to understand where website visitors are coming from, so that when they do navigate to the landing page, we can create a custom welcome message as well as a personalized conversation.”
This process allows Botco.ai to create a personalized experience that makes visitors to your website feel like you know exactly what they were looking for, why they were looking for it and help convert prospects to customers at a quicker rate.
In a seamless transition, data gleaned from the chat is then submitted to your CRM to eliminate the inefficiencies of lead forms, emails and phone calls. This efficiently eliminates sales team members from having to manually entering data into a CRM and avoid the possibility of human error or making mistakes when inputting that data.
Analyzing the conversion data to increase leads
ROI matters for all businesses. Having the foresight to determine if an investment will result in a positive return allows you to make financial decisions that will ultimately help you successfully grow your business.
That’s why Botco.ai has developed a proprietary tool that measures ROI before and after implementing conversational AI. Botco.ai takes the client’s website traffic and conversion rate and uses that data to project what kind of lift the client could expect to see when they start using Botco.ai.
For Botco.ai, It’s tremendously satisfying to show clients that a small conversation rate increase can bump up their revenue by several millions. One Botco.ai customer in the wellness sector was at 9.65 conversion rate in 2020. And by 2022 after implementing an AI-powered chatbot, Botco.ai successfully boosted this client up to a 13.7 conversion rate, which is an increase of about 42%.
Although this client was using various channels such as Facebook, Yelp and others to convert prospects to clients, Botco.ai’s conversational chat was the highest-converting channel for this client overall in 2022. Another Botco.ai customer went from a 5% conversion rate to 8% within six months. Additionally, this Botco.ai client had a peak month of 22% shortly afterwards for a 60% overall increase.
Continuing the conversation from campaigns
A crucial part of continuing that conversation in a consumer-friendly way is understanding where the prospects came from by tracking that engagement and performance in Google Analytics. How? By using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes. UTM codes are snippets of text added to the end of a URL to help you track where website traffic comes from if users click a link to this URL.
Whether it’s a LinkedIn post, Facebook ad or display email, Botco.ai can customize the messaging and the whole user experience when prospects are redirected to your landing page to deliver a personalized experience. Botco.ai’s intelligent chat platform provides that much-needed understanding of where prospects found your company, customizes the user engagement, and delivers a high-end conversation.
Anyone tracking bounce rates knows that you don’t have much time to really capture prospects’ short attention span. If your company is not delivering that instant interaction, that consumer-friendly experience where they can easily find what they’re looking for, they will bounce and will quickly find one of your competitors. The key lesson is to capitalize on that small window of opportunity once prospects get to your landing page.
Create data-rich leads through conversational AI
For conversational AI to be successful, personalization is important. Conversational AI can deliver interactive and personalized information that gives your business the best chance of providing all the relevant information that encourages prospects to take that next step—whether it’s a purchase, connecting with your scheduling software to book an appointment, or inputting data into your CRM so the right sales representative follows up with prospects immediately.
In the past, traditional leads consisting of just a name and a phone number, don’t really provide much insight. In stark comparison, conversational AI gives you the complete idea about what that person is really looking for and understand whether they’re looking to make a purchase, inquire about services or products, looking to book a tour of a facility, or perhaps they are a job seeker looking for employee testimonial videos.
Conversational AI provides your sales team with greater insight into what the prospect is looking for. These conversational experiences engage prospects in a high-end consumer way and enable your team to quickly gather data-rich leads to capture specific audiences.
Seamless integration of data into a CRM
Collecting data-rich information and getting it to the right sales representative has never been easier. By implementing Botco.ai’s intelligent chat platform, there’s no need to manually input leads into your CRM. The leads are automatically entered into your system and directed to specific members of the sales team to follow up on immediately.
“Speed to lead is something that clients are able to accomplish,” Knack concluded. “Additionally, having the insight gleaned from the chat experience provides Botco.ai clients with information on the prospect’s timeline to purchase or schedule a tour, the urgency of their decision, what their budget is, and so much more. We’re able to use those insights to make sure that leads get to the right person. For effective lead generation, you can’t afford not to have a virtual agent.”
Watch the webinar replay for more information
To learn practical ways to optimize lead generation and qualification using chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, VISIT HERE to watch Botco.ai’s webinar replay of “Better AI Chat Conversations to Turbocharge Demand Generation” featuring Botco.ai’s Director of Sales Joseph Terrell, Business Development Representative Don Duong and Account Executive David Knack.
If you’d like to learn how to integrate automation and AI technology into your organization or to see a product demo from Botco.ai, schedule a call with our team or email us at [email protected].