Free Lead Generation Chatbot Template: Capture Emails

The Basic Lead Generation template is the shortest useful lead capture conversation you can put on a website. It is eight nodes long. It greets the visitor, makes one confidence-building statement about the business, asks whether they are interested, and -- if they say yes -- collects a name, an email address, and one answer about which service they came for. Then it closes politely. That is the whole bot, and the brevity is the point.

Most lead capture pages fail in the same way: they present a form with six fields to a visitor who has decided nothing yet. This template inverts the order. The visitor is asked to express interest with a single tap before they are asked for anything personal. Only after that small commitment does the bot ask for a name, and only after the name does it ask for an email. Each question arrives on its own, in a conversation the visitor is already in, rather than as one wall of empty boxes.

It suits a small agency, a freelancer, a local services business, a consultancy, or any team that currently runs a "Get in touch" form and wants something friendlier without a build project. It is also the right starting point if you are new to Conferbot: it is short enough to read end to end in the builder in a couple of minutes, so you can understand every node before you extend it. The shipped copy is written for a fictional marketing agency called Forest and Co., which you will replace with your own wording.

Be clear about what it does not do. It does not qualify, score, branch, book a meeting, or answer questions. There is exactly one path through the flow. If you need budget and timeline questions and a routing decision, the B2B lead qualification template is the heavier option. If you want to start minimal and grow, start here -- the customisation section below explains which nodes to add and in what order. Everything is edited in Conferbot's no-code builder, and the template is available on the free plan.

Eight nodes, seven connections, one path. Here is every step exactly as the published template ships it.

1. Welcome message

A welcome node opens with "Hi there, welcome to Forest and Co." This is the first thing a visitor sees when the widget opens, and it is the single most important line to rewrite, because it is the only place the bot names your business.

2. Interest confirmation

A choice node follows with the prompt "We are the best marketing agency in town" and one button: "I am interested!" There is no second option and no rejection path. The single button is a deliberate design: it is a low-cost micro-commitment that costs the visitor one tap and converts a passive reader into a participant before any personal detail is requested. Anyone who is not interested simply closes the widget, which is the same outcome as abandoning a form, minus the wasted keystrokes.

3. Name

Tapping the button leads to an ask-name node: "Lovely, may I have your name?" The answer is stored in the variable called name, and the node is configured with a greeting response, "Nice meeting you, {name}", which the bot echoes back immediately. That echo matters more than it looks: it proves to the visitor that the bot heard them, which is the moment most people decide whether to give an email address.

4. Email

Next is an ask-email node: "What is the best email address to reach you at?" This is a typed input with built-in validation. If the visitor types something that is not a valid address, the bot replies "Please enter a valid email address" and asks again rather than accepting a broken value. The answer is stored in the variable email. This validation is the practical advantage over a plain text question -- you do not collect typos you can never follow up on.

5. Service interest

A select-option node then asks "What services are you interested in?" with three options: "Marketing", "Website Development", and "Graphics Design". The choice is stored in a variable called interested_service. All three options continue to the same next node -- the answer is recorded for your team to read, not used to branch the conversation. This is the one piece of routing information the template captures, and it is usually the field you will want to rename and re-option first.

6, 7 and 8. The close

The flow ends with three short message nodes in sequence: "Alrighty", then "We will get back to you soon", then "Have a good one!" Splitting the sign-off across three bubbles rather than one paragraph is what makes the ending read like a person typing rather than a receipt printing. There is no handover node in this template, so the conversation ends there -- nobody is paged, and the follow-up promise is a promise your team has to keep manually or through an integration you add.

That is the complete graph. Three variables come out of it: name, email, and interested_service.

Everything else you might want -- a Google Sheet of leads, an email alert, a live agent handover, a calendar booking -- is available in Conferbot but is not wired into this template out of the box. The customisation section tells you which node to add for each.

Three things you get regardless of the flow, because they are platform features rather than template features: every conversation lands in the unified inbox where your team can read the full transcript, live-chat handover is available on every plan including the free tier, and the same bot can run on any of the supported channels without being rebuilt.

This is a short flow, so setup is genuinely short. Budget fifteen to twenty minutes for the first deployment.

Step 1: Open the template

From the lead generation template library, open Basic Lead Generation. It loads into the drag-and-drop builder as a working flow with all eight nodes already connected. You are editing a bot, not building one.

