Chatbots – The Vanguard Angel of SaaS Startups

Apr 20,2019 by Shashvat Vats

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SaaS – Software as a service market is on an exponential growing spree.

Stats tell us that the global SaaS market is going to touch the $ 117 Billion by the end of the year 2022.

Sounds perfect if you are a SaaS business owner, right?

The growing interest of the business world in the SaaS market is a clear indication of how services and their delivery is going to rule the future market.

With zealous climb, the upsurge of the SaaS market also resuscitated notions like marketing automation among the businesses.

With automation comes chatbots.

And if you are one of SaaS zealots who also want to set up a successful business and looking for some push, here is a golden tip – start using Chatbots now.

If you don’t know about chatbots, here is a quick glimpse of how it all started:

The Dawn of Chatbots – touched by Artificial Intelligence

Simply put, a chatbot is a creation of computer program or AI (as we know it) that has the competency to engage users via text messages or audio conversations.

Chatbot, for the very first time, was ruminated by Alan Turing, a British scientist, in his jotted paper, ‘Computer Machinery and Intelligence’ in the year 1950.
Then in 1966, Joseph-Weizenbaum, an American scientist, developed ELIZA, in 1966, which laid the groundwork for chatbots structuring.
In the succeeding years, scientists keep on working more advanced chatbots.
Finally, in 1995, L.I.C.E was created by Richard Wallace, for which it won the Loebner Prize in 2000, 2001, and 2004.
In 2001, Smartchild, a bot to offer prompt access to weather, news, stock, movies, and transit information, was released by the now discarded AIM dais. This was considered as an Usher of Siri and S Voice.
Today, Google has Google Now, Amazon has Alexa, Facebook has Portal, IBM has Watson, and Apple has Siri.

How Chatbots foster your SaaS Business?

There are certain ways using which you can actually optimize your SaaS business’s online efficiency and reach out to your customers in an engaging manner.

Let’s take these ways one by one:

Delineating your patrons

Call a spade a spade – yes, Chatbots can really help a SaaS business owner to outline the target audience remarkably.

If you are planning to open up a SaaS startup, remember there are two typical ways using which you can edge out your target audience:

You can either use a wide-spread targeting method and let people themselves express if they want your solutions or not.
You can use confined targeting, which is dependent on data and postulations and size up the outcome.

Chatbots can exist on multiple channels for your SaaS startup – website, social media, messenger, emails, etc.

Despite where the chatbot is placed, you can always use this artificial intelligence backed tool to get a better comprehension of your target users.

How?

Chatbots ask the most befitting questions to your audience. Based on the response, chatbots have the proficiency to fetch critical information. You can utilize this useful data to clearly outline your focused customer-base and develop your customer personifications.

Using this method, you can strategize your action plan in strict accordance with the preference and taste of your audience.

As a startup owner, you should know that heaping information in form of data from multiple origins is quite necessary to make tactical accords and make your reach in the market more efficient.

So, ensure to design a soothing and frictionless script of meaningful questions and then utilize it as a knowledge-base to sketch your audience clearly.

Impeccable capacitation

One of the most important aspects of a startup is to generate warm and closable leads for your business.

Believe it or not, chatbots can help your SaaS startup to streamline your lead generation process quite effectively.

Needless to say, the lead generation process is quite tedious and requires an immense investment of time, money, and efforts.

Automation is the brand new way of generating leads to start your startup. This approach is going to save your money, time, efforts, and is also going to offer you relevant leads.

You can always put up qualification questions in front of your audience to find whether the particular user is eligible to become your lead or not.

An example of a qualifying question is

“What is the major objective of your business? To lessen the customer service cost, to elevate the customer engagement or to boost your sales?”

As per your business objective, you can formulate limitless questions that could offer you clearance with respect to the quality of leads.

As a personal recommendation, I would suggest making short questions that keep the user interested and engaged with your chatbot.

Cementing your turf

SaaS businesses are all about how you offer value to your customers through your offerings.

However, you need to build a community first for which you need to constantly incorporate value. Pick any of the renowned SaaS startups, each one of them had built a strong community.

You can also start by creating a turf for your chatbot. Most of the SaaS entrepreneurs are utilizing community for their chatbots to get highly engaged subscribers. A great example of such an approach is Viral Loops.

Bottom line – you can infuse value to your customer-base via your chatbot by enticing a long list of subscribers that could be converted into loyal customers.

Filter your paid traffic

SaaS business owners expect the closure of the sales cycle in a matter of days – sometimes even in hours.

For this, a lot of startup owners look towards Paid targeting.

A lot of business experts and entrepreneurs of the SaaS sector has complained that their Facebook click-to-messenger Ads are not generating expected results.

I agree. It is so because you are implementing the paid targeting strategy in the wrong manner.

For a normal business, the key to success is by developing a prosperous relationship with your potential customers first. After you do so, then only you can try to sell your offering.

But most of the SaaS startup owners do the mistake of selling before offering any value through Facebook click-to-messenger Ads.

So, the correct way is to use your chatbot to promote unique and crisp content. Also, you can utilize your chatbot to educate your new leads too.

This ensures that your Paid Ad campaigns offer you expected return – that sometimes is measured in value too.

Final Statement

The aforementioned tips are not new at all. If you would explore the Google, you may find these tricks disseminated in different articles.

However, it is unfortunate that despite the presence of so much knowledge, many SaaS startup owners still practice their chatbot in a totally wrong fashion.

If you think that chatbots are just a quick way to inform your target audience about the upcoming offers and latest information, you haven’t yet witnessed the limitless potential of this AI-backed super tool.

Follow these simple tips and see how fluently and productively chatbots can really push your SaaS startup towards success.

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