As a marketer, you know how to get your audience’s attention. You create engaging content and people click on your offers. But what do you do with the clicks you generate? How do you get visitors’ attention and start a productive sales conversation?
Chatbots in B2B marketing and sales are the perfect lead generation tool for digital activities that lead prospects onto your website. However, optimizing your chat tool to maximize your team’s efficiency and generate leads requires finding the balance between automated and human touchpoints in your chat platform’s programming.
Let’s look at best practices for using chatbots to convert your leads.
How to Optimize Chatbots for B2B Lead Generation
1. Set up Chat for Real-Time Engagement
Real time engagement is a crucial part of generating demand. You want to capture website visitors when they’re the most receptive, such as when they’re on a particular product page or when they’ve spent a certain amount of time on your website.
Chatbots provide the perfect bot-to-sales handoff, letting your visitors know that someone is available for a live chat when they’re ready for the next step.
Based on a visitor’s activities, your chatbot can initiate a chat and then bring your sales team into the conversation. Reps can use the visitor’s browsing history and buying signals to customize the conversation.
With the chatbot’s help, they can make a personal connection with your visitors, leverage context in their conversations, and maintain a friendly, engaging dialog.
The result? website visitors feel more confident moving forward in their decision-making process.
2. Respond to Leads with Lightning Speed
When a visitor takes action on your site (e.g., downloading an ebook), you want to be proactive with your responses. The faster you can reply to the prospect’s inquiries and concerns, the better.
We live in a world of instant communication, where users want convenient and quick modes of communication. Chatbots allow potential buyers to communicate their needs faster and with minimal “friction.” A good bot-to-live-agent exchange will help reduce your lead response time and create a seamless experience for prospects.
Consider this: What’s your average response time for a sales inquiry? At ZoomInfo, our sales development reps (SDRs) respond to inbound leads within 90 seconds.
3. Personalize Your Chat Messages
Chatbots can help you engage quickly with prospects and customers. But like with any marketing channel, you need to make them feel valued in their interactions with your company.
According to Folloze Research, 77% of B2B sales and marketing professionals believe personalized marketing experiences improve customer relationships.
You can easily configure your chat tool to create personalized messages by integrating it with your marketing automation platform and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Then you can use your visitors’ information to greet them with their names and personalize the conversation based on their browsing history.
For example, did they spend considerable time on your content page? Offer them relevant pieces of content. Are they return visitors? Welcome them back and say that you’re ready to help. Remember: Simplicity goes a long way in the art of personalization.
4. Provide Your Best Prospects with the Fast Lane to Sales
Prospects who are evaluating a solution want a quick and easy way to find the information they need. Time is of the essence in the B2B world. Once you know a visiting prospect is engaged and ready to take the next step, you need to connect them to a sales rep.
Using your chat software, you can offer visitors the opportunity to speak to your sales team with a simple button or skip the automated process and connect them directly with your agents. Not only will this reduce your bounce rates, but it will also help minimize dropoff and capture potential leads.
5. Use Engagement History to Continue the Conversation
A visitor’s engagement history is gold for an SDR. Leverage previous interactions to keep your visitors engaged. You want to capture their attention, keep the conversation going, and convert them in the process.
If you sense that a visitor is about to bounce from your website, trigger a chatbot to start a conversation based on their engagement history. Initiating the automated chat can address specific problems that the prospect couldn’t resolve from your website content.
Additionally, if you notice that a visitor previously interacted with a bot or agent, your teams can use that data to understand where the prospect is in the buying process.
6. Train Your Sales Team on Best Practices for Chat
Chatbots can contribute to the success of your lead generation strategy, including automating processes and transferring chats to live sales agents. But your sales team is the critical component to retaining leads and converting them into customers.
Train your sales team to employ best practices to manage the bot’s interactions and transitions to live conversations. This includes equipping your teams with extensive product and website knowledge, making sure their informal dialog aligns with your brand voice, and teaching them how to prioritize prospects on your site in real time.
The beauty of chatbots is their ability to engage with multiple visitors at the same time. Once your sales reps are aware of this, they can get comfortable handling numerous inquiries at the same time and carrying on multiple conversations without losing a lead’s interest.
7. Integrate Chat With Your Marketing Automation and CRM
The magic happens when you integrate chat into your tech stack — your CRM, marketing automation tools, and collaboration software (Slack, Teams, and Zoom). Marketing and sales can align on the accounts you want to turn into customers.
ZoomInfo Chat integrates with platforms such as Marketo, Salesforce, and Hubspot. The tech mix makes it easier for your SDRs to access all your contacts’ data, view previous conversations to target them in future interactions, and support customers faster than before. Plus, all your information is under one roof, making your process smoother for all your website visitor interactions.
Bringing Intelligence to the Conversation
Unlike other chat tools, ZoomInfo Chat brings conversational intelligence to the chat experience. Marketing and sales can use real-time visitor insights to automate lead routing, jump into live chats fully prepared, and get more meetings scheduled. This will improve your lead generation numbers and get more qualified leads into your sales pipeline.