Conversational marketing is a buzzword taking its place in the marketing industry. If you’re wondering how exactly conversational marketing works, how it’s being used to boost online sales, why it’s so important in 2021, and where it fits in with the world of inbound marketing strategy, keep on reading!
By the end of this blog you’ll have a perfectly good understanding of the whole process.
What is conversational marketing?
To put it in the simplest terms, Conversational Marketing is marketing that talks to customers. It’s a process of interacting with website visitors and converting leads via dialogue-driven activities. The whole idea of conversational marketing is based on- listening to your customer and potential customer’s needs. This is a very engaging type of marketing that provides 1:1 real – time conversation between your brand and your customers, so you can build a deeper and more personal connection with them, which can be done through – live chat, chatbots, voice assistants or other forms of conversational AI.
Some of the key elements of conversational marketing are –
1. It is designed around the needs of the customer that involves one-to-one interactions in real-time across multiple channels.
2. It happens in customer-time, meaning- whenever the customer prefers. It also means customers should be able to pick up things right where they left off whenever it is convenient for them to continue, be it a chat with a rep, putting items in the cart or the whole process of buying.
3. The conversation needs to be scalable. The customer doesn’t know if you’re talking with 10 or 1,000 other people — the only thing they care about is the issue they need to be solved, in the fastest possible way. And that’s where chatbots help make 24/7 support possible by providing answers to common questions based on existing data.
4. It should have contexts, which means gathering, storing, and making accessible customer data — from recent orders to visits to pricing pages etc. It’s necessary to save time, make messaging convenient, so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves in every stage of communication.
Importance of Conversational Marketing
If done right, conversational marketing can provide multiple benefits that can give you an advantage over the competition in your market, make your brand a stand-out with a personal, ‘human’ approach to marketing. Here’s why it’s so important:
Some of the key elements of conversational marketing are –
1. Build trust and rapport with your customers: In addition to technology, a human touch is always needed for a positive customer experience. We can not stress enough how important it is to move buyers through your marketing & sales funnels faster and also retain the customers.
2. Understand your customers: Conversations allow you to collect more accurate data about your customer, enabling you to profile the customer, in order to provide a positive and customized customer experience in the future and drive sales and customer loyalty for your brand.
3. Improved lead generation: It is a great way to engage, qualify, and generate more leads through new channels, by providing an interactive way for customers and prospects to engage with your company and convert more visitors into paying customers.
4. Improving customer satisfaction: Having conversations with your visitors / potential customers helps you to learn more about their needs and pain points. Based on their interest, throughout the buyer’s journey, you’ll be able to personalize and optimize your communication, send them relevant, targeted messages, interact and keep in touch with them in a meaningful way.
5. Available 24/7 and can be automated: A fully automated process means you never miss a single lead. Having an automated system that gives comprehensive responses to commonly asked questions can essentially make you money while you sleep.
How to implement it into your business
Here is a simple guideline to successfully implement conversational marketing strategies into your business:
1. Understand: Start by placing yourself in the customer’s shoes. To best understand your customers, their problems / queries, you need to think from a customer’s perspective and communicate in a way that’s delightful and adds value to their time and interest.
2. Engage: Use Chatbots / LiveChat. Chatbots are artificially intelligent software that simulates human-like conversations with users through text messages on chat. Chatbots not only automate your marketing communication but are also budget-friendly. LiveChat is a complete customer service platform that can help you reach more customers in real-time, more personally, regardless of conversation volume—or whether your team is free live or later.
3. Recommend: The chatbots having engaged and gathered all relevant data of your visitor, your sales team has a much better picture of the customer – how they behave and what they expect. But to move them to the last stage of the funnel- purchase – human interaction might be necessary. So at this stage your sales rep might require further personalizing the buyer’s journey and eventually convert your prospects into customers.
4. Keep in touch: Irrespective of the life cycle of a customer, you need to stay in touch with all your customers. As much as it is important to build a good rapport with new leads, it is equally important to retain your old customer. Customer engagement can only be built when you are interested to understand their opinion and take it under consideration. To keep the loop of conversation going, ask for customer feedback about your offerings.
Brilliant examples of companies using conversational marketing
Here are two examples of companies effectively implementing conversational marketing in their digital marketing strategy and creating a customer experience that matches their brand’s message perfectly.
1. Sephora: From time to time Sephora has implemented some exceptional marketing strategies. The company used Kik messenger to learn more about their target market by inviting them to a short quiz about their beauty habits. Once the users answered questions about their age, makeup preferences, and favorite products, the app was then able to deliver relevant content such as how-to videos and product reviews based on the individual’s answers. Sephora also uses their AI-powered ‘Virtual Artist’. Using this Facebook Bot lets the user upload her/his selfie and try on different products in the picture itself. The bot then streamlines the thread so that the prospect can directly buy the products. It’s basically virtual window shopping! The campaign is not just fun and sleek but also extremely compelling. Once the prospect witnesses the beauty of the products, s/he will be easily tempted into hitting the buy button.
2. Domino’s Pizza: One interesting example of conversational marketing tactics was Domino’s AnyWare. It all started with the consumers tweeting an emoji and receiving a Domino’s pizza delivery. It then transformed into something bigger and the company allowed customers to order pizza from, well, literally anywhere. This includes conversational channels like Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and text message — by simply texting the pizza emoji. All they needed to do was set up an “Easy Order” on their Domino’s profile and send the pizza emoji. Conversational marketing is the key to adding human touch to your customers’ experiences; boosting customer loyalty, retention and helping you create a brand that truly gets people talking. It can really help you and your customers throughout the entire online customer journey – from a visitor interested in educating themselves, to a prospect looking for information on your products or an existing customer needing support with a new purchase. Looking ahead, every large or small business needs to make use of these highly efficient strategies and tools to ensure superior customer satisfaction and stay relevant.