Despite the advent of social media, email remains a vital content distribution channel for both B2C and B2B marketers. On average, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. That’s why businesses and organizations continue to rely on emails to nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel to convert.
Email workflow automation is an effective way for businesses to optimize email marketing and sales productivity—also known as email automation or drip campaigns.
Drip campaigns involve pre-written emails that are sent to users based on specific actions or triggers. So, for example, if a prospect researching your service was to download an asset of yours, such as an eBook, your drip campaign might send a thank you email which includes links to further information, and follow up a few days later asking the prospect if they’re interested in booking a demo. Alternatively, if someone subscribes to your newsletter, then your drip campaign might send out a welcome email with links to popular content.
Put simply, drip campaigns are designed to enable you to connect with your users at the right time with relevant and personalized content to help drive conversions.
A recent study carried out among marketers from across the globe found that 57% had been successful in implementing automated email marketing programs. This number looks set to rise, with global data on email marketing automation showing great promise—for example, automated welcome emails sent by e-commerce sites in 2020 had a conversion rate of 51.9%.
So what are we talking about when we say ‘chatbot drip campaigns’?
What is a chatbot drip campaign?
While a drip campaign is a terrific way to engage with and nurture leads, it needs to be complemented by a robust lead generation strategy for it to be truly successful. And that’s where chatbot automations enter the picture.
Chatbots are great for inbound lead generation. Once deployed on a website, they greet visitors, answer their questions or provide them with information they need in real time, and most importantly, interact with visitors to gather leads.
We’ve found Instabot outperforms static lead forms and pop-ups by more than 33%, with some of our customers reporting an increase in lead capture by 30%, and, interestingly, that lead capture efficacy drops when customers use only live chat.
As a digital marketing strategy, it makes sense to combine a chatbot which gathers leads with a drip campaign which draws upon these leads to drive conversions. And that’s exactly what a chatbot drip campaign does.
What are the benefits of a chatbot drip campaign?
There’s a wide range of benefits that come with using chatbots for lead generation, especially for fueling drip campaigns, chief of which are the following.
Build Detailed User Profiles
Through conversations with website visitors and potential customers, chatbots collect valuable information which is used to build out user profiles. This information includes contact details, demographics, preferences, needs or pain points. With Instabot, all conversations are time-stamped, dated, and automatically filed under the user’s profile for easy access and review.
How is this important? Because this information helps you prepare deeply relevant and personalized content for your drip campaign, which can then touch upon key issues that your users and prospects are looking out for.
Auto-Segment Users
Chatbots can easily be trained to auto-create segments of users based on conversations. This allows you to organize users based on demographics, preferences or specific behaviors—such as if they are a new subscriber, have recently placed an order, or are looking to unsubscribe.
This has the obvious impact of improving customer experience, as the chatbot can be trained to use specific messaging for specific segments. Moreover, this can be exported to CRM or email marketing platforms automatically and used to inform personalized segmented emails.
This is a valuable benefit for nurturing leads as segmented email marketing campaigns perform significantly better than their non-segmented counterparts. One study found that on average open rates are higher and bounce rates are lower for segmented email campaigns, with the click-through rate 100.95% greater. It’s obvious customers want to be seen and valued, and this is an easy and effective way to show this.
Auto-qualify Leads
With chatbots, you can set up a series of questions to act as goals or triggers so that leads are automatically qualified and sent to the appropriate sales resource—or, alternatively, if the prospect is not a good lead, pushed to a different action of your choice. So a chatbot will only qualify a lead, or book a meeting, if the user responses meet the rules you create. Auto-qualifying users and prioritizing leads ensures no time, money or resources are wasted following-up on unqualified leads.
The Instabot and ActiveCampaign Integration
As an automation tool, chatbot drip campaigns are remarkably effective. That’s why at Instabot we’ve worked hard to develop our new ActiveCampaign Integration.
With the new integration, you can set up your chatbot so that leads are automatically sent to your ActiveCampaign account, where you can then follow up with them through a relevant email drip campaign. This delivers a highly personalized email journey for users, and builds relationships, nurtures leads, and increases conversions.
We’re already seeing some of our clients take advantage of this integration. Here's their story.
Challenge
Plastica Colombia had a well-optimised website with a high number of visitors, but their conversion rate was low. They wanted to improve their demand generation process to nurture prospects and improve their conversion rate.
Solution
They launched Instabot – deploying different bots for different landing pages. The bots were trained to provide a more tailored and personalised experience for users, and to shorten sales cycles by leading users along a conversational journey towards booking a meeting. And the workflow was streamlined by combining Instabot with ActiveCampaign. Instabot would collect leads and automatically feed them into ActiveCampaign, which would then organise leads by campaign depending on the landing page they came from or bot they engaged with. This information then helped to deliver a highly personalised email drip campaign.
Result
“In a short time we have seen that the conversion goals have increased using Instabot, since it has allowed us in an agile way to optimize the conversation flows and generate a much more personalized conversational marketing aimed at the audiences we want to captivate. Likewise, by being able to integrate it with other platforms such as ActiveCampaign, it helps us streamline workflows in our demand generation team.”
- Carlos Navarro, Mind de Colombia, Senior Consultant Marketing and Sales
This seamless integration is also ideal for agencies. It saves them time, effort, and money with an end-to-end solution that provides clients with robust lead generation and lead nurturing tools.
With Instabot and our ActiveCampaign integration, you combine conversational marketing with marketing automation to get a chatbot drip campaign that generates leads, meaningfully engages with them, and multiplies your conversion rate.
To learn more about Instabot, check out our use cases and case studies, or sign up for a free trial today.