How your MarTech stack can benefit by integrating a smart AI Chatbot solution

Buying journey has changed because buyers are more tech-savvy, more empowered, and expect personal experiences at every touchpoint. It is increasingly challenging to reach decision-makers at the right time and engage them across multiple decision-making units in today's world.

Today, marketing & sales practice is leveraging the digital ecosystem starting from identifying the right consumer to consumer retention by using technologies like behavior-based platforms, Data analytics, CRM, Automation, and AI as consumers are continuously evolving, and their consumption patterns are highly dynamic. Businesses are now leveraging social media, IoT, AI, artificial intelligence AI, and analytics to target and engage customers and help brands accelerate sales growth by using data-rich customer insights and intent-to-buy signals.

Organizations are leveraging the Next-gen technologies to create deeper connections with consumers. They offer conversational engagement through personalized offerings driving salespeople to have account-based strategies rather than adopting mass-selling opportunities to get a holistic view of the customer journey.

Understanding MarTech Stack 

A marketing technology stack is a grouping of technologies used to conduct and improve a brand’s marketing activities. Often, the focus of marketing technologies, aka "martech," is to make complex processes more manageable, measure the impact of marketing activities, and drive more efficient spending. While martech might still be a new term to some, marketing technology is not. 

Components of a MarTech Stack

When assembling a marketing technology stack, it’s essential to know which technologies are foundational and should be put in place first. Both B2C and B2B marketers should consider these technologies necessary as they will use different channels and techniques to acquire customers and will have varying technology needs as a result:

1) Content management system (CMS) 

CMS is the technology that powers a website, blog, or other relevant web properties where businesses want to engage their customers.

2) Advertising technology

Advertising is a crucial customer acquisition technique for brands. Most brands often use a combination of SEM, display ads, retargeting, and ad tracking or attribution software.

3) Email 

Email is a crucial customer communications channel that all brands need in their toolkit. Sometimes, email is a capability built into marketing automation or an inbound marketing platform.

4) Insights and Analysis

Brands should have access to their data to measure digital marketing activity. Most businesses will have website analytics and their business analytics tracked in either homegrown or third-party tools. A data warehouse can pull together data from various sources and make it easier to access. It can also deliver performance insights through content intelligence.

5) Experiential marketing

Experiential marketing, also known as event marketing, is an essential aspect of marketing for many companies. With the growing popularity of virtual events, conferences and webinars, it's crucial to have the right experiential marketing tools to manage these events.

6) Experience optimization

Experience Optimizations include A/B testing and personalization software or programs that allow brands to take action on their analytics to make their marketing campaigns more efficient. 

7) Social media

This includes technologies to monitor social activity and make social engagement easier, which can help maximize the impact of this marketing channel. Social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also a vital part of the ads landscape, and many have paid advertising options available.

8) Digital asset management (DAM)   

Like a content management system, it stores content but typically focuses on keeping track of and authoring static assets like images, documents, and videos.

9) Customer relationship management (CRM)

When CRM is used with a direct salesforce, marketing attribution can be tracked. CRMs track all customer relationships and can provide insights into how marketing campaigns influence sales pipelines and customer growth.

10) Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is often an essential strategy for driving organic traffic to the website by ranking higher in search engines such as Google and often pairs well with content marketing strategy.

It’s also important to know which skill sets and team members businesses need to ensure that the marketing team benefits from the technologies. 

Here are a few categories to consider when thinking about how marketing technology will complement the business:

• Customer acquisition - website optimization, online marketing, event marketing, partner marketing

• Brand & communications - public relations, broadcast advertising, social media, sponsorships

• Product marketing - content marketing, product marketing, analyst relations

• Marketing operations - campaign performance, data analysis, and insight into marketing operations play a crucial role that will help enable the rest of the marketing team to make intelligent decisions with the marketing data.

Benefits of MarTech in Driving Sales 

Marketing teams worldwide have long relied on these tools every day to consistently deliver relevant content to their audience. Martech also helps to: 

1) Do more, faster

Use automated tools to save time by streamlining repetitive tasks such as pulling data, converting file formats, and finding assets.

2) Enhance internal communication

Provide a way to communicate openly about project status and team goals to improve tracking.

3) Create smarter content

Create more intelligent content by using insights and data to understand performance, optimize experiences, and deliver targeted content.

4) Build better relationships

Strengthen customer and buyer relationships by knowing the right thing to say with easy access to past conversations, interactions, subscription information, and more.

5) Be stronger together

The value of each tool is amplified when they all come together to reduce friction in workflows, allowing brands to work faster and wiser.

Building Marketing Technology Stack

Building a sustainable martech stack requires a strong understanding of the current and future technology landscape and where business needs fit into it.

