Learning how to grow an email list with chatbots is easy. Chatbots can be an effective tool for collecting email addresses from different sources, including website visitors, social media followers, and other online platforms. 

In fact, Statista reports that 26% of B2B marketers that used chatbots in their marketing campaigns had a surge in lead generation volume of 5-30%!

But for you to benefit from chatbots the same way, you need to know how to use them the right way, of course. This article will show you how to grow an email list with chatbots to maximize your email marketing efforts. 

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing entails sending emails to a targeted audience to promote products, services, or content. Email marketing encompasses various formats, such as email newsletters, promotional emails, and other personalized messages. This digital marketing strategy can help you effectively engage with your ideal customers, cultivate brand loyalty, and boost sales.

Plus, it’s a cost-effective solution. According to Backlinko, brands in the US see a return of $40 for every dollar spent. You can also easily track the impact of your emails and measure their effectiveness. 

Overall, these email marketing benefits demonstrate the power and value of email as a marketing tool.  

Why Chatbots Work for Email List Building

A robust email list enables you to connect directly with your desired audience, foster meaningful connections, and boost conversions through personalized communication. For that reason, you must build it strategically and consistently.

Chatbots are effective for email list building for several reasons:

1. Automated Interaction: Chatbots leverage automation to interact with website visitors or social media users in real-time. This automation enhances the user experience, ensuring a seamless process for potential email subscribers to join the email list without any interruptions.
2. Personalized Conversations: Chatbots can gather additional data, such as user preferences, interests, and demographics. You can use this data to segment email lists and create email marketing campaigns tailored to individual recipients, which is particularly beneficial for creators who have subscription platforms.
3. 24/7 Availability: Even when a human isn't available to take a customer's message, a chatbot may collect email addresses and add them to a database. This way, chances to expand the email list are never overlooked, no matter the time of day.
4. Instant Gratification: Chatbots can provide immediate replies and rewards like downloadable material, discount codes, or special deals in return for email list subscriptions. This instant gratification creates engagement, encouraging users to act promptly.
5. Lead Qualification: You may configure chatbots to ask qualifying questions. This will help you confirm that subscribers are genuinely interested in your products or content. The result is a more focused and healthy email list with higher-quality leads.

In general, chatbots make it easy to engage your consumers, collect data, and build a good email list.

How to Create Your Chatbot for Email List Building

Before you can grow an email list with chatbots, you need to build your chatbot first. That said, here are some tips for you to follow:

1. Choose a Suitable Chatbot and Platform

Not all chatbots are built equal. Based on their complexity, function, and intended use, they may be classified into rule-based chatbots, AI-powered chatbots, voice assistants, and hybrid chatbots, among others.

When it comes to collecting emails, you must select chatbots that prioritize lead generation or customer acquisition. These transactional chatbots are highly effective. They can be rule-based or AI-based:

• Rule-Based Chatbots: These are the simplest chatbots that follow predefined rules or decision trees. They operate based on keywords or specific commands provided by users. Here's a visual representation of how they might work.

You could, for example, set up a rule-based chatbot to ask users for their email addresses after they ask a question. Here is an example.

This way, you can capture leads in a more targeted and efficient manner.

• AI-Powered Chatbots: These chatbots can learn from interactions and improve their responses over time.

Whatever type of chatbot you choose, select a chatbot development platform that lets you personalize conversation flows to meet your unique email collection requirements. 

Also, search for one that facilitates seamless integration with your current tech stack, such as your CRM and email marketing platform (more on this later). That will enable the automatic storage and management of collected email addresses within your current marketing workflows.

2. Leverage Generative AI for Conversational Flows

Did you know 27% of consumers were unsure whether their previous interaction on a brand channel was with a person or chatbot? That’s a great thing. That means there’s some recognition that the lines between humans and chatbots are becoming blurred. After all, the assumption of these consumers is this: chatbots are close to providing that same emotional touch to conversations only real people can give. When people feel this human-like connection, they’ll likely be willing to convert into leads.

