Case Study: Retargeting Bot

Picture this: a new person visits your website, looks around for a bit, and starts to interact with your brand-new fancy chatbot that’s equipped with the most inviting and on-brand copy your marketing team could muster. The visitor progresses through the bot’s sequence, giving all the right answers and displaying promising interest. They agree to meet with a sales rep, the calendar drop hits, and then…nothing. The prospect has fled the scene and you’re left scratching your head wondering what went wrong, and more importantly, how you can get that prospect back and swimming down the funnel toward a closed deal.  

While you may have lost the lead temporarily, you don’t have to just hope and wait for the prospect to visit your website and go through the whole bot process again before having another shot at booking a meeting. Here at ChatFunnels we wanted to know what exactly we could do to win back those prospects who showed initial interest, but then got cold feet. We ran an experiment with one of our partners exploring this very thing and now we’re ready to share what we’ve learned and what we’re planning on doing next.  

The Goal 

We started with the knowledge that if someone came to our partner’s website and interacted with their bot, they probably at least have some amount of interest in the product our partner offers. After fleeing the “book a meeting” scene, a website visitor will often return to the same web page within a few hours, days, or weeks to reconsider. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for these potential customers to pick up where they left off, so we created a special bot that specifically retargets this segment of website visitors. 

The Method 

We started with the bot itself. As you can see in the image below, the bot’s copy reflects the fact that this site visitor was “SO close” to booking a meeting but didn’t set it up. The copy focuses on making the user feel like we care about their individual journey (by recognizing that they’ve visited the site and interacted with the bot before) and reminds users that the partner can add value by increasing “sales by 30%.” This bot will take return users through a short-cut experience because the bot has already previously captured all the pertinent information that qualifies a user for a meeting. So instead of being forced to answer all the qualifying questions again, the user can skip right to booking a meeting. Our hypothesis was that the shorter a user is required to engage with a bot (especially an engagement they’ve already been through once and didn’t complete) the more likely they would be to book that meeting. Remember, the overall goal is to make this process as easy as possible for users to pick up where they left off in order to increase the likelihood that they become a lead.  

The Results  

At the publishing of this article, this bot experiment has been live for around three months. In that time, 13% of the times the bot has fired resulted in conversations and 50% of those conversations resulted in meetings. Compared to this partner’s average conversion rate from conversation to meeting of 15%, that’s a big improvement. Those are meetings that probably wouldn’t have taken place without the aid of the retargeting bot. Those meetings also produced a $20,000 potential opportunity that is still in progress.  

Next Steps 

Even with the relative success the retargeting bot brought to this ChatFunnels’ partner, there’s still always room for improvement. As we look towards Version 2 of this bot, there are a few potential new aspects we’d like to experiment with to see if we can make this bot even more successful. To entice return users to make that final leap to booking a meeting, we might offer a free trial or e-book to incentivize the meeting. We might A/B test the actual copy of the bot to see if one grabs users’ attention more than the other. We could even try to incorporate live chat into this bot so that the return user will receive a more personalized and attentive experience, hopefully leading to an even higher conversion rate. However we choose to improve the success of our partner, it will only help us learn more about the consumer and how to best engage them with conversational marketing.  

Want to learn more about how we can apply our expertise to your situation? Set up a free 10-minute consultation now!