The traditional sales and marketing methods are no longer useful in retaining today's internet-savvy customers.
According to studies, around 82% of customers expect an instant response to sales and marketing queries. Companies that respond to customer queries quickly have a higher customer satisfaction rate and increased chances of revenue.
Conversational marketing can be a solution to achieve faster response times.
Customers look for straightforward information exchanges that the companies can address efficiently with conversational marketing. It can fulfill the speed today's customers expect.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational Marketing focuses on a real-time, one-to-one conversation with prospects and customers with the help of chatbots and messages.
It is a feedback-oriented approach to bring back conversations into the sales and marketing process. It is about creating two-way conversations with your prospects and customers using chatbots, social chat apps (Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, etc.), and live chat - anything that makes the conversation trouble-free and fast for your customers to interact with you.
What purpose does it serve?
It helps you deliver the content and answers to questions your audience seeks.
Also, conversational marketing enhances your customer's experience, generates more leads, and helps convert more and more leads into customers.
Besides, conversational marketing is designed to be a relevant, meaningful, one-to-one exchange between you and the prospect, thus creating instant trust with them.
The Right Approach for Conversational Marketing
You can follow a simple few-step approach towards creating your company's conversational marketing strategy.
Let's dive deeper into each one step and understand how to do it right.
1. Selecting Appropriate Channels
First of all, you need to understand your audience and their needs. It will help you determine:
- The kind of channels you need.
- Their purpose and end-objective - Whether to answer common FAQs, provide information about the products, assist in finalizing a purchase, or promote your content.
Be mindful of how you're creating interaction on your high-intent pages, like your pricing, product, service, and landing pages.
You must decide on the kind of conversations you want to engage your audiences with. Base it on:
- The information required by the sales team to qualify a lead.
- Your objective and stage of the customer's journey.
2. Personalize the Conversations
Do not create a conversation that is meant to address a mass audience - Conversations do not work that way. - Personalize it.
Make the conversation more natural. It'll help you to get to the root of the issue fast.
Personalize your conversations based on your customers' behavior and the stage of their customer journey to show them the right content via the right channels at the right time.
Remember, people appreciate when they get relevant and timely information and when they have authentic interactions.
3. Engage Customers with Chatbots
The first step is to avoid using pop-ups and lead-generating forms.
Make a chatbot to initiate a friendly conversation with your website's visitors.
Bots are an excellent means to instantly start conversations with customers on your website instead of waiting for them to decide if they want to fill out a lead-generating form. They can be scripted or powered by AI.
A significant aspect of chatbots is that they are available 24/7. You can also customize the conversation based on different parameters. Make sure you involve a skilled chatbot development company to develop your chatbot application.
4. Qualify
Make sure you turn your sales team's traditional qualifying questions into chatbot scripts.
For example, you can have the chatbot ask a visitor, "Do you have any questions about this product?" If they say "No," then you can send them a friendly but disqualifying wrap-up statement.
On the other hand, leads that qualify should be routed to a sales representative. Or, if it's after work hours, you can serve up a calendar widget to book a time with someone at a later date.
Conversational Marketing Examples that Achieved High Value Goals
Let's learn from a few examples of companies that have implemented conversational marketing.
1. Virtual Artist by Sephora
Sephora, the leading beauty retail brand, partnered with Facebook messenger and introduced a chatbot messaging feature called Virtual Artist.
With it, all a prospect or a customer needs to do is have a Facebook account and upload their selfie. Virtual Artist lets the prospects try on the makeup on their selfie - almost instantly. It then streamlines the process so that the prospect can directly buy the products.
The customers can share their makeover photos with friends and get their feedback. Above all, Visual Artist offers a try-before-you-buy experience without having to physically visit a retail store.
Sephora's booking assistant, another bot, allows the customers to book appointments automatically with a beauty consultant. It uses geolocation tracking to help customers find the nearest store, drive foot traffic, and increase sales.
2. AnyWare by Domino's
Domino's Anyware is a unique example of a personalized conversational marketing strategy.
The company wanted to get more people to order Domino's online, and there was no other way better than allowing people to use those platforms that they were already using. Domino's AnyWare includes ordering with a text, a tweet, Alexa, Facebook messenger, or even slack.
AnyWare has proved to be an innovative system that creates customer engagement and makes ordering pizza available anytime and anyplace.
3. Chatbot by 1-800-Flowers
1-800-Flowers is the flower retailer that has its chatbot. It lets the customer browse and order flowers through Facebook Messenger.
It provides excellent customer services through its conversational marketing.
The uniqueness of this feature is in its simplicity. Once the customer initiates a chat with the chatbot, chooses their preferences, they are directed to the payment page with just a single click. No complex forms. No additional steps.
Conclusion
As AI continues to evolve, there's a lot you can do with chatbots. It would be best if you experimented with various ways to implement conversational marketing.
With conversational marketing, you must lead your prospects to the purchase, engage with them, delight them with an automated assistant, and become a company that customers trust.