Today’s AI-powered chatbots aren’t just excellent solutions for customer service and support teams. Thanks to the latest advancements in generative AI and conversational AI technologies, AI-driven chatbots have become essential tools for customer service, sales, and marketing teams alike. AI chatbots can deliver 24/4 support, answering your customers’ questions and helping them resolve issues independently – but their capabilities don’t stop there. In this article, we’ll explore how AI chatbots can actually help you optimize your marketing ROI.
How AI Chatbots Are Used by Marketing Teams
Though AI chatbots are primarily associated with customer service interactions, they can also be effectively used by marketing teams, helping them boost their marketing efforts through automated interactions. Here are a few examples of what AI-driven conversational chatbots can do to support your marketing efforts:
- Offer website visitors helpful product-related information;
- Engage website visitors proactively based on specific behavioral patterns;
- Offer discounts to prevent shopping cart abandonment;
- Cross-sell and upsell to increase the average order value;
- Encourage users to join a webinar or subscribe to your newsletter;
- Deliver highly personalized product/ service recommendations;
- Qualify inbound leads through a series of predefined questions;
- Schedule appointments or demo calls by synching with your calendar;
- Capture lead information and automatically create lead cards in your CRM.
3 Ways AI Chatbots Can Optimize Your Marketing ROI
Let’s take a closer look at how using AI chatbots can help you optimize the ROI of your marketing campaigns:
Boosting engagement with proactive triggers
First and foremost, self-service chatbot solutions can initiate conversations with your website visitors proactively. For example, an AI chatbot can reach out to visitors who are browsing your product pages or a pricing page and offer them real-time assistance in selecting the best product or service plan that aligns best with their needs and objectives.
Similarly, AI chatbots can initiate chats with users who have added products to the shopping cart but haven’t yet finalized their purchase. An AI chatbot can offer them help, remind them about the items in their cart, or encourage them to complete their purchase by offering a personalized coupon code. Not only does it increase engagement, but it can ultimately help you reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase conversions.
The best part is that these interactions can be entirely automated, which means they don’t require any human intervention, freeing your team up to focus on more strategic tasks rather than chatting with your website visitors and answering repetitive questions.
Automated lead capture and qualification
For B2B SaaS businesses that rely on inbound lead generation, in particular, AI-based chatbots can be used for automated inbound lead qualification. A chatbot can respond to inbound requests and accurately collect and capture important information by asking your prospects a series of pre-qualification questions. That information may include a prospect’s name, email address, phone number, company name, specific interests, products or services they are looking for, and other critical information – all without getting your team members involved.
Based on responses, the AI chatbot can filter out unqualified leads and pass the qualified ones to your sales and marketing teams. That can also give you valuable insights into the quality of leads your website or landing pages generate so you can make well-informed adjustments to your strategy if needed.
An AI-driven chatbot by VoiceSpin is a great example of how these tools can help you with lead capture and qualification. The tool can engage with your prospects, answer their questions, provide basic information about your products or services, gather specific information through a series of predefined questions, and instantly qualify leads based on their responses.
The chatbot will also automatically create new lead records in your integrated CRM system to ensure no opportunity slips through the cracks. And that also means your team will only focus on interacting with high-quality prospects who are more likely to convert. Additionally, it can be integrated with your calendar, so the chatbot can check your availability in real time, offer available time slots to your prospects, and automatically schedule demo calls.
Increasing conversions through personalized product recommendations
Similarly to re-engaging users who haven’t completed their purchase by sending them reminders, exclusive offers, and shopping cart recovery prompts, AI chatbots can go even further than that and offer personalized product recommendations to your customers or prospects. The AI chatbot can analyze user data such as the user’s browsing history and journey on your website and past purchase history (for existing customers). Based on that data, the AI chatbot can provide dynamic product recommendations, helping you increase conversions.
In addition to that, AI chatbots can help you capitalize on cross-selling and upselling opportunities. The bot can recommend complementary products to go with the initial purchase or offer upgrades (or higher-value options) that can enhance the overall value of the purchase.
Key Takeaways
Using AI chatbots to answer your customers’ questions and automate your customer service interactions is only one way to leverage them in your daily business operations. AI-driven conversational chatbots are helpful tools marketers can use alongside customer service teams to automatically qualify inbound leads, proactively engage customers and prospects, recover abandoned carts, deliver personalized product recommendations, or offer timely assistance to website visitors during the most impactful moments.
That can help marketing teams automate the entire inbound lead generation and qualification process, boost engagement, drive higher conversions, and ultimately improve the ROI of their marketing campaigns.
