Chatbots for lead generation are becoming more and more popular among digital marketers. When we talk about lead generation, we talk about recognizing customer interest or the process of attracting new customers—an extremely important step in the sales process. These customer relationships should be further improved and strengthened, as they have the potential to result in sales. The process is not as easy as it may seem, however. Stale attempts such as mass emails and generic ads are more likely to put off customers than to attract them. In other words, marketers must stay on top of their game and not give in to lazy attempts at reaching potential customers.

Why Are Chatbots Gaining Popularity in SaaS Marketing?

With consumers becoming more independent and self-directed in their online shopping, it can be more difficult for marketers to engage shoppers and successfully monitor their interest in certain products or services. Behold the novel chatbots! In its simplest form, a chatbot is a computer program that can hold a conversation with a customer through a pre-scripted text or audio. A chatbot can improve the interaction between businesses and potential customers by making it more personal and thus more appealing to the customers. Chatbot has been increasingly used in customer service as it helps the business become more available for customers without spending a huge budget on hiring more employees. This article would explain how chatbot works.

When shopping online, customers often have questions regarding a given product, service, or the business itself. A good chatbot can save a lot of their time and effort by instantly solving many of their issues. At the same time, businesses are able to hold onto these leads for longer, easily identify the stage a customer is at within a sales funnel, and effectively guide them all the way through the sales process.

Unlike some more traditional methods of lead generation, a chatbot can be harnessed to automatically collect and store the information provided by the customer. Over time, this allows businesses to figure out more targeted ways to market to certain customer groups or other novel marketing solutions. Using a chatbot in a messaging app such as Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger provides businesses more information about the leads, resulting in more precise data and better analytics.

As more and more businesses are looking to use chatbots to help them with lead generation, more advanced yet competitively priced chatbots are appearing into the market. Up next, we will look at a number of chatbot providers, from the big names to the intriguing newcomers. Soon you will know how the cheaper alternatives stack up against the competition.

Big Players of the Chatbot Market

Intercom

Intercom is one of the leading companies offering chatbot services, and for a reason. Businesses can choose from a number of packages to best suit their needs and, for 14 days, you can try the service for free. Although their main plans are better suited to larger companies and start from $136 per month, Intercom offers an all-inclusive early stage plan for eligible startups for only $49—a pretty sweet deal. Chatbots can be sold separately for $99 per month if you don’t wish to use the other sales tools.

Intercom is the next great chatbot - get new business and talk to customers. The chatbot helps you build trust with customers and can be integrated with dozens of outside apps. Intercom is worth the money. We made our money back in two months. Jason Patel, Founder of Transizion

Intercom has everything you need without being over-cluttered and complicated. They have done a remarkable job with the layout and grouping together the different apps so it is simple to use on a day to day basis. Blake Pridham, Co-Founder & COO of Adventure Bucket List

However, more companies have been complaining about the increasing cost of Intercom, and their rigid customer support. More startups have been jumping out of Intercom, seeking for new chatbot providers for customer service and lead generation.

Drift

Just like Intercom, Drift is one of the major players in the chatbot business. Drift claims to create massive ROI for its customers and, if one is to believe all of the positive reviews on Twitter, it is not all mere hype! Drift only offers paid plans for chatbots, making it easier for larger companies to hop on this bandwagon.

Top new chatbots that are great alternatives to Intercom

Tidio Chat

We knowTidio Chat because we use it ourselves! The service is smooth, easy to set up and to use, and their website boasts over 900 positive reviews. One of the best things about Tidio Chat is that you can get a chatbot on the free plan. Their additional plans are not bad either: only $15 for three operators.

GetJenny

GetJenny is much more than your regular old chatbot! GetJenny not only provides you with a chatbot to take care of those FAQs for you but also something to improve the efficiency of your live chat team, namely an intuitive SmartLayer that provides agents with suggested answers based on past chat history. Although GetJenny is targeting their product more for customer service rather than lead generation, it will be a very exciting tool for lead generation! ;)

GetJenny - How to manage digital transformation and incorporate AI to customer support? from GetJenny on Vimeo.