However, for chatbots to come close to interacting with potential subscribers like humans, they should leverage a natural conversational flow. 

A chatbot's conversational flow is the sequence of interactions it follows during a conversation with a user. It involves understanding the user's input, processing it, and providing relevant responses based on predefined rules or algorithms.

Now, who designs the chatbot’s conversational flow?

You, of course.

You could do this on your own, but it will take some time for you to come up with multiple conversation sequences that are, well, conversational. That’s where generative AI can help you.

You can use generative AI to ensure your chatbot flow leverages a casual and friendly tone. In your prompt, just specify the language tone you want in your flows. Some generative AI tools also allow you to specify the tone you want them to use in their responses.

Generative AI also has another great benefit: it can produce many conversation sequences based on your goals or services in a short time. In seconds, enterprise generative AI can easily develop inquiry scenarios that will see the chatbot automatically requesting users' email addresses. Unlike humans, it can cover way more scenarios.

You can use generative AI to create initial dialogue snippets or conversation starters. These could be generic or specific to certain scenarios (e.g., greeting messages, handling FAQs, initiating a specific service request.)

Once you have all these flows, incorporate them into your chatbot platform.

3. Test Your Chatbot and Continuously Improve

Testing your chatbots is crucial for ongoing improvement. If your chatbot doesn’t meet consumer expectations, how else will they interact with it enough for you to turn them into subscribers?

To test your chatbot, you’ll need to set the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to evaluate its performance beforehand. Your KPIs can include response accuracy and user satisfaction.

Then, perform functional testing. Try out different queries or messages to see how the chatbot responds. Also, test edge cases like the maximum character limit and empty input to ensure the chatbot handles them smoothly.

Assess the ease of use and intuitiveness of the chatbot's responses. Make sure that you–the user in this case–can effortlessly move between various choices or answers. 

You should also collect users' feedback. Ask users themselves how you can improve the chatbot. Monitor usage patterns and commonly asked questions. Then, incorporate these frequently asked questions into your chatbot’s conversational flow. Update the chatbot's knowledge base with accurate and relevant information. 

4. Connect Your Chatbot to Your Email Marketing Platform

As previously mentioned, integrating your chatbot with your email service provider enables you to automatically add prospects from your chatbot conversations to your email list. It may also allow you to segment your email list based on chatbot interactions, allowing for more personalized and targeted email campaigns. 

As a result, you can also monetize your email list more effectively. After all, a segmented email list ensures you send the right messages to prospects based on their interests, increasing the chances they’ll buy the products or services you’re promoting. With these increased sales, you can boost affiliate commissions and email ad revenues if you’re promoting other brands’ products and services in your emails. You can also increase your own sales revenues by promoting your own products in your emails. 

Landbot, for instance, boasts integrations with several email marketing platforms. All you need to do is create the relevant email platform block on Landbot. Finally, specify the types of user data the chatbot will send to the email marketing tool.

So, once the chatbot collects the specified user data, it will send it directly to these email tools in real-time.

Get in touch with your email marketing or chatbot platform provider if you require guidance in configuring the integration.

How to Grow an Email List with Chatbots

Now that we've covered how to build your chatbot for email list building, here are some tips on how to grow an email list with chatbots:

Set Timely Triggers

Optimizing chatbots for email list creation requires smart triggers that drive subscriptions and provide a good user experience. You may use a wide variety of triggers, including:

• Content-based triggers: These triggers are based on content users engage with, such as blog posts or product pages. For example, you can prompt users to subscribe after they have read a certain number of articles or viewed a particular product page multiple times.

You might invite consumers to sign up for your newsletter to get related content during the chatbot interaction. You may also provide relevant resources such as case studies, whitepapers, or guides in exchange for their contact details.

• Exit-intent triggers: These triggers are initiated when a user is about to leave your website. You can provide a last-minute incentive or exclusive discount to motivate users to maintain communication via email.
• Other behavioral triggers: These triggers are customized to suit other specific userbehaviorsr. For example, you might alert users to new emails that offer items related to their past purchases or chatbot inquiries.

