How to Build a Lead Generation Chatbot

If you’re in the business of lead generation, whether as an in-house marketer or working at an agency, you know that our professional lives are defined by the constant search for the ultimate lead generation strategy. Is the best way to go a conversational landing page? Should you bet all your chips on WhatsApp chatbots?

There is no right answer to these questions because your lead generation needs depend on your business, budget, and target customers. 

However, it should come as no surprise that we’re big believers in the potential of conversational marketing and chatbots, which is why we’ve prepared this lead generation chatbot guide for you. 

We’ll walk you through the basics of a lead generation chatbot and the competitive advantages it offers, as well as teach you how to build your own chatbot for lead generation using both Landbot’s no-code builder and its AI assistant. 

Let’s jump in!

Advantages of Using a Chatbot for Lead Generation

A lead generation chatbot is a bot designed to identify potential customers, collect their contact information, and spark their interest in the products or services you’re selling. 

Compared to other lead generation strategies, lead generation bots offer a number of advantages.

1. Higher Conversion Rates

The most important types of conversion — especially for B2B websites — are lead form submissions. The information they collect in these forms is what turns casual visitors into prospects, and can ultimately translate into valuable partnerships and sales.

Unfortunately, generating leads or any kind of conversion can be challenging. In fact, the average website conversion rate is just 3.3%. That’s not great news, especially for businesses looking to use their websites as a key part of their marketing campaigns and sales strategies. But just because the average is low doesn’t mean that your site’s conversion rates have to be as well. Replacing standard forms with a lead generation website chatbot can be the perfect solution.

Conversational Design, an agency that helps companies grow with conversational marketing, was able to increase conversion rates of chatbot leads to over 40% with Landbot compared to an average landing page conversion rate of 2.35%. 

And that’s not all. They were also able to reduce their own cost per lead by 200% and generate close to €1.5M in revenue for their customers. 

2. Lower Cost Per Lead

Speaking of lowering CPL, Conversational Design isn’t the only Landbot customer doing so with a lead generation bot. 

Animal Equality, an international organization working with society, governments, and companies to end cruelty to farmed animals, reduced their CPL, too, with a WhatsApp chatbot for lead generation. 

Working with Conversational Design as their marketing agency, Animal Equality resorted to a WhatsApp bot and made it its primary conversational channel that was integrated with other channels for lead capturing, nurturing, and engagement. 

This lead generation bot collects lead information and opts in the users in all the 7 channels for further content outreach.

Among other great results such as reducing drop-offs and increasing donor conversions, Animal Equality saw a blended cost per lead for all the leads acquired through the chatbot of 2.33€, where the lead is accessible on the majority of the seven channels. This is significantly lower when compared to the CPL for building a list for only the email channel, which is 0.30€.

3. Better Experience and Increased Lead Engagement

One of the most challenging parts of turning site visitors into leads is keeping them engaged with your brand long enough to show them why you’re the right choice for their needs.

There are better ways to accomplish this than just filling your lead generation website or landing page with long walls of text. The text can be helpful, sure. However, most people find information-based pages on a brand’s website a little overwhelming — and often a bit off-putting.

Lead generation chatbots can transform this experience. Instead of expecting visitors to read paragraph upon paragraph of text, skimming to find the details that are relevant to them, chatbots deliver the relevant data to the prospects through a simple conversational interchange.

Our customer MeinAuto, Germany’s top online car retailer, noticed that one of their customer segments — those who needed more guidance during the buying process — showed high bounce rates on their website. Before Landbot, their existing user journey led users through the website guided only by the UX. It was a method riddled with unanswered questions, such as whether customers fully understood the information on the homepage or were tech-savvy.

However, after implementing a conversational lead generation bot, MeinAuto was able to much better engage with high-quality leads. The chatbot collects lead information, which is then automatically handed over to the Sales team, who ultimately reach out to the potential customers to help them complete the car purchase process.

