5 Ways to Build a Lead Generation Funnel Using Chatbots — Engati Blog

Chatbots have revolutionized customer service by helping brands remain omnipresent for their customers. Be it day or night, chatbots ensure that customers can get answers to their questions instantly.

This helps improve customer experience and satisfaction.

However, chatbots can be instrumental in marketing your products and services too. In fact, you can develop an entire lead generation funnel through chatbots.

Through your communication with your prospects, you can easily market your brand and get leads.

So, how can you build a sales funnel through chatbots?

Before we delve into that, let’s find out why chatbots are useful for lead generation.

Why Are Chatbots Useful for Lead Generation?

The single biggest advantage that chatbots offer is that they are and conversational. This makes conversations with the audience feel seamless and reduces the chances of boring them.

Due to their engaging nature, they’re also able to hold the attention of your audience and this might lead to better click-through rates (CTR).

What’s more?

You can integrate chatbots across a variety of channels. Be it social media, your app, or even your website, you can have chatbots everywhere. This makes it easy to grow your reach as well.

As a result, you’ll be able to get more people to interact with your chatbot and when it holds their attention, they might give their information to it too.

Now that you know why chatbots can help with lead generation, let’s take a look at how you can use them for it.

Ways to Build a Lead Generation Funnel Through Chatbots

Here are some ways through which you can create a lead generation funnel using chatbots.

1. Attract and Connect with Your Audience

The first step in building your lead generation funnel is by attracting and connecting with your target audience. This step can’t be done completely through the chatbot.

You need to offer something unique to your audience that catches their attention. This could be a piece of high-quality content that might interest them.

While they’re going through the content, the chatbot could send out a message with a lead magnet.

This might interest your audience and they may decide to provide their details to get their hands on the lead magnet.

If your chatbot is a Facebook Messenger chatbot, you can get permission to message them and receive access to their public profile too. Alternatively, you could ask for their name and email address to take things further.

2. Engage the Lead

Once you’ve got a way to contact the lead, you need to engage the lead to improve the chances of them becoming conversions. Also, having only the contact details is only the tip of the iceberg. You need to qualify the lead before it can be of any use to you.

So, how can you go about this?

There are two ways you can do this.

You could continue your conversation through the chatbot or engage with the lead through emails now that you have their email address.

But why emails, you may ask?

This is because email marketing has a high ROI of up to $40 for every dollar spent on it. So, engaging with the lead through emails might be a good option as the prospects might respond positively to it.

The next thing that you need to do is ensure that the lead remains warm and engage them. It’s only by engaging them that you’ll get to know more about them.

You could ask them relevant questions to segment them.

For instance, you could ask them about their marketing budget, and based on that, you can figure out if they’re a freelancer, an agency, a small company, or an enterprise.

Getting such information can help you provide personalized customer experiences to them even further and increase the chances of converting them.

3. Ask Qualifying Questions

Once you’ve engaged the lead, you can start asking them qualifying questions. Chatbots make this process easier as they can ask the questions in a conversational manner rather than the lead having to fill out long forms.

Whether you use AI-powered chatbots or regular ones, you should try to make this process as quick as possible. One way of going about this is by adding buttons.

What does this do?

When you add buttons for the responses, all the lead needs to do is click on the buttons. This saves them the effort of having to type out the answers. It’s a win-win situation, really, as you’ll get consistent data without varying answers and spellings.

Based on the answer to each question, you can display the next relevant question. This can help you qualify and segment the leads into highly specific groups.

4. Add the Data to Your CRM

Once you’ve segmented your leads into different categories and collected their information, you need to add that data to your CRM or a spreadsheet.

This is where chatbots excel as well.

Many chatbot platforms offer integrations with popular CRMs, email clients, and even Google Sheets.

This can help you completely automate this process.

All the information that the chatbot receives will be automatically transmitted to the respective application and be registered.

5. Set Up Human Takeovers

When you’re segmenting the leads, you might find some enterprise leads which may need special attention from your end.

In such a situation, you should have the option of taking over the conversation to ensure that the lead doesn’t getaway.

For such situations, you should set up triggers that will prompt the chatbot to transfer the conversation to a human agent.

Let’s say that the threshold for an enterprise account is 100 users. In such a situation, when the lead enters any number above 100 while answering the question posed by the chatbot, it’ll transfer the conversation to a human agent.

This can ensure that enterprise clients get customized services that can solve their issues.

Final Thoughts

While chatbots are revolutionizing the customer service industry, they can do a lot more than that. You can leverage their engaging nature to generate leads for your business and get more conversions.

All you need to do is hook your audience’s attention and provide a lead magnet to them through the chatbot. Once they provide their basic details, you can further engage with them and segment them.

Lastly, you should set triggers through which humans can take over the conversation to offer more personalized service to the leads.

Do you have any questions about using chatbots for creating a lead generation funnel? Let us know in the comments section below.