The COVID waves that the world has experienced in the past few years have not only impacted everyone’s health but also the manner in which businesses market their products and service their customers.
Post-COVID, every business now offers the ability for its prospective customers to learn more about its offering via virtual assistants called chatbots and provide instant and round-the-clock support to its existing customers via smart chatbots.
Purpose-built to solve these major challenges, WotNot’s demand generation, and customer support automation solution help companies in automating their current and future customer interactions at scale through a no-code chatbot platform.
SourceForge recently caught up with Hardik Makadia, Co-founder of WotNot, to discuss the role chatbots have to play in demand generation across businesses of all verticals. Hardik Makadia is the co-founder of WotNot, a fast-growing no-code chatbot platform.
Firstly, can you please share a brief overview of WotNot and what inspired its creation?
The idea of WotNot came to us when we were building a custom chatbot for a long-time customer to improve their operational efficiency. While building that solution, we realized the potential for a tool like this could bring to all the small and medium businesses around the world.
We quickly jumped on the opportunity to build an MVP around 2018 and never looked back. It’s been almost 5 years since we have started and WotNot is arguably one of the best no-code chatbot platforms out there. Our easy-to-use no-code bot builder and powerful analytics dashboard coupled with our ability to deliver tailor-made chatbots have been the driving force behind our growth.
Our mission is to provide businesses with the ability to build automated chat assistants with no code to automate interactions at scale.
Why did you focus on branding your product as a “Demand generation” tool?
Every business on the planet wants to grow their business, and every businessman will do anything to see their revenue and business grow year over year. I’d be surprised if you know of a company that does not want this.
We felt that demand generation was one crucial area of a business where companies would be willing and open to trying new things, unlike other areas like support, HR where management is usually budget-oriented towards capital spend.
That coupled with the wave of new businesses starting up (in the form of startups) there is enough demand in the market for demand generation.
How do businesses generate demand? And why do you think it is inefficient?
Ever since the rise of the internet, companies have been relying on form fills as the main source to generate demand. History has shown that it is one of the most inefficient methods of generating leads with an average conversion rate of 1 – 3%.
Not just form fill, even if you look at SEM (Search Engine Marketing), companies usually require at least 10 clicks to get one lead, making the cost to acquire that lead very high. If your product/service has a big invoice value, then you could easily.
Even without chatbots aren’t all companies generating demand? What difference does a chatbot bring?
Yes, you are right. Every website has at least a few thousand people visiting it each month. Now, all these people were looking for something when coming to your website, and are lost opportunities to the business.
The benefit a chatbot brings is that it immediately engages your website visitors into a conversation and tries to uncover more details about their need, timeline to purchase, contact details and a whole lot more. Thereby, helping the business get a higher conversion rate as well as better ROI on ad spend.
How does WotNot help companies generate demand?
Like I stated in my earlier answer, we help businesses that engage with each and every individual visiting the website and uncovering more details about their reason for visit. Not only that, WotNot also provides businesses the opportunity to proactively reach out to prospects via WhatsApp and SMS through a drip marketing sequence.
WhatsApp, commanding an average open rate of ~80% is a no-brainer for marketing teams.
Most of all, the experience that WotNot’s team has garnered in designing and implementing demand generation bots for its customers over the past 4 years with an average conversion rate of ~25-40% is what makes us desirable and different from the competition.
Can you tell us a bit more about WotNot? What are its key features and capabilities?
Sure, WotNot is basically a no-code chatbot platform where one can build chatbots across websites, mobile apps, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SMS.
With our no-code bot builder, it is effortless to design and build conversational workflows. In fact, you can check our G2 reviews, and the majority of our users have repeatedly talked about how easy to use our bot builder is.
Coupled with our powerful analytics dashboard, users can get business-centric insights into how well their bots are performing and optimize them for better results.
If I’m not wrong, you most likely compare with Drift, Intercom, and Ada? What makes WotNot stand apart?
Yes, there are 4 main USPs that make us stand out from the likes of Drift and Ada.
Firstly, our no-code bot builder is unmatched with its easy to use aspect and experience of building bots.
Secondly, our analytics dashboard is built keeping in mind the business metrics that one would want to look out for. You can find data like business value generated, engagement %, cost saved etc.
Thirdly, the done-for-you service that we offer to shorten the time to go live. With our team’s experience in delivering over 3000+ bots, we can understand your requirements and deliver in <2 weeks.
Lastly, our cost-effective pricing. Rather than charging very high prices (annually) and for each seat/user, which penalize businesses when they grow, we kept our pricing very simple and affordable at either $99/month or $499/month.
Oh and one more crucial thing I’d like to point out is our support. We strive to provide resolutions to problems with an SLA of < 4 hours.
From what I hear the # of leads the chatbot generates is quite dependent on the # of visitors coming to the website? What if a business does not have enough traffic?
That’s right. The chatbot can only speak with so many that are coming to your website.
As a startup or new business, we understand that this would be a huge challenge, as website count can not be increased overnight. To solve this problem, we introduced a new feature on our product called “Outbound bots”.
As the name suggests, rather than being limited to your website visitors, outbound bots can proactively reach out to your contacts across SMS and WhatsApp similar to a drip-sequence on email. With open rates of ~50-80%, WhatsApp is one of the fastest growing channels for promotional activities.
In fact, in countries like India, UK, Brazil, where WhatsApp is the standard form of communication, we are seeing a huge interest in such a feature.
How has WotNot helped companies succeed?
There’s probably a handful of customer stories that I could talk about. But to point out a specific case study, we worked with UAE’s largest legal consultant in helping them generate more demand/leads. Before WotNot, they relied on a form to generate leads which was giving them a poor ~100-300 leads per month.
After WotNot stepped in, we’ve improved the ROI of their ad campaigns and generated over 60,000+ leads in 6 months alone, which is mind-boggling in itself. And continue to generate over 2,500+ leads every week.
Similarly, we’ve helped another company in South Africa optimize their support headcount from 8 people to 4 people.
If you’d like to experience a similar ROI for business, feel free to book a demo.
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