Understanding tech gaps within the organization will also allow it to recognize opportunities for new tools as the need arises. Brands mapping their martech needs is vital in bringing clarity to the process. With six recognized categories in the martech landscape, it’s essential to review the tools and companies that make up each to understand how they could benefit the brand.

Virtual Sales Agents - Chatbots with AI to drive conversion from website

Everyone knows selling online isn't easy. Brands have to attract visitors and keep users happy throughout the purchase process. Adding to all of that is this year's pandemic. But it's not all doom and gloom. Despite these difficulties, a strategy in line with customer needs and the right technology can be a brand’s best ally.

A Harvard Business Review article says that companies using AI increased leads by 50%, reduced costs by 40% to 60%, and decreased customer call time by 60% to 70%. 

Let's explain the main benefits of this technology and its main applications in sales strategy.

Driving quality traffic to the websites won’t help brands if they haven't figured out ways to leverage them and achieve the desired conversion rates. If visitors are not converted into qualified leads, marketing investment returns will always be lower.

It is where Virtual AI sales agents can prove a great tool — brands can use them to devise a solid engagement strategy and drive the conversion. Therefore, brands should use AI-powered bots to automate the sales process and successfully engage and qualify website visitors. 

It is how chatbots for sales can ensure every dollar spent on marketing fetches better returns and certainly generates more revenues for businesses.

10 Sales Chatbot Features that Help Drive Conversions 

Companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence to implement new strategies. Specifically, a study conducted by Forrester revealed that 46% of the companies implementing this technology today use it in their sales and marketing departments, and 40% in customer service.

Applied to chatbots, conversational AI lets brands automate customer communication points while still delivering a satisfying and efficient experience. This technology allows for natural conversations, understanding of regionalisms, interpretation of grammatical errors, and even usage of emojis, gifs, and memes. There are other advantages, like 24/7 availability, immediacy, and omnichannel service, to help a prospect throughout the entire purchase process, thus making them a partner at every step of the sales process.

Great customer conversations are essential to accelerating leads and growing conversions for any business. Companies are now delivering great experiences to customers via timely conversations and engaging them with the perfect message, boosting the sales pipeline thanks to AI chatbot marketing features.  

To drive leads and increase conversions, businesses can utilize sales chatbot features in the following ways -

1. Pre-qualify Leads 24×7   

Before talking to customers, brands have to get their attention. One way to do this is with chatbot advertisements. These are small buttons or images that stand out on websites that, when clicked, automatically open a chat window with a predetermined message. 

This way, brands can bring users to the bot with a relevant message.

Chatbots can be an excellent tool for optimizing the customer experience and boosting lead generation. 

Since bots are conversational and always available, businesses can modify them based on the different stages of the customer journey and bolster the lead qualification effort. 

However, businesses first need to build the chatbot for lead generation flow with relevant questions to ensure better customer engagement. It is also essential to consider the human touch in creating the bot flow to avoid sounding robotic, attract more visitors and generate more leads. 

Best Practices to Use when using Chatbota to Qualify Leads 

• Consider the customer journey – Target the lead qualification bots based on the customer journey stage or the visitors' specific page to get better results.
• Have step-by-step questions – Ensure there is a multi-step form system with specific questions for each stage to serve customers relevantly without confusing them. 
• Prioritize the questions – Design the bot flow so that customers are asked the most critical questions on a priority basis, which boosts engagement.  
• Place easy-to-click buttons – More leads can be qualified when the visitors are provided with buttons against questions, making the tasks easier for them.

2. Automate Appointment Bookings

Reservations via chatbot are a favorite with customers because booking appointments based on availability is fun and interactive. They also like navigating through a tree of options, answering questions, and getting recommendations for bookings or reservations.   

Businesses can automate appointment scheduling with chatbots and let visitors self-schedule. Additionally, this helps gather data to generate leads for the sales team. Chatbots can be customized or programmed to establish the time and duration of the appointment and allocate particular slots to consumers.

Further, integrating the chatbots with Google Calendar will help brands display the available slots to customers based on their time zone and prevent overbooking. The calendar integration will always ensure that both business and the lead receive a timely email invite so that the dates are remembered.    

3. Assist Customers with Pricing Queries 

Through conversations, businesses can guide customers to find exactly what they're looking for. When a user asks a question, the chatbot will direct them to the section where they can find the products related to what they asked. This prevents them from leaving the site before finding what they were looking for, thus improving retention. 

Giving customers the pricing information at the right time can help ensure better leads and conversions. Chatbots can assist in automating the pricing process and save agents the tedious task of displaying it to visitors. More importantly, a Conversational AI-enabled chatbot can always handle customer queries efficiently and guide them with the correct product information through the sales funnel.

