If I could sum up this article in a line, it’ll be this: By incorporating conversational marketing into your strategy, this customer-centric approach will ultimately set you apart and bring you better customers.
Gone are the days when you had to generate leads through online forms and wait for a long time to hear back from your potential customers. Today, we live in a world where people are looking for quick, accurate answers to their questions.
Salesforce reports that 71% of customers expect companies to have a real-time communication mechanism – and this is where conversational marketing comes in.
In this read, I will walk you through the various aspects, benefits, and examples of conversational marketing.
Let’s get started.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational Marketing:
Conversational marketing is a customer-focused mechanism that is based on interaction with your customers across multiple digital outlets of your business.
The eventual goal is to make your customers’ online or digital experience more personalized through one-on-one conversations and dialogue-driven marketing strategies.
If done the right way, conversational marketing can help businesses ‘speak’ to their potential or existing customers, learn their buying trends, and predict future sales or other important business decisions. More importantly, better customer interactions can build better customer relationships in the long run.
Main Highlights of Conversational Marketing
Here are some key aspects of conversational marketing:
Customer-preferred Time
Conversational marketing is largely based on the ‘talk to your customers when they want to, not when you want to’ model. With those traditional online forms, your website visitors would have to wait for hours or days to hear back from your sales team about an inquiry that shouldn’t have taken a few seconds to answer.
However, conversational marketing creates an environment where your visitors get responses through a meaningful conversation with the help of a smart chatbot such as the Facebook messenger bot, or any other tool that you use to interact with them.
Qualifying Leads within Minutes
According to a study by Harvard Business Review, if a company doesn’t respond to a lead within the first 5 minutes since the first contact was made, the odds of qualifying the lead go down by 400%.
So, what does this mean for marketing and sales teams?
Well – if you aren’t able to qualify leads as quickly as you can, then you may as well say goodbye to that business. This is where conversational marketing assists marketers and sales representatives to convert leads more efficiently and effectively.
Troubleshoot in Real-time
When I say troubleshoot, I don’t necessarily mean resolving customers’ technical queries while they’re on your website.
Keeping the marketing and sales perspective into consideration, troubleshooting covers a lot more than that – relevant content, targeted messages, lead generation, conversion rate, and customer journey being some of the key troubleshooting elements of conversational marketing.
Once you are able to implement an effective conversational marketing strategy, you will start troubleshooting your marketing or sales obstacles simultaneously – a goal that is or should be common for the entire organization.
Taking away the ‘frustration’ of your customers is what you need to focus on as a marketer. Here is a survey result that shows various online customer frustration reasons:
It is clearly evident from these numbers that people still can’t get the answers to basic queries, followed by difficulty in website navigation and so on.
Where Can You Use Conversational Marketing?
Here are some areas where you can apply your conversational marketing strategies:
1. Live Chat
Live chat has been one of the major support tools that companies have opted for in recent years.
A report suggests that the likelihood of a customer making a repeat purchase goes up by 52% if the company has a live chat tool on one of their digital platforms.
Brands that offer live chat can make effective use of conversational marketing, and how it can benefit the organization’s goals in all its entirety.
2. Customer Success and Loyalty Programs
Abandoning your new customers once they have purchased your product is not a smart thing to do. Instead, what you would want is to ensure your product has delivered the purpose to your customer the way it was meant to.
For this, a lot of brands hire designated customer success managers that make sure that your product or service has been fully understood by the customer after their purchase.
In the service sector, such as software development, this helps a lot with product renewals or repeat purchases. In addition to this, you can introduce various customer loyalty programs using the right conversational strategy to build long-term relationships with your customers.
3. Email Marketing
You might have heard or read about email marketing going obsolete or relevant news about this marketing tool, however, when I see the stats, they tell a different story.
According to Statista in 2019, it was estimated that marketers in the US will be spending more than $350million on email advertising by the end of that year.
Email marketing, and more importantly email outreach, was, is, and will always remain a strong marketing tool across the globe. To make it even stronger, marketers can use conversational marketing strategies and