These triggers can be effective if you want to develop a more focused and individualized strategy to get people to join your email list.

Experiment with various trigger combinations to determine which ones provide the best conversion rates. Also, track metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, and user comments to determine the success of your email list building strategy and make adjustments as needed.

Use Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are valuable resources offered to potential subscribers in exchange for their email addresses. Examples include e-books, guides, checklists, templates, case studies, and industry reports.

But before your chatbot can offer these lead magnets, you have to make sure they’re what your potential subscribers are looking for.

So, first, understand your target audience's pain points, interests, and needs. You can check their previous interactions with your chatbot, if any, to determine these. Another option is to check your analytics tools or send them surveys to ask them directly.

When creating the content based on your findings, you can use marketing workflow software to ensure seamless editorial approval and publication processes. 

Create Other Incentives

Your chatbot can also offer other incentives in exchange for email addresses. Special discounts are effective incentives since they help consumers save money and get the products they want.

Early access to upcoming sales, product launches or events can also work. People are often motivated to take action if they feel they'll get insider information.

The sky’s the limit when it comes to the types of other incentives your chatbot can offer in exchange for subscriptions. Just make sure the incentives are valuable in the eyes of the potential subscriber. 

Build Long-Term Customer Relationships

It’s true your chatbot’s goal in this case is to get signups to grow your email list. But that doesn’t mean it can just go ahead and ram the “Can I get your email address” question down a potential subscriber’s throat, get what it needs (if it does get it), and then leave. The chatbot should build long-term customer relationships, not one-and-done ones. 

When you show potential subscribers your chatbot is ultimately there for them for the long haul, they won’t hesitate to take the desired action (in this case, give their contact details if they haven’t done so yet). They’ll even promote your email list to others without you prompting them, further boosting your email list-building efforts. 

Building long-term customer relationships via chatbots requires a thoughtful and consistent approach. The goal is to leverage automation, personalization, and responsiveness at the same time. You also want to provide value.

Use the chatbot to greet customers warmly and personalize the interaction by using their name (if available) or previous interaction history (if applicable). This fosters a friendly tone from the beginning.

Also, integrate your chatbot with customer support functionalities. Ensure your chatbot is equipped to handle common customer inquiries and provide prompt and helpful responses. These might include FAQs, order tracking, or basic product information. If there are complex queries, the chatbot should be able to escalate these to human agents.

Don’t forget to use data from previous interactions or preferences to offer personalized product recommendations or content suggestions. Plus, the chatbot can be used to solicit feedback from customers after interactions or purchases. This will make them feel like their opinion matters to you. Just make the feedback process simple.

Now, with this article, you learned how to grow an email list with a chatbot. But does this mean you’ll only rely on chatbots to grow your email database? Of course not. There are other strategies you can also leverage, of course. 

For instance, you can attend industry events to generate leads. You can create a QR code business card you can distribute to potential subscribers. With this approach, you’ll make it easy for them to submit their email addresses through your opt-in form in the QR code business card. Once a form is submitted, it becomes a contact entry you can easily export from the card to your company CRM.

Another option is to run referral programs. You can formally ask your loyal customers to refer potential subscribers to you. Since they’re already loyal to the brand, chances are, they’ll gladly oblige.  

Conclusion

Chatbots are a powerful tool for growing high-quality email lists. However, you need to follow a plan to ensure optimal email list-building results.

Choose the appropriate type and platform to create a chatbot for email list building. You’ll want to harness the power of generative AI to produce conversational chat flows and scenarios. Then, ongoing testing and refinement will be performed to enhance the chatbot's performance. Also, connect the chatbot to your email marketing platform. 

To grow your email list using chatbots, implement timely triggers, use lead magnets, and provide other incentives. Don’t forget to use your chatbot to foster long-term relationships with customers. That will help boost your chances of email subscriptions. 

Now that you know how to grow an email list with chatbots, go and get those leads!