What Is an Acquisition Chatbot?
An acquisition chatbot is designed and explicitly used to acquire new customers or users for a product, service, or organization. These chatbots are a subset of conversational AI applications typically employed in marketing and sales contexts.
Acquisition chatbots streamline the customer acquisition process by automating initial interactions, providing timely information, and capturing leads. They can enhance the user experience and improve conversion rates by delivering personalized and immediate responses to potential customers' inquiries across multiple channels.
For example, marketing may use an acquisition chatbot to start a conversation with new visitors, and sales could use these chatbots to share product suggestions with existing customers. Either way, it’s crucial acquisition chatbots offer customers value beyond a transactional relationship.
Acquisition chatbots, or lead generation chatbots, represent a cost-effective way to engage new customers and re-engage exciting ones. Put simply, they can speed up the process of converting new clients, cross-selling to existing ones, answering questions and providing useful content to customers without the need for human intervention.
One of the biggest headaches for any business is engaging new customers and making sure they stick around long enough to convert or enable you to cross-sell. So, how do you build a healthy pipeline of new customer leads when the average time spent on a webpage across all industries is 54 seconds? The answer is simple and doesn’t involve an expensive website redesign or massive PPC investment. An acquisition chatbot can help you find new leads and identify those most likely to convert, saving you both time and effort.
Why Implement an Acquisition Chatbot?
An acquisition chatbot can interact with potential customers on your behalf. The beauty lies in its ability to quickly and simply get vital information from a prospective customer and identify when the time is right to route them to a human agent. Equally, acquisition chatbots can identify customer needs and help them to navigate to the right products for their requirements. You can implement chatbots across various channels and your website to ensure you don’t miss any opportunities to engage with new and existing customers.
So, acquisition chatbots aren’t just about awareness and consideration; they can be helpful throughout the funnel.
How Does an Acquisition Chatbot Work?
An acquisition chatbot has the potential to add value at many points throughout the customer journey. Whether vetting new leads, helping to onboard new customers or upselling existing ones, an acquisition chatbot can do many of the hard yards to conversion so your team can focus on account management and building relationships.
Acquisition chatbots can be built as scripted chatbots, the simplest type of chatbot that answers customer queries by following set rules, or AI chatbots, which combine Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand user intent and respond appropriately. With an AI chatbot, acquisition chatbots often work as follows:
Engagement: Acquisition chatbots - often deployed on websites, social media platforms, or messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more - engage with potential customers by initiating conversations with visitors or responding to inquiries, aiming to capture their attention and interest.
Qualification: AI chatbots use NLP and ML algorithms to understand user input and qualify leads. They can ask questions to determine a user's needs, preferences, and buying intent.
Product or Service Promotion: Once a user's needs are identified, the chatbot can provide information about products or services that match those needs, including details, benefits, pricing, quotes and more.
Lead Generation: Acquisition chatbots often collect contact information from interested users, such as email addresses or phone numbers. This information is used for follow-up communication and lead nurturing.
Appointment Scheduling: In some cases, acquisition chatbots may integrate with scheduling systems, allowing users to book appointments, demos, or consultations with sales representatives or service providers.
Automated Sales Funnel: The chatbot can guide users through a sales funnel, offering personalized recommendations and addressing objections or concerns. It can also handle common sales objections and provide relevant responses.
Analytics and Insights: Acquisition chatbots generate valuable data and insights on user interactions. This data can help businesses refine their marketing and sales strategies and improve the chatbot's effectiveness.
What Are the Benefits of an Acquisition Chatbot?
With the flow of acquisition chatbots in mind, they offer several benefits to organizations seeking to acquire new customers or cost-effectively upsell existing ones. Some of the key advantages include:
New Business Sales: Chatbots can deliver immediate responses to user inquiries, reducing wait times, speeding up new business sales and preventing potential customers from losing interest or moving on to competitors.
Lead Generation: Acquisition chatbots can proactively collect contact information and lead-qualifying data, allowing businesses to build a database of potential customers for future marketing efforts.
Lead Nurturing: Beyond initial lead capture, chatbots can be programmed to nurture leads over time through automated follow-up messages, content distribution, and personalised recommendations.
Reduce Acquisition Costs: Chatbots can handle multiple conversations simultaneously, allowing businesses to engage with many potential customers without hiring additional staff.
Increase ARPU: Chatbots can quickly navigate users through sales funnels, answer FAQs, and assist with everyday tasks, streamlining customer acquisition and allowing sales to concentrate on more complex deals.
Measure ROI: Chatbots generate valuable data and insights on user interactions, which can inform marketing and sales strategies and help businesses improve their chatbot's performance over time.
Industry Use Cases of an Acquisition Chatbot
Financial Services
One of the world’s leading banks uses our Conversational AI Cloud solution to deliver best-in-class customer service. The brief was simple: create the ultimate customer experience for the bank’s customers regardless of when they needed help.
By deploying an advanced AI chatbot, the bank now serves customers relevant product and service information every time they engage. This approach helps to drive higher sales across the brand’s website.
The bank’s acquisition chatbot was initially deployed because it was experiencing a 98% failure rate with credit card applications. The chatbot now guides customers through the process and asks them to identify any issues they’re having, which it then assists in resolving. The result is a considerable uptick in successful applications.
Retail
One of our clients is a major furniture retailer that proactively messages customers who show an interest in a specific product to reengage them and help them convert. The brand’s acquisition chatbot asks customers a series of questions to show them the most suitable products. That information is stored in the brand’s CDP, ready to be used to re-engage potential customers that have yet to convert.
Conclusion
Acquisition chatbots clearly have their place in the modern sales and cross-selling mix. The ability to deploy them both on owned channels and third-party platforms, such as conversational channels, makes them even more valuable as a communication tool.
With the labour and cost-saving benefits - and the chatbot’s ability to assist in ROI attribution throughout the customer journey – the case for acquisition chatbots is pretty clear. Add to that the ability to assist in cross-selling and the potential to influence ARPU significantly and, just as we’ve seen with live chat, acquisition chatbots are set to become part of the accepted customer service mix over the next few years.
We have a range of solutions that allow businesses to deploy their own acquisition chatbots, available across several of our key solutions, including Conversational Channels, Mobile Service Cloud and Conversational AI Cloud. In addition, we can build Live Chat capability into your offering and create a hybrid live chat/chatbot model to enable 24/7 customer interaction and create a more efficient, flexible customer experience for consumers.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help your business to create a next-generation customer contact offering, get in touch with one of our experts, and we’ll help you shape your roadmap to success.
