Conversational marketing or conversation marketing is a new personalized approach of marketing that provides an authentic experience aimed towards engaging in a dialogue with the customer on a one-to-one basis to have a better understanding of their needs and to grab a specific position in the customer’s mind so that they can distinguish the company’s brand.
Live chat is one of the more popular tools of conversational marketing, but it is not limited to just live chats. Social media, phone calls, emails, etc. can also be leveraged for the same.
Key Elements of Conversational Marketing
1. When the Customer Wants and How it Wants
To have a valuable conversation, it should occur when the customer prefers, this means that a conversation can take place any time, during the early morning or the night. The conversation should also start and finish according to the convenience of the customer, whether it takes a couple of minutes or hours.
2. Easily Scalable
No marketing strategy can succeed without the ability to scale. Small and medium businesses in the past would have faced issues as they cannot hire a lot of people for the same, this is where bots help out, providing 24/7 service and have a series of answers ready for the common questions. If the conversation becomes complex then these bots can forward the conversations to a human.
3. Provide Answers Vs. Creating Confusions
In these fast-moving times, customers have become very time-sensitive and want their questions to be answered without any efforts. This can be solved by collecting and storing customer data to avoid having the customer repeat their information over and over again as they are forwarded from one agent to another, one department to another.
4. I Want it Now
For the customer to have a valuable experience the number of steps that the customer has to take needs to be minimized. People will always prefer writing a text on a messenger rather than writing an email about a query that they have.
Benefits of Conversational Marketing
1. Understand Your Customer Personally
Why are people visiting your website? This question can be hard to answer. Chatbots help gather information about the website visitor which couldn’t be gathered before by engaging with them in a conversation and will help generate insight about the website visitor.
This information then can be leveraged to have a better understanding of your customer and fill the gaps if there are any. They further make the conversation natural and fun thus helping in the extraction of more information from the visitor.
2. Customer Relationship Management
Based on the login information of a visitor on your webpage, chatbots can help recognize the customer and would not require the same questions to be asked from the customer over and over again. Since chatbots provide personalized information of the customers, it makes follow up much easier as compared to traditional approaches like email marketing.
3. Shorten Sales Cycle
With the assistance of AI-based bots, products or services can be directly brought to the customer rather than them scouring through the site looking for the product or the service, this can be done by the personalized marketing approach of the bot. This will also help in the reduction of wastage of human effort and the biggest deals can be carried forward and closed by your employees.
4. Convert More Leads
With the shortened sales cycle, more leads can be generated at the same time which increases the overall efficiency of doing business.
Tactics to Approach of Conversational Marketing
1. Replacing Forms with AI Chatbots
Usually, when a visitor lands on the ‘Contact Us page’, they are greeted by a form asking for their basic information. This page can be upgraded by adding a chatbot as this will help generate more relevant information about the visitor.
2. Chatbot Presets
Have a preset of questions, answers, greetings and other responses ready 24/7 as the chatbot will be the first contact with the visitor of the page. Make sure that the conversation is personable and has a human touch so that the visitor feels like he/she is having a conversation with a human.
3. High Performing Pages Relevance
Having a chatbot sending you messages on every page can be annoying at times, to avoid this one should put the chatbot where most of the traffic is being generated from. This can be done by researching which pages have the highest impact on conversions and implement a chatbot on the same.
Conversational Marketing Framework
Conversational Marketing helps move buyers fastest through your marketing and sales funnel. The Conversational Marketing Framework can be broken down into 3 steps:
Step 1: Seize the opportunity
Having a visitor engage with a chatbot rather than sitting there filling out a form can lead to a business having higher conversion rates, and make the visitor have a personal experience with a customer.
Step 2: Understand the needs of the visitor ASAP!
With the help of chatbots, one can engage with the visitors 24/7 rather than having them wait for follow-up emails which can take longer than usual. Having set the basic questions on set on chatbot, similar to the ones you ask in forms/ emails can help them qualify into a lead faster.
Step 3: Endorse your lead with the right step
Having bots book meetings for the leads with the sales team after having an initial conversation with the lead is the right next step. By connecting the sales person’s calendar, bots can book meetings which will shorten the time the lead has to spend in the sales funnel by helping them reach out to the salesperson faster as compared having them fill a form or by contacting them via emails.
Designing your site user’s experience as the priority, generating engaging and easy to understand conversations, adjusting according to the needs of the visitor can help you stay at the top of the game. Conversational Marketing isn’t rocket science, it can help you provide the best service to your customers.
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