Step 2: Rewrite the four text nodes

Click the welcome node and replace "Hi there, welcome to Forest and Co." with your own greeting. Click the choice node and replace "We are the best marketing agency in town" with a claim you can actually stand behind -- a specific one converts better than a superlative. Rewrite the button label if "I am interested!" does not match your tone. Then rewrite the three closing messages, particularly "We will get back to you soon", which should state a real response window rather than a vague one.

Step 3: Fix the options list

Open the select-option node and replace Marketing, Website Development and Graphics Design with your own service lines. Keep the list to somewhere between three and five options. Long option lists defeat the purpose of buttons -- if you have twelve services, group them into four categories here and ask a follow-up question later. Rename the variable from interested_service to something your team will recognise in the inbox.

Step 4: Decide where the answers go

By default, the name, email and service answers are stored with the conversation and visible in the unified inbox. If you want them somewhere else, add an integration node after the select-option node and before the closing messages: a Google Sheets node appends each lead as a row, a Gmail node emails the details to your sales address, and a webhook node posts them to your own endpoint or to HubSpot or Zoho CRM through the integrations hub. Webhooks and API access require the Starter plan or above.

Step 5: Connect a channel and test

Publish the bot and connect it to a channel -- for most users of this template that is the website widget, embedded with a snippet in the site template. Run the conversation yourself first. Deliberately type a malformed email to confirm the validation message appears, and check that the lead shows up where you expect it. Then watch the first dozen real conversations in analytics to see where, if anywhere, people drop.

Eight nodes is a starting point, not a ceiling. The useful thing about extending this particular template is that each addition is one node and you can add them one at a time, measuring the drop-off after each. Here is the order most operators find works.

Add a phone number -- but only if you will call

An ask-phone-number-node after the email node gives you a second contact route with the same format validation the email node applies. Add it only if someone genuinely picks up the phone. Every extra required field costs completions, and an unused phone number is a pure loss.

Add a free-text "what do you need" question

An ask-custom-question-node placed after the service selection, with a prompt like "Briefly, what are you trying to achieve?", turns a bare contact record into a lead your team can prepare for. This is usually the single highest-value addition, because it is the one field a salesperson actually reads before replying.

Add a branch on the service answer

Right now all three service options go to the same place. Insert a condition node after the select-option node and you can send each service line down its own path: different follow-up copy, different closing promise, different destination. This is also how you route a "Not sure" option to a general enquiry path instead of forcing a choice.

Add a human handover for hot leads

A human-handover-node replaces or follows the closing messages and pushes the conversation into the live inbox with a priority and tags you configure. Put it behind a condition so only the enquiries worth interrupting someone for trigger it -- for example, only the service line with the highest deal value, and only during business hours. Handover and the shared inbox are available on every plan; read more on the live chat page.

Add a booking step

If the natural next step is a call rather than an email reply, a calendar node after the email capture lets the visitor pick a slot inside the conversation, while their interest is at its highest. See calendar booking for how the availability is configured.

Add a second interest option

The single "I am interested!" button has no alternative. Adding a second option -- "Just browsing" -- that leads to a short helpful message rather than the capture sequence gives you a cleaner read on how many visitors open the widget without intent, and it stops those visitors bouncing off a question they did not want.

One warning on all of the above: add nodes one at a time and check the completion rate after each. A capture flow that asks for eight things converts far worse than one that asks for three, and the extra fields are worth nothing if the conversation never reaches the end.

The same flow runs unchanged on any channel Conferbot supports, and every channel is included on every plan with no gating. Which one you pick changes the character of the leads more than the conversation.

The website widget is the default home for this template. It is designed for the visitor who has just read a services page and is deciding whether to make contact, and it replaces the contact form that sits at the bottom of that page. Put it on the pages where intent is highest rather than on every page.

On WhatsApp the flow behaves differently in a useful way: the phone number is already known, the conversation persists, and a reply from your team days later lands in a thread the person will actually see. If your market runs on WhatsApp, this is the strongest channel for a capture bot, and you can consider dropping the email question entirely.

On Instagram and Facebook Messenger the template works as a response to ad traffic and story replies, where a form would be a dead end. Telegram suits communities and technical audiences. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, LINE and the mobile SDK are all available too, though for an inbound capture bot they are more often used for internal request intake than for public lead generation. The omnichannel overview covers how one bot serves several channels at once.

In 2026 the practical advice is to start on one channel, get the copy right, and only then duplicate. Running the same untuned flow in five places multiplies your problems rather than your leads.