5 Proven Customer Experience Strategies To Skyrocket Lead Generation

Increasing lead generation is the reverse side of a good customer experience coin. The better the customer experience strategy you build, the more leads are in your funnel.  

Satisfied customers is a silent lead generation engine. In addition to a purchase, they spread the word about your business and bring you new leads.

But how does it work? What customer service strategy can be used by marketers to collect more leads? Here are some of them: 

• pre-chat surveys,
• chatbot automation,
• omni-channel communication.

Intrigued? Let’s take a look at each of these points in detail.

Provide instant communication

Everyone loves it when businesses value their time. The less time leads spend waiting for customer support agents to reply, the better conversions you’ll have. Adding a live chat to your website produces more than a 40% increase in overall website conversion rates. It can significantly grow your email list, considering only 2% of website visitors usually become leads.

Nevertheless, businesses still use live chat like Drift or Intercom as a customer experience and support tool and ignore its marketing potential. This is your chance to beat competitors. Here are two tactics on how to turn this customer support tool into a lead generation machine.

1. Engage visitors to chat with a welcome message

There are classic customer services like knowledge base and support via email or phone where the initiators of an action are clients. But a part of an audience prefers business professionals to be the first to offer a dialog. 70% of customers choose companies that send proactive customer service notifications. 

Here is an example of how it works: when visitors to your pricing page return to double-check the features of the plan, they see a small pop-up message at the bottom right of the screen.

By clicking such a message, customers trigger a live chat conversation with an agent, who can consult them on the pricing plan choice or help schedule a call with a sales agent. 

2. Capture lead with pre-chat surveys 

Another way to collect leads with a live chat is pre-chat qualification – 1-2 questions before the conversation starts. It can be the client’s name, email and/or phone, and the topic of their request. 

The best part of using pre-chat forms for marketing is that most chat tools send this data to a customer profile in your CRM. At the end of a conversation, you’ll have contacts of prospective customers and data about their preferences. This is a holy grail for further lead nurturing campaign personalization. 

Automate communication with chatbots

A lead-generation chatbot engages your site visitors in a conversation to resolve their issues, offer valuable content, help them choose a product, and gather essential information. People love it for its 24/7 availability, fast replies, and high personalization. Marketers – for the opportunity to personalize messages based on clients’ behavior, preferences, and context. 

55% of marketers implement chatbots to improve lead generation. And for a reason because, on average, this tool can increase sales by 67%.

Here is an example of how it works.

When visitors try to leave your website, a small message pops up at the right corner of a landing page, encouraging them to chat. 

In a short conversation, the chatbot asks them a few qualification questions and offers a relevant lead magnet – “SPM 101 Book” – in exchange for an email from a prospective customer. 

The lead magnet chatbot scenario is one of the most popular parts of successful customer experience strategies. Here are more ideas for you:

• Offer a discount. To achieve the best chatbot interactions, eCommerce, EdTech, and SaaS marketers launch this scenario on holidays like Black Friday or Christmas. It works the same as previously: a chatbot asks for potential customers’ contact data, name, etc., and sends a follow-up message with a code on their email/phone.

• Route clients to the suitable support agents. This is a conversational form of a pre-chat survey we mentioned at the beginning of this post. For example, a chatbot asks your clients to choose the topic of the query, type their contact data to a marketing, sales, or customer support team.
• Schedule a demo call or an expert consultation, book a hotel, beauty salon visit, or doctor appointment, or make a restaurant reservation. Usually, marketers launch such an insurance AI chatbot on the primary or pricing page. It welcomes your visitors, collects their email, role, company, and budget, and sends them a Calendly link to choose a perfect time for a meeting.

Sounds great, isn’t it? So let’s see how to scale this approach to customer journey.

Communicate with leads where they are

One of the keys to a successful marketing campaign is choosing the right channel. But here is the challenge: one client can prefer texting on messengers, the second on a landing page chat, and the third on Instagram. 

In addition to a better customer experience, knowledge of communication channels your customers prefer gives you a chance to scale the best of your lead generation hypotheses. 

For example, you defined that a discount chatbot brings you the best performance. You also know that WhatsApp is one of the most popular channels people contact for your support. So why not use this option and send a message or a chatbot like that?

To ensure the best service, offering the opportunity to communicate with live human employees is essential.

Build a knowledge base for passive lead generation

The knowledge base is an excellent tool for helping customer service agents resolve users’ queries faster. It saves them time and hassle. Also, it is perfect for people who don’t like interacting with human agents. As for marketing, the variety of knowledge base content like FAQs, videos, and podcasts helps a website’s ranking through improved SEO. 

It’s an absolute win-win!

But how about lead generation? 

The knowledge base articles remove customer objections to a purchase. For example, in the how-to article about the product feature, users can find answers to their questions and proceed to registration by a link at the end of a post.

We found Fitbit’s knowledge base a great example of the successful combination of lead generation and a customer experience strategy. 

• First, because of the “Let’s talk” banner at the footer of knowledge base articles. It is a direct way to collect hot leads in a chat. 
• Second, because of the opportunity to talk to other users on a forum. It is a perfect place to discuss how to use the products amongst themselves, albeit in the presence of your moderator. As a result – there is positive experience and a higher motivation to convert into a customer. 

Personalize interactions with customers based on their behavior

Let’s consider the eCommerce customer experience strategy example. For instance, I spent 20 minutes choosing presents for a family just yesterday. Eventually, I had so many items in a cart that it took me another 10 minutes to clean.

At some point, I started hesitating about the purchase and tried to leave the website. But at the last moment, such a message stopped me: 

It is one of the best lead-generation strategies for engaging first-time visitors: 

• The CTA perfectly reflects customers’ desire to save the time spent shopping.
• The launch time – popup doesn’t interrupt the shopping process and appears when the system detects an exit intent. 

Such an approach is not a problem when you know what pages your customers visit, how they found you on the web, their preferences, pain points, etc. 

80% of users prefer to purchase from a company that provides a personalized experience. 

Here are a few lead generation strategies your marketing and sales team can use for different buyer personas:

• Offer first-time visitors a discount for creating an account at your service/store. 
• Invite repeated visitors to get early access to a new product/feature.
• Engage email subscribers with items that complement their previous purchases. 

Here are ideas to personalize your customer experience strategy based on the website page customer visits:

• Launch a pop-up with a discount on a specific item category. 
• At the checkout page, recommend products based on the items in the cart. 
• On the product page, launch a popup message offering to book an expert consultation on the main pain point the product solves. 

Launching automated messages for leads from YouTube, partner blogs, and paid ad links is also a good idea. 

Time to build your customer experience strategy

Delivering excellent customer experiences is critical to snagging new leads. When customers rave about your service, they’re likelier to promote your brand to their friends, family, and everyone on the web. 

That loyalty and buzz? 

They’re your lead-gen secret weapons. Drop the ball, though, and those leads might just dry up. Savvy businesses leverage data to tweak and refine the client vibe, keeping customer satisfaction scores up and linking them straight to lead gen stats. Nailing that customer experience can seriously up your business game.