How Has Your Chatbot Transformed Your Business?

A saturated digital space means users are bound to spend less time meandering on web pages they find irrelevant or difficult to navigate. With a world of options at their fingertips, why would anyone waste valuable time trying to connect with a company representative to receive the information they are looking for? If only you could employ a virtual salesperson for your website to engage with users and convert them into paying customers. Luckily, now you can. Businesses have begun to incorporate chatbots into their digital marketing strategies to captivate consumers, answer queries, decrease bounce rates and increase conversions.

Curious to learn more about the impact of chatbots? We asked entrepreneurs to share how their chatbot has transformed their business, as well as the lessons they’ve learned since integrating chatbot technology on their website.

Amy Kilvington, Marketing Manager at Blinds Direct

We use chatbots across our retail sites, handling repetitive queries with automated responses. Any complex requests are flagged and a customer service team member jumps in. We have found that this mix of automation and ‘real life’ input is the recipe for success.

Our chatbot functionality has allowed us to nurture leads on-site by offering useful information, assistance and a personal touch where necessary. It has also helped us to gather data, as we have introduced questions into chatbot interactions to get feedback.

Fran Conejos, CMO & Co-founder of Landbot

We’ve spent more than three years working with different chatbot approaches. We use chatbots almost in every touch point with our customers. In fact, we do not even have a website like every startup or SaaS company, we have a conversational bot instead. We use chatbots on our website mainly for generating leads. We tried to use a traditional website, but we found that a conversational website converts better than anything we’ve seen in the past.

Lyndon Nicholson, CEO of Buffalo 7

We implemented a chatbot in June 2017 and have seen some really great results. As a B2B service company our website is based on lead generation and 12 months on from implementing our first chatbot we now find that 40% of our leads make contact through our bot. We rely almost entirely on inbound marketing to generate leads so having this new method of contact
has enabled us to increase our number of leads month on month and subsequently our number of clients. I’ve no doubt that our chatbot is playing an important role in the continued growth of our business.

Outside of office hours is when the chatbot is hugely beneficial though. We have set up our bot so it is able to answer the most common questions we get asked without any human involvement. People can have full conversations with it and, perhaps the best thing about, it is that it has the ability to schedule meetings with potential clients with members from our Client Services team. We’re generating qualified leads through the night and at weekends: something that wasn’t possible before.

My advice is when you program responses into your bot, don’t stop there. It should be continuously evolving and getting smarter. Every time a conversation breaks down with our bot during offline hours, we add in more responses. You should constantly test new messaging too; even the slightest tweak can massively improve results.

Samantha Avneri, Marketing Director at Regpack

In terms of our strategy, we tried to focus on creating a basic bot first that would be general and capture the attention of a website visitor without being overly pushy. It just says, “Hey there! Can I help you find what you’re looking for?”

I also used the strategy of keeping it simple with button responses only to lead the conversation how I wanted it to go. So I ask what they are interested in, based on that answer, provide a demo system for them to review specific to that vertical/market and eventually lead to asking for
the email to schedule a demo.

I think bots can be very powerful, so starting off small, seeing what works and then building on that success makes sense. It’s also a lot of work, so slowly creating specific bots for high traffic and high converting pages is more productive than a one size fits all bot.

Anne Dossey, Content Marketing Specialist at Clearbridge Mobile

Currently, we are experimenting with a chatbot that helps with the lead scoring process. We’re working on introducing a 24/7 chatbot to our website which can book meetings and share helpful content depending on where the customer is in our marketing funnel. The chatbot can engage with web visitors in real-time and qualify the lead based on responses to personalized questions. In addition, the chatbot is able to pass the conversation over to a real person if further communication is necessary. The chatbot is part of our greater effort to reduce the number of forms in our conversion pipeline.

AI tools, like chatbots, offer valuable solutions for lead scoring. AI-driven chatbots allow marketers to connect with leads with the highest odds of conversion. A chatbot is incredibly beneficial for account-based marketers who need to prioritize the most qualified prospects. Chatbots also provide personalized value to each user depending on their position in the marketing funnel. For example, the chatbot can direct potential customers to helpful blog content if they’re in the research phase or book a meeting with the sales department if they’re ready to discuss our services.

Ketan Kapoor, CEO and Co-Founder of Mettl

Chatbots helped us capture the leads that we were previously missing during offline periods. Based on pre-qualified criteria, the chatbot filtered incoming leads into three categories- Qualified, Unqualified and Hot Leads. As a result, we are able to get rid of junk leads and can now attack the hot leads on priority. This single change helped us achieve a 25% improvement in
conversion rates and a 30% increase in the total lead count. In this case, people looking for a job aren’t the part of our lead generation, so the chatbot automatically drops such queries to the unqualified leads list. On the other hand, people asking about our offerings or facing issues understanding a feature get placed in the qualified leads funnel. It’s that simple!

Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminous Marketing

My company set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot for local craft brewing company, Indian Joe Brewing in order to keep loyal beer fans in the know about which new beers are on draft, which special events are happening at the brewery, and which food trucks will be at the brewery each day. The bot gives our fans the option to opt into the types of notifications they want to receive so that we aren’t bothering them with tons of messages.

This is a fantastic way to stay in touch with our loyal fans and customers who may not otherwise see us on social media channels due to the recent and frequent algorithm updates. As with most businesses, we’ve seen a sharp decline of organic reach on newsfeed posts over the last year, and this is one small way around the system for now.

Werner G. Krebs, CEO at Acculation

We realized a few years back that chatbots were (at the time) a new and potentially better way of creating rich content that could help engage our website visitors – similar to the way e-books, newsletter subscriptions, or registration-required premium content are sometimes offered. We wanted to put together a simple checklist that could inspire business owners with some easy to follow frameworks for growth. We trained the bot to provide business advice, and then, after observing users’ interactions, further trained it to respond to commonly observed user behavior.

Our business advice or growth hacking business chatbot was a success, and greatly increased website visitor engagement with those visitors that chose to use it. About 25% of organic visitors to our website in 2016 choose to interact with the chatbot, which is pretty phenomenal when one considers typical web page engagement and bounce rates.

Ready For Your Own Chatbot?

Think you’re ready to implement a chatbot onto your business’s website? Creative Click Media can design a custom bot for your business that embodies your brand and generates leads. Contact us today to get started!