Marketing & Sales 
Marketers and salespeople consistently try to generate leads using new strategies. Conversational AI chatbots aid their efforts while adding a new channel to supplement lead-generation efforts.
An AI chatbot engages customers while enhancing their user experience through real-time interactions and round-the-clock customer support.
It’s almost like chatting with a human (who is available even at 2 a.m.). When users land on your website, they will see a chat option to get immediate answers to their questions.
Many solutions offer options to automate chats using AI while facilitating live chats with human agents. Learn more about why you should opt for an AI-powered solution.
Why Use AI Chatbots for Lead Generation?
AI chatbots streamline your lead-generation process by engaging and qualifying leads, reducing the burden on your sales agents.
Immediate responses and engagement
Chatbots respond instantly to inquiries and engage potential leads when they express interest. Suppose a potential customer visits your website at midnight with a burning question about your product. Now, instead of keeping them waiting until morning, a chatbot instantly provides them with the answer.
Chatbots provide real-time responses to ensure potential leads receive the information exactly when needed. This creates a seamless and engaging user experience that drives conversions.
Lead qualification and nurturing
Not every visitor to your website is looking to make a purchase. Many people will casually browse or simply be curious about your offerings. Chatbots are one of the top communication channels they use along the buyer’s journey to ask questions and even discuss pricing.
You can also program chatbots to ask questions about a visitor’s budget, demographic, and specific requirements. Answers to these questions will help you to qualify visitors and set the context for your sales team to follow up on potential opportunities.
Most of the B2B buyer journey is over before prospects contact the sales team. In such situations, chatbots represent your sales representatives, helping visitors find what they’re seeking on your website.
Cost-effective communication
Chatbots are available 24/7 without significant overhead, and they can handle multiple interactions simultaneously. This minimizes the need for extensive customer support teams, better controlling costs.
Chatbots make your current teams more productive and efficient. They answer several frequently asked questions, helping your team to focus on more critical issues. They also enable you to optimize resources and improve overall efficiency.
User data collection and insights
Conventional methods require website visitors to fill out generic forms, which lack a human touch and are monotonous. They can also be too lengthy, resulting in the customer leaving your website within minutes if not seconds.
Chatbots follow a conversational approach, making customers more likely to engage and provide information. You can collect valuable customer data, such as preferences, behaviors, and pain points using chatbots.
This data is helpful in determining trends and patterns to gain actionable insights that refine your marketing campaigns and lead-generation strategy.
Improved customer experience
We live in an information-charged, attention-starved world, and today’s customers lack the interest or focus to go through an entire website. Studies show that the average time people spend on a webpage is 54 seconds.
So, you need to give them an easier way to express their needs and get solutions.
With a conversational AI chatbot for sales, you can take your customer satisfaction and experience to the next level. Think of it as a shopping assistant for your customers. These lead-generation chatbots can recommend products, answer questions, and seamlessly guide users where they wish to go.
Related: The Newbie’s Guide to Conversational AI Chatbots
5 Best AI Chatbots for Lead Generation
There are several AI chatbots on the market for effective lead generation. Below are the top five picks.
1. Nextiva
Nextiva offers live chat automation that helps engage visitors and qualify leads effectively. The platform supports communication through multiple channels, including website chat, SMS, and social media.
By seamlessly integrating it with a CRM platform, you can more easily manage quality leads and set custom workflows to handle different inquiries from various channels.
With Nextiva, you get support for over 50 languages, making it easier to respect customers’ preferences for the language they want to communicate in. The solution uses natural language processing and machine learning to keep these interactions personalized to users’ needs.
While AI lets you address routine inquiries, it seamlessly transfers communication to human agents when encountering a complex query or when customers need their issue resolved urgently. You can easily customize and train the virtual agents to route conversations to live agents.
2. Drift
Drift offers a chatbot platform that helps marketers generate leads through live chat and in-app messaging. It integrates directly with your calendar, assisting prospects in booking meetings through the chat interface.
Its integration with tools like HubSpot and others can improve your existing workflows. Although Drift works well with most platforms, some users have reported challenges when integrating with Salesforce.
Here are more details about their challenge:
Overall, users found Drift easy to implement into existing processes, making the team more effective in handling large volumes of inquiries. However, while it’s popular, some users might find its advanced configuration challenging.
