We now live in a digital communication world. When leads need your response, you are expected to engage quickly and on their terms. Leads will reach out by phone, email, text, social media, or chat. Whichever way leads choose to communicate, you must be ready to help them.
Using an email bot augmented by a chatbot can significantly improve your marketing efforts providing better-qualified leads through nurturing company/customer relationships and helping to keep your company top of mind.
What Is an Email Bot?
An email bot is an automated marketing tool that can respond quickly to incoming email leads. Using Artificial Intelligence and contextual analysis, an email bot delivers customized email responses, allowing you to automatically respond with the right message and engage potential leads.
Think of it as a conversational AI assistant that can contact and follow up on your email leads, answer basic questions, and ask follow-up questions. An email bot can be pre-programmed with specific and detailed responses. For example, if someone emails you to ask about product pricing, your email bot could respond with a rate sheet, or ask for additional information that’s needed to provide a quote. You can also test various messages to optimize their effectiveness.
Email bots can help qualify leads and schedule appointments for sales reps, all while saving you both time and money.
Email bots have two additional significant advantages:
- You can engage with 100% of your leads with customized messages
- You can automate follow-ups and lead nurturing
It does all of this in a natural, conversational way that’s often difficult to distinguish from a human response
What Is a Chatbot?
A Chatbot plays a similar role. A Chatbot is a computer program that simulates real-time conversions back and forth with a human counterpart. Whether customers use a live chat function on your website or engage you in text, a Chatbot can respond with customized messages.
Some Chatbots are rule-based, which means they follow a scripted conversation. The bot asks questions and displays buttons with the answers options the lead can choose from. Once an answer is choses, the bot responds with an appropriate pre-produced response. Using NLP (Natural Language Processing), they can handle basic inquiries and refer more complex queries to sales teams.
Chatbots save time for sales reps as well. By gathering basic information and directing conversations to the right person the first time, they can provide customers a more seamless experience and cut down the wait time.
Smart Chatbots (i.e. AI chatbots) act as virtual assistants. Leads can enter free text into the chat instead of choosing from pre-approved responses. AI chatbots are data-driven and predictive. Using contextual analysis, NLP, AI, and Machine Learning (ML), they can incorporate user profiles, past purchases or customer behavior, and provide recommendations. Over time, these Chatbots get smarter as they receive more data input. By monitoring data, they can infer intent and carry on conversations at higher levels.
How Email Bots and Chatbots Complement Each Other
Chatbots and email bots complement each other by creating greater efficiencies in handling leads and inquiries. They work 24/7 and never call in sick. This allows businesses to engage with every contact and engage more deeply with conversational marketing.
While email bots can answer emails and nurture leads, chatbots provide instant answers and help drive potential customers through the buying journey.
Fast Response
Speed can be a significant competitive advantage. Both chatbots and email bots provide rapid response. In a recent study, findings showed just 7% of companies responded within the first five minutes after receiving an email or form submission. Unfortunately, over 50% didn’t respond after five business days!
When you respond quickly, your opportunity to engage increases dramatically. Companies that respond in the first hour after contact were almost 7 times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers.ations with decision-makers.
More Marketing Touches
Using this level of marketing automation guarantees 100% follow-up, immediate follow-up, and persistent follow-up. Here are just a few of the things you can automate:
- Nurture leads over time with 1:1 conversational emails
- Intelligently follow up abandoned chats
- Follow up meeting no-shows to reschedule
- Verify chat leads and chat-booked meetings
- Provide reminder notices for meetings
If you’re in sales, you know that follow-up is key to pursuing leads. Yet, sales reps regularly miss opportunities because they are too busy or stop after a few attempts. Eighty percent of sales require at least 5 follow-ups to close, but 92% of reps give up after just four attempts
Automation handles the follow-up for you. It creates consistency and keeps your company top of mind as you nurture leads. Chatbots and email bots provide an immediacy with human-like interactions that can drive leads through the sales funnel more quickly.
How to Optimize Your Marketing with AI
By using email bots and chatbots in concert, you can automate marketing campaigns with scheduling to deliver the right messages to the right customers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.
Analysis and reporting, including A/B testing tools for email and chat, can help you optimize your responses and campaigns. This allows your marketing teams to focus on their priorities.
As you use Artificially Intelligent bots equipped with Machine Learning, they will become smarter over time. With training, your AI becomes more efficient as it gathers and analyzes more data input,
Combining the Two with AI
Are you looking for a way to improve the quality of your leads and grow your revenue? Using email bots and chatbots can be a powerful solution.
Exceed is the only automated service to offer both AI email and chatbots together. This can be pivotal in providing consistent responses across channels, moving from one to the other along with prospects.
Using an email bot alongside a chat bot allows you to:
- Ensure immediate follows-up on chat leads
- Complete meeting scheduling by email for abandoned chats
- Verify a chat lead’s information (people often “mess around” with chatbots)
- Further qualify chat leads before booking a time on the sales rep’s calendar
By scaling your lead engagement, you will get more qualified leads and sales opportunities. AI-powered virtual assistants, working together with your sales team, can make sure every lead is engaged over email and chat. It can also qualify leads and book meetings on its own.
While nothing can replace a great sales development rep, SDR automation definitely makes the rep more productive. It can complement your team’s efforts and make sure potential leads don’t fall through the cracks. It can also supplement their efforts by using automation to continue to nurture leads your team develops.