As a result, MeinAuto saw a 10% increase in leads generated who interacted with the lead generation chatbot on the homepage. 

Step-by-step Guide to Building a Lead Generation Chatbot

By now you’re probably thinking, “Wow, these are amazing results! How do I get started?”

Worry not! In this section, we’ll show you how to easily build a chatbot for lead generation. You can follow along without having a Landbot account, but it’s best if you create one to be able to try out the builder yourself. 

Once you sign in to the app, click the “Build a chatbot” button.

You’ll see that there are several options to choose from to get started. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the two options — using the no-code builder and the AI assistant. 

With Landbot’s No-Code Builder

Let’s begin with the no-code lead generation chatbot builder. This way, you’ll get to know Landbot’s product better and get a feel of all the possibilities is has to offer. 

1. Create a New Bot in Landbot

Go to your Landbot dashboard and click “Build a Chatbot.” Select the channel on which you want to deploy your bot. For this tutorial, let’s go with “Web” as our channel. 

Next, you will be to pick between the following options:

We’ll explore the AI possibilities later in this tutorial. You could get started with a pre-built lead generation template:

However, to show off some of our product’s features, we will pick the “Start from scratch” option. 

2. Configure a Welcome Message

The first thing you need to do is customize a welcome message that greets your leads and gets the conversation going. To do so, drag an arrow from the starting point block and pick the “Buttons” option:

By clicking on the block, you can modify the message as you please, add more text bubbles, and play around with visual elements such as images, GIFs, and videos. You can also provide one or more buttons as answer options. 

Here, I’ve typed up a simple greeting with a GIF and provided one possible answer for the lead to reply to the bot. 

3. Ask for the User Name

When it comes to lead generation, once the greeting is out of the way, the first step should always be asking for the lead’s name. This will allow you to personalize the conversation from the very beginning.

To set up the next exchange after the welcome block, drag a green arrow from the last button answer and select the type of block you want to set up next. Hover over “Questions”, then select “Ask for a name.”

The predefined question text is “What’s your name?”, but you can modify it as necessary, for example, if you want to convey a more formal or informal tone or reflect other traits of your brand’s personality. 

As you can see, the user answer is already set to save under the @name variable. Thanks to this variable, you are not only able to collect the data but also call your visitors by their name throughout the conversation. 

4. Request Email & Phone Number

After you got the lead’s name, proceed to ask for their email address and phone number by using the designated blocks. 

First, drag an arrow from the last block, hover over the “Questions” section again, and select “Ask for an email.” 

As in the case of the name block, there’s a preset question and the variable is already configured. Also, the email block automatically checks that the user's answer has the correct email format and includes “@” sign and “.com” or variations.

Next, drag an arrow from the “Email” block, go to “Questions” and pick “Ask for a phone.” Here, you can edit the question to include a short message acknowledging you got the lead’s email address. The answers will be saved under the @phone variable, and you can select the option to show the country code selector in your bot. 

5. Ask Qualifying Questions

The best part about a lead generation bot is that, unlike a form, it can ask a lot of questions without annoying your prospects.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to obtain qualifying information is by using the “Buttons” block, which, instead of asking the lead to type in their answer, provides options in the form of buttons.

This is a great way to understand your leads’ needs, communicate your service offering and how it can help them, and speed up the information submission process.

You can add as many question “Buttons” blocks as you need to make sure you gather all the relevant information from your leads. 

Additionally, you can save each answer under a @variable for every question so that you can later reach out to leads according to what problem they’re trying to solve or which solution they’re looking for. 

6. Upload Data to Spreadsheet/CRM

Once you have collected all the information, you’ll want to export your lead data to a spreadsheet and/or your CRM. 

From the last question block, drag an arrow, go to “Integrations”, and pick an option:

For the purpose of this tutorial, we are going to walk you through how to send lead data to a Google Spreadsheet. More advanced users can also use a “Webhook” block to connect their lead generation chatbot to other 3rd party apps. You can learn more about how to do that in this video:

Now, back to our Google Sheets integration. 