Tips for using chatbots to assist customers with pricing queries  

• Bot on the pricing page – Adding a bot on the pricing page can be incredibly helpful in answering routine questions and helping customers pick the right product quickly.
• Display product pricing – Brands can visually display product pricing and give customers a chance to compare prices for different products.  
• Send product quotations to customers - Bots can automatically generate quotations or replace purchase order forms, boosting sales.

4. Ensure Online Order From Social Media Pages

Customers now expect online ordering systems to align with their social media usage, driving conversational eCommerce growth. Many businesses have started to add chatbots to social media pages enabling customers to place orders directly from official handles. 

Twitter and Facebook Messenger users can now use a chatbot without placing an order over the phone. 

Reasons to use chatbots for online ordering.

• Businesses can tap into the next generation of millennial customers by using chatbots for online orders on messaging platforms.
• The purchasing process becomes seamless for new-age customers as they don’t have to download an app to buy products from a brand.

5. Offer Product Recommendations 

Besides capturing leads and chatting with them, the chatbot can also be a great sales agent. Based on the correct content, it'll be able to make personalized suggestions and be with the user through the entire process to help make the sale. It can even help sell more products through Up-Selling and Cross-selling techniques. They can suggest add-on products, creating a need the customer hadn't initially thought of.



Most customers look for help to smoothly proceed through the final stage of the sales funnel. With quick answers to their queries and guidance, businesses can meet their preferences quickly. It is where customer service chatbots can prove extremely helpful as they can engage with customers via conversations, understand their needs better, and then recommend products accordingly.

These chatbots can efficiently guide users and eliminate the need to have a sales agent, and at the same time, buyers won’t need to waste their time searching and knowing about the products by themselves.

6. Give Personalized Welcome Messages 

Customers love to be greeted by sales agents because it makes them feel special. A gentle welcome at the start can always prove handy when engaging visitors on the website. Businesses can greet online customers with personalized messages and make an instant connection with them. A proactive chatbot can help enterprises engage customers of any type, whether new or returning ones and cater to their needs via conversations. Brands must focus on the chatbot design flow and prepare multiple messages tailored for a positive customer experience to be effective with personalized welcome messages.

7. Track the Status of Sales Order  

After buying a product, the customers expect prompt delivery. If a brand uses an old-fashioned order tracking system, the customer must manually find the shipping number to obtain the details. Integrating Conversational AI chatbots into the shipping system can help customers track their order status. Thus, buyers can be spared the inconvenience of calling the support agent or filling out the tracking order on a third-party website. 

8. Reduce Cart Abandonment Rate  

Cart abandonment is a big issue retailer and the eCommerce industry face worldwide. There could be many reasons why customers might leave the purchase mid-way, a complex checkout process, poor website navigation, or high shipping costs. AI chatbots can help reduce cart abandonment by filling the gaps between what customers want and want they should get. Businesses can adeptly use bots to trigger messages at various sales funnel stages and reduce cart abandonment rates.  

How Chatbots Reduce Cart Abandonment

• Answer product FAQs – Chatbots can answer the FAQs before and during the purchase either in a clicked-on or automatically triggered manner and clarify customers’ doubts on time. 

• Ensure Guided Selling – Brands can program and set up AI-powered chatbots to understand customer preferences quickly, answer their product queries, and automatically get triggered based on certain predefined conditions.

• Provide Last-Minute Personalized Offers – Businesses can use AI-based chatbots to build-up triggers like last-minute offers, discounts, something free with the products, etc., to reduce the cart abandonment rate.

9. Offer Multilingual Sales Support 

The relationship with the customer doesn't end when with the completion of the sale. The important thing is that brands continue to offer 24/7 omnichannel service and personalization to answer questions about shipping status, changes, or returns. The customer can share the tracking number with the bot and immediately receive updates on the quality of their shipment. Bots can also send proactive messages on WhatsApp to notify the customer when their package will arrive. Most online shoppers prefer to make purchases in their language, and they would not go ahead if this option were not available. 

Therefore, if a business is selling products across the globe, it will have customers with different choices for conversations. In such scenarios, AI chatbots can prove handy as they can be programmed to offer multi-lingual support and increase conversions. When brands can help with sales-related queries in multiple languages, they can quickly become more accessible and expand to new markets.  

Benefits of offering multilingual sales support 

• Improve customer experience – Using AI bots can help businesses engage customers better with faster and easier conversation in the native language and improve their experience with the brand. 
• Expand customer base – A multilingual bot can help brands expand their reach, showcase the products to a new set of customers, and quickly move them down the sales funnel. 



10. Build lasting relationships with prospects

To develop a long-term relationship and nurture it over time, brands can collect customer contact information through forms that can be transferred to the CRM software to add it to the newsletter, nurture or mailing lists.