3. Intercom
Intercom lets users customize chatbots to fit their specific needs. Its customizable chat interface makes it easier for them to engage and qualify leads.
The chatbot comes with pre-built templates to automate repetitive interactions. You can rely on the platform to send follow-up emails, schedule appointments, or update user information, which allows sales teams to focus on performing activities critical to their role.
These chatbots support communications on multiple channels, helping businesses attract inquiries across different platforms. Despite their great aesthetic, there might be some gaps to take into account regarding Intercom’s customer experience.
4. Zendesk
Zendesk offers live and automated chat functionalities that trigger based on users’ actions. The chatbot monitors the behavior of users in real time. When the moment is right, the chatbot is triggered to engage visitors with appropriate messaging.
Whenever a complex query seems tricky to address, the chatbot seamlessly hands it over to a live agent, helping prospects get assistance that’s personalized to the complexity of their questions or problems.
The chatbot showcases the performance with details on timing, the number of incoming chats, and agent activity via email to track performance effectively. Be mindful that the company tends to be exceptionally aggressive with service renewals, as seen below.
5. Tidio
Tidio is a user-friendly chatbot builder with various pre-built chatbot templates for effective lead generation. It offers a live chat that runs around the clock and instantly answers users’ queries.
With Tidio, you get predetermined canned responses to common questions users ask. Simply put, you don’t have to type in the same answer to a question asked several times.
Although users love Tidio’s customizable features, some feel that more advanced customization options would be beneficial.
Like many other automation tools, Tidio offers multi-channel functionality to connect with potential customers on different platforms.
Do’s & Don’ts of Conversational Sales Chatbots
Below are some practices you should follow (and some to avoid) when working with conversational sales chatbots.
Chatbot dos for lead generation
Here are the things you should do:
- Know your purpose: Before setting up a chatbot, you must know your purpose. Do you want to generate more leads, have more conversations, or simply improve user experience? Setting clear goals is the first step.
- Define your target audience: For any lead-generation strategy to work, you should direct your efforts at the right audience. Focusing too much effort on people who do not need your product would waste time and resources.
- Craft engaging content: To improve your customer engagement, craft answers that are not only informative but also engaging. Customers are more likely to interact if your responses are creative and friendly. Add a pinch of humor to connect better with the user.
- Develop a persona for your chatbot: Your chatbot must have a personality that syncs with your brand’s voice. It can be funny, quirky, gentle, sassy, or anything that you would like it to be. Just don’t sound robotic. A unique personality will make your brand stand out.
- Personalize your messages: Personalization is the key to designing a perfect chatbot, as just giving real-time responses is not enough. Advanced personalized features can increase return on investment by 200%.
- Monitor performance and optimize: You must regularly monitor your chatbot’s performance to identify areas for improvement. Pay attention to the numbers — how many views or clicks, how much time a user spends, etc. — and optimize your campaign accordingly.
Chatbot don’ts for lead generation
Follow these suggestions to help you avoid the pitfalls of working with conversational sales chatbots:
- Don’t sound too formal: Keep the interactions fun and friendly. Remember that you are talking to a human, and humans connect better when there is a personal touch. Avoid overly scripted responses or robotic language, which may turn your customers away.
- Don’t give generic answers: Be specific with your answers. Listen to the user carefully. Respond to what they’re asking, and provide precise and clear explanations.
- Don’t nag the user: Your ultimate goal may be to increase conversion rates. Remember that a user will not immediately purchase without knowing about your brand. Focus on providing value first.
- Don’t set and forget your chatbot: To provide accurate information to your users, regularly update your chatbot with the latest knowledge about your products and offerings.
- Don’t avoid experimentation: You must continuously test and experiment with your chatbot to see what works best for you. Try different chatbot scripts, responses, etc., to find out what resonates the most with your audience.
Related: Top Chatbot Providers: Key Features, Uses, & Campaign Ideas
All Your Chat Needs Covered
AI-powered chatbots assist customers seamlessly with a 24/7 live chat facility, offering personalized interactions.
These platforms connect with CRMs to enrich the context of every interaction. You can train many of them to lead visitors to share their contact information while asking relevant questions that help qualify them as leads.
Whether you want to engage customers with a live chat or let AI take the lead, Nextiva’s marketing suite has you covered.
Nextiva offers a highly customizable chat solution that personalizes customer experience at scale.
Book a free demo of Nextiva. It could automate up to 90% of your interactions.
