Lead Nurturing and Enhancing Engagement with GirikSMS Chatbot

What is the primary objective of marketing? Customer acquisition, right? Identifying potential customers, understanding their interests and preferences, engaging them, and nurturing those relationships for an eventual conversion is the most challenging aspect of marketing.

Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI can help you analyze your audience, identify leads, segregate them, and nurture them to deliver high value. AI chatbots are today’s avengers in the marketing world. The first task however is for marketers to know how and when to leverage a chatbot to nurture leads and drive conversions.

Let’s start with how.

Top Ways to Use Chatbots for Lead Nurturing

AI Chatbots have already been shown to improve the productivity of customer service. They also have the power to enhance customer journeys and even nurture leads. Powered by capabilities such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Programming, and Voice Recognition, Chatbots are poised to be the future of AI-powered marketing by seamlessly integrating data collection, analysis, interactions, and intelligent product recommendations.

Marketing teams can leverage AI to drive conversational excellence. Conversational marketing is based on 2 key aspects.

• Listening to and understanding customers
• Deliver hyper-personalized experiences.

Here’s how AI Chatbots can nurture leads with conversational excellence.

1. Customer Segmentation

To nurture leads effectively, you first need to segment your audience. Segmentation helps marketers to personalize marketing messages. Segmentation however relies on data aggregation and analysis to recognize buyer behavior.

Chatbots can accomplish both these tasks easily and effectively by extracting data from user conversations and analyzing them with AI algorithms. The process starts with chatbots collecting user master data such as name, address, and gender which, are vital aspects of user-chatbot conversations. Chatbots can then segment the audience based on demography, location, and behavioral preferences. Brands rely on behavioral data to understand their needs and preferences. It is therefore vital to design a robust segmentation process to optimize data aggregation.

Here are the steps you can follow to design an effective segmentation process.

• Define personas for your target audience.
• Identify the key differentiators in these personas.
• Design Chatbot interactions based on these differentiators to aggregate data.
• Analyze data aggregated from user-chatbot interactions.
• Establish patterns and feed them into your marketing platform.
• Leverage differentiators and patterns in your marketing platform to offer tailored recommendations.

Audience segmentation is the first step to identifying leads that chatbots can nurture through conversations.

2. Lead Identification

Every time a user interacts with your brand does not necessarily qualify for a lead. This is where chatbots can be useful. Having said that, identifying a lead from multiple interactions isn’t as straightforward as it sounds; Chatbots can leverage deep learning algorithms to identify patterns and segregate leads.

Let’s consider an example. You are looking to get leads for your solar-rooftop business and you want to segregate your B2C leads (typically an individual) and B2B leads (a company or firm interested in selling your products or services). Identifying the type of these leads is key to designing chatbot conversations with each of them to nurture them further.

Once you have qualified leads and segmented them, the next step is to design personalized chatbot conversations to collect lead-specific data.

3. Customized Data Aggregation (Forms v/s Bots)

One of the most common ways in which businesses gather customer data is through web forms. Typically, businesses target their audience with promotional campaigns with links to a web form. Users then fill up the relevant details in the form which marketers can then leverage to identify and segregate leads.

However, with emerging technologies, this is a thing of the past. Web forms capture only specific information, and do not understand user sentiment. Not to mention, they can be tedious and boring for users to fill up. Chatbots completely eliminate this form-based approach. Over multiple short, quick interactions, chatbots can aggregate greater details about customers that can be quite complicated with forms.

Forms have limitations of fields; the longer the form, the less likely a user is going to furnish all the details in one session. Chatbots don’t have these limitations. They can interact with a user multiple times, each time collecting bits of information and then piecing all that data together to build a customer profile. And once the AI algorithms analyze the data, they can qualify and segregate leads for further actions. Chat bots have been known to offer a much higher conversation rate than forms on a landing page and the order of magnitude could be more than 10.

While chatbots can gather important information about customers, segment them, and facilitate lead qualification and segregation, that is not the end of it all. Converting these leads to sales and providing those customers with exceptional customer support experiences that compel them to come back for more is the ultimate goal of any business. In short, businesses thrive on repeat business.

4. Customer Support

Effective customer support holds the key to retaining customers, but traditional systems lack the effectiveness and promptness today's customers have come to expect. Wait times and the time taken by agents to resolve routine customer queries and execute common requests lead to customer frustration. Research indicates that lack of speed in issue resolution is the number one cause of customer dissatisfaction. Customer support is also the most important touchpoint in the customer journey to facilitate repeat business and brand reputation. With a hybrid approach, AI Chatbots can enhance the entire customer support experience. For instance, chatbots can resolve common customer queries and route complex cases to relevant support agents.

With an AI-chatbot-powered hybrid customer support approach, businesses can,

• Reduce response times.
• Resolve common issues with self-help articles and videos.
• Enhance the customer support experience.

5. Chat Personalization

Chatbots are an effective marketing tool to engage users. They can offer hyper-personalized recommendations, suggest services, and even come up with solutions to routine customer queries by leveraging CRM data.

Conclusion

At Girikon, a Salesforce Implementation Partner, our AI and CRM experts believe chatbots are the game changer in conversational marketing. Our Salesforce Chatbot comes integrated with Salesforce, allowing businesses to unlock the limitless power of the world's leading CRM to acquire, segment, and nurture leads. To learn more about how to establish customer personas, identify target audiences, and design tailored marketing conversations with our 100% native Salesforce texting app, connect with our AI expert today.