Conversational marketing: What is it and how it can help

Conversational marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to grow your marketing funnel and eventually sales funnel using the power of real-time conversations, namely interactions that shape customers’ perception of and relationship with your bran.

Conversational marketing technologies such as conversational AI, live chat, and interactive interfaces allow marketers to focus on two-way interactions with the consumer, helping them increase engagement and simplify the customer journey 🤝

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A good conversational marketing strategy has two essential elements: 👇

1- Customers determine the conversation logistics. Customers determine through which channel, how, and when they will communicate with you. That’s why most startups hire professionals in customer-facing roles from locations that span over different time zones. A little help from chatbots makes it possible to provide 24/7 support.

2- Making progress is the final goal. Being responsive is the first step, but you have to show progress 🚀. As a customer, imagine getting customer service emails in response to your complaint. Would you be happy just to receive a response, or would you like to have a conversation worthy of your time? When a customer makes a request, even if you’re not able to realize their demand at first, you should let them know what will be theprocess and where exactly they’re standing. It’s important to keep your customer support agents educated on different customer-related issues. Using an educational platform such as StuDocu is a cheap and efficient way to do so.

It’s almost intuitive for business owners to presume that consumers expect a fast and helpful response to their customer service questions, and in fact 90% of consumers state so. What’s often missed is the fact that 82% of consumers rate an immediate response as important when the question is a matter of sales or marketing 🤩. That means a fast and reliable line of communication between you and your prospects will help you convert them easily.

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Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, one of the fastest growing startups in the B2B space, mentions how they got rid of forms and started having real conversations with prospects, and how it contributes to their growth:

‘’Somebody will come in on our website and our sales reps, when a named account comes to the website, they get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey! The VP of Marketing at DropBox is on the website right now.” 💬

👉 We had a real example like this, and I’ll just make up the companies.

The CMO at Starbucks, she comes to the website, and she says, “Oh, I was interested-” and the bot says, “Hey! What brought you to Drift?” And she says, “Well, I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack and so we’re actually not a good fit.”

At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa! Hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.” And she’s like, “Oh, interesting.”

Long story short ❤️, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.’’

• Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift 💬

eBay, the multinational e-commerce giant also benefits largely from their chatbot that works through voice command, allowing consumers to go through the sellers’ catalogs and find the best deals. The giant also sends over the best deals to customers' phones, making it easier than ever to shop online.

In a summarized way, we can say that the main benefits of the conversational marketing are:

• More facility on knowing your consumers needs
• Allows you to give an immediate answer to your client
• Helps you on managing leads and clients
• Part of the customer loyalty process
• A differential from your competitors

Conversational marketing is one of the many marketing automation ideas that improve metrics beyond customer conversion and support🎯. It’s a great way to listen to the Voice of Customer (VoC) and improve their life-time value. The team at Solitaire Bliss, for example, found that improving their response time increased their games played per users and revenue by 10%.

Any seasoned professional knows by heart that conversion is an important metric, but if you fail to keep customers returning to your website, you can’t mention sustainable growth. Conversational support helps you increase customer retention by tailoring your message to the needs and preferences of customers, and drives your business forward. 🚀

Messenger-based sales is a strategy where businesses use messengers as a primary channel of communication with customers throughout the buying process 💬. Messengers allow for a fast, personalized and largely informal communication, which creates an environment where customers feel less hesitant to ask questions and more proactive in finding the right solution for their needs.

Businesses benefit greatly from messenger platforms like WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, in the sense that they bring about an opportunity to connect all marketing material such as, ads, posts, events, stories, in one place.

You can, for instance, use Click-to-Messenger, sponsored ads or create a QR code to lure prospects into Messenger, and offer truly tailored and insightful content they can benefit from. Even if they don’t convert in your first interaction, a continuous conversation will be extremely crucial in their buying process, not to mention its impact on customer lifetime value.

👉 A study by Help Scout’s found that 90% of chat feedback received from customers is rated ‘Great’ whereas only 69% of email feedback is rated the same. This is not a coincidence. Customers expect an immediate response to their queries, because they likely have a busy schedule and barely find the time to make the query in the first place. That’s why live chat is increasingly popular across industries both B2C and B2B.

Offering live chat support basically means having someone within customers’ reach via 24/7 chat. It’s a great way to understand what a customer needs during the onboarding process, and help resolve their problems. Keep in mind, customers don’t want to repeat themselves often, as 72% of customers expect you to know their details—their support history, purchase data or account information 💬. That’s why you have to have a system in place that keeps every interaction recorded and in your agents’ reach.

Add to the list of live chat advantages the fact that it also improves customer support teams’ productivity: most live chat tools allow customer success agents to handle multiple chats at once, a convenience that doesn’t come with email, direct calls, or virtual meetings.

