The way we communicate between family and friends, as well as customers and business, has evolved from handwritten letters, Morse-code, Phones, Faxes, Emails, SMS, to Instant Messaging. The waiting time before receiving a reply has decreased dramatically, and the buyer’s patience has decreased in the process. They want it, and they want it now!
The power lies in having helpful, personal, and empathetic conversations with your customers, but at a scalable rate and when it best suits your customer. To take advantage of timing and scalability is where technology comes in. Technology has evolved to such an extent that customers want to connect with your business on their terms, whether it is via phone, email, or chat. Therefore, you have to adapt your business’ communication channels to include Conversational Marketing and use it effectively in sales, marketing, and customer communications to minimize pain points.
So you might be wondering what Conversational Marketing is…
It is a term coined by Drift, and it has been around for the past couple of years. It is more than just selling to your customers on a personal level. It is having one-on-one real-time conversations with customers to instantly fill the gaps to move buyers through the marketing and sales funnels. Conversational Marketing can create authentic personal experiences and build customer relationships. It provides you with an opportunity to learn more about your audience and to tailor your offering to their needs. The technological tools behind this powerful marketing strategy are live chat, chatbots, and social messenger apps.
Let’s quickly do a recap of these technologies?
Live chat is when your consumer directly connects with a member of your team from your website. It is real-time assistance between business hours.
A chatbot is a software program that imitates natural language and conversations through instant messaging with the added benefit of being available 24/7 and is powered through AI. Chatbots can answer common questions quickly, based on available data, and direct a user instantly to available information or a team member. Chatbots offer your business scalability and gather data that can be leveraged to reveal more about the consumer and predict their future needs.
Both these Conversational Marketing tools can be implemented in social messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Social messaging apps provide businesses the opportunity to communicate with consumers on channels where they are already spending a lot of their time. These social apps are mobile-friendly and are a convenient way for consumers to engage with your business.
What are the cornerstones of Conversational Marketing?
Engaging with users in real-time. Conversations happen in real-time and is a two-way street. By instantaneously responding to user’s queries, you resolve issues immediately and can move prospects quicker through the sales funnel.
Understand the context of Conversations. Context is everything in every conversation. You can demonstrate that you understand your customers better by gathering and storing information, thus creating a personal and emphatic connection. Bots can ask the qualifying questions that you use in your form fields, which can speed up the process for your rep to talk to the right lead at the right time.
Personalize the messaging. You can gain valuable insight into your customers and what their wants and needs are by mining chat logs for information. You can tailor your messaging accordingly as you need to talk to your customers in their own words. You need to focus on the user’s experience, and by personalizing this experience, you will foster a better one-on-one relationship.
The goal of conversational marketing is to connect with your customers authentically. The User’s Experience needs to be first, and scalability needs to come second; otherwise, what is the point if you lose sight of creating genuine relationships. Keep in mind that traffic consists of individual people with their unique problems, and tailoring your communication to solve these problems can foster better relationships. Authentic relationships are built on trust and enjoyable experiences. The challenge is to find your business conversational voice in the age of technology.