Kommunicate

A very clean interface, Kommunicate offers a great bot integration to any business website as well as a messenger application with pre-defined bots, custom bots, and a smooth bot-to-human handoff! With Kommunicate, you can snatch up a free plan with limited features or a growth plan at $10 per month. The company also offers an enterprise level plan with what they call “maximum business value,” pricing available upon request.

Great team working on a cool new product. We're excited to be working with them at HelpDocs to power FAQs. Jake Peters, CEO & Founder of HelpDocs Tweet

Botsify

Botsify is not the cheapest out there at $50 per month at minimum, but they do offer a lot of bang for your buck. While the pricing might scare off some of the smaller companies, it is worth it to mention that Botsify offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to try their premium bot before you buy.

"Easy tool for designing chatbot. I like the pre-built templates that comes with the software. This helps to let users get started quickly with the software. I also like that Botsify provides the ability to save responses from users to a form. Eric Peterson, IT Manager at Bosch USA"

Landbot.io

This chatbot has been recently very popular on ProductHunt. Landbot is a very interesting chatbot provider with their UI design. Landbot is for marketers with limited coding skills with the easy-to-use setup process is one of the pros that people in ProductHunt claim.  Their new release of Bricks makes the work of building a chatbot more fun as it is like playing Lego.

They're the real deal. The product itself is very cool, but just as importantly, the guys behind it are amazing to work with, flexible & transparent. They will work to earn your consideration, just as they have ours. Leo Sussan, Director of Digital at Real Tweet

Facebook chatbots

With over 20B messages exchanged between people and business per month and 1.56B daily active users on Facebook Messenger, Facebook Messenger is no doubt a channel that businesses embrace using it to reach customers and generate leads. There are several reasons why Facebook Messenger is an effective channel for marketers. There is a low barrier to reach your target audience through Facebook Messenger (speaking of no email filtering, right?). Moreover, Headliner Labs reported that people are 3.5 times more likely to open a message on Facebook Messenger than a marketing email. And a Facebook Messenger chatbot is how you use to scale up your Facebook Messenger marketing strategy.

On Facebook Messenger, a right chatbot will help you effectively engage your existing customers (24/7), generate leads and nurture leads through your funnels through personalized content. There are several existing Facebook chatbots in the market right now, and here are two of our favorite chatbots for Facebook Messengers:

Chatfuel

Chatfuel’s full-featured bot is gaining rave reviews on the Facebook group for SaaS growth hackers! This is great news for those of us on a budget, as Chatfuel offers a prime chatbot for much cheaper than Intercom or Drift, starting from $15. Chatfuel prides themselves in their easy-to-use interface that focuses on your success!

Easy platform to create a bot. I was introduced to chat fuel by a client who wanted me to integrate his current facebook page which I was managing with chatfuel and whilst researching on it I got to understand and like it bit by bit. It’s really user friendly and easy to work with even a non tech person can get the hang of it within a few hours.
Tyler Manyinyire, Web Developer at Freddy IT Solutions Tweet

MobileMonkey

Founded by Larry Kim who successfully founded and grew WordSteam from a startup to a unicorn, MobileMonkey has been one of the most popular chatbots for Facebook Messenger in the market right now. MobileMonkey provides a easy-to-use, effective tool for you to build chatbot that helps you automate messages and generate leads.

Built for non-technical users, MobileMonkey is easy to use with its user-friendly interface and other features like ‘ChatBlast’ and ‘Facebook Comment Guard’ etc. Not just product, MobileMonkey provides marketers with their learning resources of templates and guides that have helped a lot of marketers new to the game of Facebook Messenger marketing.

MobileMonkey’s pricing is suitable for startups to enterprises with the free plan and pro plan.  For starters, a free pricing plan is everything you need to build your chatbot for unlimited Facebook pages and unlimited contacts. In order to release MobileMonkey branding, a pro plan with just $49/month ($19/month for the first 8 months) is a no brainer.

Facebook organic has drastically decreased over the years but adding MobileMonkey Facebook Messenger marketing chatbots is the one thing you’ll do this year that will drive the most engagement.It amplifies your Facebook advertising, content reach and customer service. Put these monkeys to work for you ASAP. Neil Patel Tweet