After you’ve selected that block, you’ll first need to log into your Google account. Then, you’ll need to select the spreadsheet (that you’ve previously created) and the specific sheet where the lead information will be sent to. Finally, select the type of action you want to perform:

• Insert a new row;
• Update a row;
• Get data from the sheet. 

In the case of a lead generation chatbot, you’ll need the “Insert a new row” option to add fresh data to the spreadsheet.

Next, all there is left is to pair the leads’ input variables with the columns under which you want to store them. 

Now, each time a user passes through the conversational flow, the information will automatically updated in the spreadsheet.

7. Set Up Conditions & Human Takeover

The cherry on top — chatbots are perfect for lead generation because they enable you to catch hot leads in real-time.

As you ask your leads the qualifying questions, you can very easily set up conditions using the “Conditions” block and thus separate high-value leads from the rest.

In our lead generation chatbot example, let’s assume the piping hot leads are the ones who select “I want to decrease my CPL” as the reason they’re interested in Landbot. To set up a condition here, add a “Logic” block and pick “Conditions.” Then fill in the information: 

Once you have done that, set up the “Human takeover” block to transfer those leads immediately to one of your Sales representatives. 

But wait! Don’t forget about all your other leads. Set up a farewell message for them once they finish chatting with your bot. Select the “Goodbye message” option from the “Messages” block and edit the text. You can also toggle the options needed if you want the conversation to restart or if you want to redirect leads to a specific URL. 

Finally, let’s see our lead generation chatbot in action!

With Landbot’s AI Assistant

If you remember, I mentioned we’d be building a lead generation chatbot with both Landbot’s no-code builder and its AI Assistant. 

It’s easy!

Inside the builder, the first step is to select the AI Assistant you want to build, in this case, Lead Gen.

Then, pick between “Web” and “WhatsApp” as your channel. 

You’ll see that the “builder” looks very different from the one we’ve used before. That’s because, using the AI Assistant, we’re not building the chatbot from scratch and don’t need to piece the different blocks together. Rather, the Assistant is building it for us. 

In the main section, you’ll notice there are predefined questions. You can edit these according to your lead generation chatbot needs. Or, you can get started using a pre-built example:

For a similar example as the no-code tutorial, I’m going to pick “Capture contact details.” The Smart Questions will automatically include name, email address, phone number, and company name. In this case, I’ll remove the company name question and add one about why the leads are interested in Landbot. 

You can also customize your welcome message, and define more of your lead generation chatbot’s settings in the section below the Smart Questions. 

You can provide more information, add a prompt with extra instructions on how your bot should act, among other things. 

All the while, on the right-hand side, you can test your AI chatbot as you go. 

Are You Ready To Grow with a Lead Generation Chatbot?

Now that you’re all set with your lead generation chatbot, what are the next steps?

Even though you can test your bot before launching it, we recommend you first share it internally with your team and other colleagues to ensure everything is working as intended. It’s always a good idea to have an extra set of eyes to polish things up and make sure the best is the best version it can be. 

Then, you’re good to go! Since we’ve built a lead generation bot for web, you can embed it on your website — on the home and/or other relevant pages, like your Solutions page — but that’s not all. Utilize your chatbot to the max and embed it on a landing page, link it to a social media campaign, you name it. Wherever you see it fit, make the most of your chatbot to drive traffic, strike conversations and generate more leads. 

Employing any chatbot lead generation strategy, even better if it's part of a larger AI lead management scheme, can give your conversation rate the necessary boost. Essentially, all you need to do is turn a chatbot into a member of your sales team, and help site visitors get the information they need in a comfortable and entertaining manner.

Therefore, if you’re not yet using chatbots as part of your lead generation strategies, now is the time to get started. Plus, you already have the tutorial, so, what are you waiting for?