The primary goal of any business is closing more deals and acquiring more customers. Because the more customers you reach, the more your business grows.
One of the most effective ways to make it happen is to implement sales and marketing automation into your business. Although 66% of companies have some kind of automation in place, the incomplete techstack and lack of optimization makes it ineffective.
To overcome this challenge, you need to build a system that smoothly connects all aspects of the sales process—right from inquiry capture to conversion.
This involves implementing a chatbot on your website to capture inbound inquiries and using a CRM Software for nurturing leads and increasing sales conversions. But first, let’s talk about the basics.
What are chatbots and CRMs?
Simply put, a chatbot is a program designed to mimic human interactions over the internet. Have you ever had a question while browsing through a site but couldn’t be bothered to search for the answers in the FAQs or contact a person? Well, a chatbot can eliminate some of that frustration by simply answering your questions quickly.
Related: How to Use WhatsApp Chatbot for Lead Generation.
With advancement in NLP technology, chatbots can engage with your prospects and customers to help you achieve your business goals. They help you deliver a superior customer experience throughout the customer journey. From personalized buying guidance during pre-purchase to providing quality customer service post-purchase, chatbots can enable you to enhance your CSAT and NPS scores as well as scale revenue.
On the other hand, a CRM, short for Customer Relationship Management software, helps you manage and nurture leads, send automated engagement emails, track them, and automatically update information about their activity so that your salespeople can concentrate on selling and save time on updating lead information.
How do chatbots and CRMs amplify nurturing and conversion campaigns?
Advanced NLP chatbots and CRM solutions come together to create a solid techstack for customer acquisition. Here’s how:
1. Lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of using content as a tool to engage with customers.
But the key to successful lead nurturing is relevance and chatbots are helpful.
Through your chatbot, you can ask website visitor specific questions like the industry they operate in, employee size, and more, along with contact details and their queries. You can also nurture prospects by providing the right information at the right time in their purchase journey through intelligent commerce chatbots.
This information can be fed into your CRM to create a segmented list based on various attributes. Then you can send relevant campaigns to specific segments via CRM.
Also read: How Conversational AI Can Help Generate Leads for Insurance Brands
2. Creating personalized email campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most popular tools to acquire new leads, engage with existing ones, and improve their lifetime value. You can nurture them by sending product updates, offers, and more.
At times, email marketing campaigns are more beneficial than social media campaigns. For instance, there are 4.3 billion users on emails compared to the measly 50 million on LinkedIn or the one plus billion on Instagram.
Another reason email marketing campaigns are so highly preferred is the fact that they can bring in a return of almost 40$ for every dollar spent. This means that the ROI on every email campaign is nearly 4,000%!
With so much ROI to offer, companies are using marketing automation tools to send email campaigns every day. However, the open rate for generic email campaigns is getting lesser, with email responses being down by 30%, an all-time low.
Chatbots can be the difference between your emails being opened or ignored.
Chatbots can help collect valuable leads and customer information. Next, your CRM can use that information to personalize email campaigns. For example, instead of putting up a generic “Hey there” or a “Dear Sir,” you can obtain the user’s name from the chatbot and put up “Hi <user’s name>.”
3. Moving prospects down the sales funnel
A sales funnel depicts a lead’s journey before becoming a customer. A typical sales funnel includes the following stages:
- Awareness – when a prospective buyer become aware of your brand
- Interest – when they become interested in your product
- Purchase – when they decide to buy your product
- Delight – when they’re happy with your product or service and are ready to stay with you for more purchases.
You can use your chatbot to help your sales reps move leads down the sales funnel. Here’s how -
When a buyer lands upon your website (awareness phase), you can offer case studies, testimonials, or how-to videos related to your product via chatbot. The chatbot can also engage with the customer throughout their journey and influence buying decisions by providing personalized recommendations.
4. Providing instant support
There can be instances when a buyer just needs to know a few things before hitting the checkout button. Not getting those answers may delay their purchase decision. Or they may even drop the idea of buying that item.
Chatbots can help in two ways:
One, it can instantly answer all major product and order queries like shipping details, dispatch timeline, return/refund policies, etc. and nudge your user to complete the purchase journey.
Learn all you need to know about Haptik's support solutions.
Two, if a buyer needs specific information which the chatbot cannot answer, they can be connected to a live chat agent. For complex queries, you can route them to the expert through your CRM (commonly known as lead distribution).
When we talk about providing instant support, chatbots can reduce dependency on your live chat agents and sales representatives to a great extent.
How do chatbots reduce dependency on human resources?
Suppose you peek into the life of a sales representative or a customer support agent. In that case, you’ll find that they’re almost always busy doing follow-ups, interacting with prospective customers, or at least pitching the product or service to potential buyers.
Any new task or query that comes to them enters the pipeline, or in simple words, in their to-do list. So, even if they’d want to, they might not be able to answer the new query instantly.
A chatbot is helpful because it can respond to thousands of queries simultaneously. Of course, the queries that need attention from sales reps can be passed on to them but imagine the workload you’ve just reduced for them. Your buyers are also happy because they got what they wanted.
In fact, chatbots can cut operational costs by almost 30%.
Moreover, advanced chatbots like that of Haptik’s come with NLP (Natural Language Processing) capabilities that can decipher the prospect’s queries through a number of text strings.
Some chatbots also support vernacular and speech-to-text functionalities. The variety of tasks that chatbots can handle cannot be done by one human agent. So, in a way, chatbots not only reduce dependencies on human resources but also make them more efficient.
Summary
Chatbots handle the interaction and automate replies, and CRMs lift the backend parts of your business.
Chatbots and CRMs working in harmony can make all the difference. You can automatically create a new lead field in your CRM whenever someone new interacts with your chatbot or update a new activity for an existing customer who interacts with your chatbot when they search for something via chatbot.
The information collected by the chatbot can be sent to your CRM, which can automatically segment your customers and note down their names, contact information, and what they are interested in. This will automatically update your target list when you are sending your next campaign.
Haptik provides out-of-box integration with LeadSquared to automate lead capture through chatbots, capture interactions, and more.
You can connect with us at sales@leadsquared.com to learn more about us and this integration.
This article is contributed by LeadSquared.
About the author
Abhishek Rao is a content writer for LeadSquared. He loves writing about sales, business and tech. When he’s not writing, he’s busy studying the latest sales and business techniques, watching tech videos, or teaching. You can reach him at Abhishek.Rao@leadsquared.com.
