Maximizing Results from Your Sales Chatbot with Gifting

By Tara Benyousky on January 30, 2023

71% of today’s B2B buyers expect personalized experiences (McKinsey).

Not prefer, not appreciate, expect. If you’re not personalizing their experience? Well, people are just going to stop engaging or worse: unsubscribe.

Many organizations struggle with personalization for two reasons: a fundamental misunderstanding of what personal experiences mean today or how to implement it at scale.

According to Epsilon insights, 80% of buyers are more likely to buy from your brand if you can deliver those sorts of experiences. While some may just throw an AI chatbot on their website and call it a day, it’s far more effective to craft the experience yourself. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by using all the pieces of your revtech stack across all your channels.

“When we think of personalization,” Said Caitlin Seele, Head of Digital Marketing at Drift, “It really starts at that very first interaction you’re having with a buyer and should carry out through all of your interactions with them in their customer journey.”

Read on to learn how strategically combining sales chatbots with gifting can make interacting with your company feel like a holistic, tailor-made experience for your buyer.

How to Combine Sales Chatbots with Gifting 

1. Start with a personalized message

While this is an obvious first step, it’s still a common stumbling block for companies. Everything starts with your “who” and if you are trying to talk to everyone you’re going to engage with no one. “So many brands are putting out very generic welcome greeting messages today,” Caitlin notes, “If you’re able to deliver that level of personalization for website visitors, that’s what’s going to stand out.”

Don’t just let your chatbot launch with a simple, “Hi there 👋!” and go about your day. You likely have some sort of information at your disposal that you can use. Whether you’re using your buyer’s company, first name, or where they came from (Google, Facebook, etc), it goes a long way to make it feel like you’re building a rapport. 

“We tend to see three times more email captures from those personalized conversations,” said Caitlin, “It’s because you’re putting your best foot forward and catching someone’s attention.”

2. Tailor your messaging

Once you’ve got their attention, it’s time to get to know the person on the other end better, to help drive action. That means approaching your chatbot experience in the same way you would in real life: asking questions to understand who they are, what they’re interested in, and how you can help. As you’re writing, you should really understand exactly where these potential customers are in your sales process.

Ask questions in your chatbot workflow like, “Are you interested in learning more about this topic?” or “Are you also facing this challenge like our other customer in your industry?” Use every interaction in your chatbot’s flow to be acknowledging that you understand who they are and asking more questions to really learn more about them and their current challenges.

From there, it’s a matter of recommending the best solution for their challenges, whether that’s answering their question in flow, directing them to a resource on your site, or if the timing seems right, connecting them right with your sales team.

3. Customize the landing page

Personalization isn’t just about the words on the page but should include a thoughtful design of the page itself. Whenever you use chatbots you should be customizing the page they land on for certain accounts or prospects and pair them with a targeted bot that speaks to that particular groups needs.

To start, identify the highest value pages on your website. This might include those that get the most inbound traffic from your target audience, or perhaps product pages or assets that you’re hoping to push out through a campaign.

“Take a crawl, walk, run type of approach here,” suggests Caitlin. “Crawl is customizing the headline of your landing page to match your audience with the right messaging. Walk could be then going a step further. It’s not only customizing the headline, but also that hero image and some of the terminology on key headers throughout the page.” Once you’ve tackled those you can move onto more advanced tactics like having a landing page built with dynamic content or branded imagery incorporated throughout.

How much should you customize? Caitlin suggests that you let the data be your guide in terms of when you hit that point of diminishing returns. At a certain point, additional personalization will require more effort but not actually deliver significantly higher conversion rates. Using Google Analytics and other tools to understand when that is.

4. Connect experiences across channels

Once you’ve got some level of customization on your landing page, you can use that messaging across channels. For instance, the messaging you develop for a conversational marketing flow right at the beginning on your landing page can then be used in ads, social media, emails, and so on.

The goal here is to deliver an omni-channel experience. You should work with your marketing operations team to ensure that your integrations are set up properly and passing data between your systems. That way, you can bridge the experience across various channels and ensure there’s one continuous conversation with potential customers.

Here are different ways to get you started by integrating gifting to maximize your chatbot results: 

Account Based Marketing Gift Boxes

1. Create custom gift box for select set of accounts.

2. Include a notecard with a dedicated landing page (and even a QR code for easy redemption).

3. Greet visitors with custom chatbot greetings.

Capture Podcast Listeners

1. Set up a custom URL and embed a Drift bot with a keyword in your chatbot platform that unlocks a gift
2. Give the podcast host that URL and keyword to share on air
3. When they arrive on the URL and pop the keyword into the bot, automate a gift to send out of your marketing automation platform.

Incentivize Content Downloads

1. Host a cornerstone content piece on your chatbot solution like a Drift Conversational Landing Page
2. Incentivize downloads by offering a gift
3. Follow-up with an email with both the asset and gift link together

Convert Virtual Event Attendees

1. Advertise gifts at your virtual event booth
2. Inside your virtual booth, utilize one of your image allotments or text areas to advertise a URL and secret word visitors can punch in to claim some swag
3. Once attendees navigate to your website, you can capture their contact information and reward them with a swag gift in real time (no more waiting for a lead list!)

Closing Thoughts

Exceptional personalization comes down to treating your buyers and customers like people—not just another record in your CRM. This means helping them understand your brand faster, how your product can help them, and get them to the best solution for their problem. 

The result is more efficient marketing lead generation, better qualified leads for your sales reps and, in the long run, more closed deals.

Interested in getting more campaign ideas? Check out a full conversation between Alyce and Drift in our Momentum Makers presentation right here.