Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have relied on tactics like lead capture forms, landing and generic web pages, and follow-up outreach to connect with and convert prospects to sales. This onerous process requires an average of eight touches to secure even a meeting or other conversion.
How can marketers speed this process up and drive growth? Chatbots and conversational marketing offer one avenue with a lot of potential.
Chatbots are quickly becoming an integral part of marketing strategies as brands prioritize personalization and orchestrate multichannel experiences. Companies that sync digital ad campaigns to chat playbooks can engage leads with a high level of intent and at every stage of the funnel.
Take, for example, CRM software provider CRMNEXT. When the company paired conversational marketing (chat) with ABM, marketing's influence on the sales pipeline increased from 45% to 92%. It also realized 1,900% ROI, an 80% increase in close rate, and a jump from 18% to 53% of marketing qualified leads to sales acceptance leads.
The “magic” of ads+chat
What makes conversational marketing chatbots effective is their ability to incorporate data connected to an ABM platform into how their playbooks engage buyers, interact and personalize based upon their segment, cohort, intent and interest.
But first, chatbots must be crafted with intention. Situational awareness is important, as is a design offering a seamless customer experience that needs as few clicks as possible.
In the B2B world, 75% of a chatbot's function is to qualify leads. People seek instant gratification; they don't want forms. By using marketing bots and conversational marketing effectively, you can offer a more pleasant and helpful experience to visitors and protect reps from becoming inundated with routine responses by automating qualification on the front end.
Your chatbot should include a playbook that can:
- Intelligently gather data from site visitors.
- Trigger sales automation processes with both prospects and current customers.
- Qualify inbound traffic in real time.
- Build account lists.
The intuitive bot playbook
While chatbots are designed to make lives easier, most operate in either one of two paradigms: linear or visual (like a flowchart). While each has its place, independently, they leave much to be desired.
Playbooks that use both visual bot and linear bot builders, and dynamically sync them, enable marketing and sales to craft the right journey, creating more relevant, valuable experiences for prospects and customers. It also enables usability for go-to-market teams as they continue optimizing the experience to drive results.
ABM teams can set up hybrid chat solutions in different channels like live or web chat, as well as through messaging platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams and in-app messaging. Teams can route live conversations from ICP/target accounts in real time, creating personalized experiences for each contact and connecting them directly to reps.
Marketing teams can develop an entire playbook to collect visitor data, launch sales automation with customers and prospects and qualify inbound leads in real time. By connecting these strategies directly to the chat experience, the chat playbook can adjust based on the dynamics of each target account, who they are and what the marketing team knows about them.
Not the exception, but the rule
When thoughtfully planned and carefully executed, chatbots enhance marketing strategy.
Understanding customers, their pain points and any friction they may encounter on your website is key. If someone clicks on a chat tool, they're seeking information faster and more easily. So your goal is to identify what might propel them to leave your website and ask the following questions:
- What's the motivation for visiting your website?
- Why are they here on this page, right now?
- What information do they need?
- Why are they leaving the page without taking the next action I want them to take?
Answering these questions provides the impetus for your bot's communication. If possible, tie it into the proactive message outside your bot, too. Always keep the user's motivation in mind when you're writing a new bot. Then frame your bots to increase engagement.
Here are a couple of tips:
Use personalization tokens — someone's name or their company name — to capture their attention. Make your brand voice a little more human by using content-specific, relevant humor. Studies show that people respond to humor, and in the marketing world, humor increases open and engagement rates while helping people retain information longer.
Know your target audience's pain points and use that as your opener. We all know that a picture's worth a thousand words, right? That holds true for social media, too. Adding emojis to social content yields up to 25% more engagement than a post without any.
Getting chatbots right
Creating an effective chatbot takes finesse. Language has many nuances, and it's hard to account for them all. It's also difficult to program empathy.
Customers get impatient when they're faced with too many steps. When your bot helps streamline processes — like booking meetings directly from a calendar-enabled bot, for example — you'll see an immediate impact on conversions.
Here's one example where chatbots were the right solution.
The challenge:
Elevated Third, a digital agency specializing in enterprise B2B, wanted to use conversational marketing to generate more qualified leads, boost deal size and shorten the sales cycle.
Doing this required the company to implement a solution designed to boost customer engagement and increase opportunities in the pipeline. The company was also seeking a solution that could initiate late-stage dynamics earlier — like looping in other departments not necessarily involved initially (or even directly) in website-related initiatives.
Because their teams could anticipate prospects' normal objections, they wanted a tool to address those concerns as early as possible in the cycle.
The solution:
Needing to execute on a blend of demand generation and ABM tactics, the company required the tools and data to support its initiatives. Its ABM team wanted a data-driven approach.
Critical to developing the strategy was understanding the “why” behind conversions, which helped refine the messaging and targeting. True ABM uses a one-to-one approach, so by leveraging intent data, the company provided contacts with the specific information they need based on who they are and their goals.
Using display and LinkedIn ads, intuitive playbooks that triggered targeted marketing collateral and intent data, a bot could engage contacts and broaden the outreach to include departments that typically don't become involved in the buying process until later in the funnel.
With AI- and ML-driven training, they used a bot to create more personalized experiences, learn to field common objections and proactively engage potential customers to start a conversation. Prospects responded more favorably to experiences starting with an empathetic connection beginning with, “Hey, you've got a challenge. Let's talk about it,” rather than a less personal, “What can we sell you today?” approach.
Before employing the chat technology, the company had to define its Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), update its Salesforce instance and verify the accuracy — and completeness — of every target account, opting not to segment contacts on too many data points.
Then the company deployed display ads and Google ads strategically, with frequent updates to prevent any from getting stale. It also used intent data to help shape its direct marketing outreach. With a chatbot in place, Elevated Third could engage website visitors, encouraging them to share their challenges, funneling the right messaging and content and scheduling demos with the sales team. Another tool — Live Chat — enabled BDRs to talk directly to site visitors, uncover and address pain points and start the conversion process.
Every adjustment and tool enabled the team to deliver tailored value propositions customized to address each potential customer's unique needs. The right tools — including its chatbot — empowered the company’s marketing and sales teams to:
- Become more qualitatively and quantitatively data driven.
- Help them identify the right people.
- Refine and deliver the right message.
- Identify the most effective channels for initiating, advancing and closing deals.
The results:
After revamping its ABM approach and incorporating more tools, the company saw strong results:
- 76% increase in targeted account engagement.
- 900% increase in qualified leads from chat.
- 325% increase in deal size from chat.
- 684% increase in pipeline overall by pairing chat and ads.
Today's chatbots are compelling. They use AI and ML algorithms to learn, speak like people, offer solutions and basic customer support, route customers and much more. As they learn, they become even more complex and better equipped to understand and accurately respond to more nuances within ABM.
Having a playbook gives you a road map for when you deploy a website chatbot. This should cover scripts, where to deploy B2B chatbots and more. Developing a strategic playbook for ABM can decrease customer churn, elevate customer net promoter scores and ultimately improve conversion rates and increase revenue.