53% of customers are more likely to shop with businesses they can directly message 📩. Although SMS is not a new technology, customers still expect to receive some of the information related to their purchases via SMS, and most businesses do so.

There are different ways to encourage customers to use SMS when interacting with you. One way is gamification 🎮. Say you placed Easter eggs on your website, and announced that you’ll be rewarding coupons to those who find the hidden messages and deliver the answers to your company line or shortcode via SMS – almost all SMS marketing platforms provide this option.

Participants won’t feel explicitly like they’re filling a form, or giving up information they would rather not. They’ll feel like they’re actively participating, and maybe even getting rewarded, who knows?

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All conversational marketing strategies call for some automation, because they all involve intelligence gathering, personalization, and real-time communication. These strategies help you tailor customer service and support to the interests and preferences of individual customers, yet they’re not possible to execute without some level of automation.

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That’s why getting a little help from conversational marketing software is necessary. Let’s take a look at a few to find out which one will best suit your business’s needs, and help you realize your goals.

Kommo is a unified conversational marketing platform for businesses, 🚀 to which they can connect accounts from the popular messenger apps, including:

• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• Skype
• WeChat
• Telegram
• And so on.

Kommo users monitor every conversation dispersed over those apps in one dashboard, making sure no customer query goes unanswered or neglected for too long. They don’t have to enter data, open tickets, or do any type of manual work, the software pulls data from a variety of different sources.

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The tool also comes with an AI chatbot 🤖, using which you can support the agents by handling easier conversations, such as when a customer simply wants to book a demo or call. Kommo even allows you to build a no-code bot without knowing anything about coding. If you need certain information before booking a call, for instance, the no-code bot will ask those questions and collect the answers for you so that you’ll be prepared when getting in touch with the customer.

On top of its messenger app integrations, this tool also integrates with email services and email marketing, VoIP telephony, lead forms, and payment processors, making it possible to manage all conversational marketing from a single platform.

AlphaChat is another conversational marketing software that allows businesses to use Conversational AI on their website, deliver personalized and automated messages, and build workflows without having coding knowledge.

It works in all European languages, Arabic and Russian, making a total of 71 automatic languages available. AlphaChat has a 10-day free trial, so you can experience it before paying for it.

Intercom, one of the most popular conversational marketing tools on the market, integrates a variety of systems and technologies in the marketing stack, like Salesforce, Marketo, Stripe, to provide 100% transparency into a site visitor’s journey on a website, helping businesses have greater control and influence over their journey.

The software allows you to communicate your offers and messages via chat bot, such as informing customers about an upcoming campaign or promotion, or simply offering them a personalized one.

Drift is a conversational marketing/revenue acceleration platform that advocates the abolishment of traditional lead-generation tools like forms, and helps businesses achieve that goal. Drift’s revolutionary approach makes sense to a great extent, considering how capable consumers are in finding useful content and material on a website without leaving contact info. So even businesses that manage to lure in people with high-quality, insightful content often fail to convert them into customers.

Drift integration ecosystem allows you to see the details of a contact as soon as they land on your website, offer them playbooks, ask them questions, and direct them towards the next step. You can, for instance, direct promising prospects immediately to your sales reps, without wasting a lot of time warming them up.

Mobile Monkey is an OmniChat platform that lets businesses connect with customers in real-time, using Web Chat, SMS, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Mobile Monkey users can build chatbots and use them on multiple platforms, allowing them to reuse chat content with their content marketing tools.

The tool also offers an unified inbox that lets you track all inbound and outbound conversations from a single dashboard.

Ushur is a 1-1 communication channel that streamlines customer journeys via conversational AI, giving businesses the opportunity to deliver branded messages to customers. You can use Ushur to support customers throughout the onboarding process, deliver marketing campaigns, upsell and cross-sell.

Ushur offers pre-trained AI with NLP, Computer Vision and Intelligent Document Automation, making it a comprehensive end-to-end Customer Experience Automation platform with a zero-code approach.

If understanding your customers and catering to their needs is a top priority for your business, then conversational marketing is your go-to strategy.

In any phase of their buying journey, customers are looking for answers for their questions and concerns, and businesses who are quicker to start conversations with them are winners 🏅. Direct conversations with your customers is also a cheap way to gain customer intelligence you badly need for your marketing campaigns.

So stop the guesswork and set up your conversational marketing campaigns using the tips above alongside the right conversational marketing tool such as Kommo

Kommo is a pioneering Messenger Based Sales CRM software that helps businesses achieve more sales and create long-lasting relationships with their customers. It is a tool that enables companies to reach better results and increase their profits.