What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is a way of using questions in a conversational format to guide leads through your marketing and sales funnels. It focuses on having a dialogue with your customers and creating relationships with them, thus increasing their trust in your brand.
It is a form of inbound marketing Automation that concentrates on conversing with your website visitors and leads instead of simply broadcasting the brand’s message in a one-way transmission.
Your goal here is to converse with customers, understand them, help them, and thus earn their trust, which would make them more likely to make a purchase from you.
Why is conversational marketing important?
If your company is looking to create and nurture great customer relationships and improve your customer experience, conversational marketing could be right for you.
That’s because conversational marketing involves creating one-on-one real-time conversations in your customers’ language, on the platform they prefer. It helps you customize your interactions online.
People prefer chatting as compared to getting on phone calls or writing an email. It’s easy, it takes less effort, and feels more natural.
The other big reason why you should get started with conversational marketing is that your customers want instant answers to all their questions - they don’t want to wait.
It could be hard to scale this up manually, but with intelligent chatbots, the world is your oyster. It makes it possible for you to reach far more customers than you could manually.
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What are the benefits of conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing helps you create a better customer journey. It is extremely useful when it comes to high-involvement purchases like insurance, travel packages, enterprise software, etc.
Here are some of the most significant benefits of conversational marketing:
Higher customer satisfaction
Conversational marketing helps customers find answers to their questions while exerting minimum effort. It essentially reduces customer effort and makes the customer journey easier.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, in most cases, the overall customer experience is more important than the actual product itself. So, if you do use conversational marketing, your chances of getting a great CSAT score are much higher.
Increased levels of trust
When you continuously engage in conversations with your customers, you’re building familiarity. Your brand is not a stranger to them anymore.
Answer their questions quickly and help them gain more value from your offerings and your customers and leads will trust you much more, making it easier for you to drive sales.
Upsell and cross-sell opportunities
Through conversational marketing, you can understand your customers’ needs better. Your team can use this information to recommend related products or even higher-value products that would help your customers meet their needs more effectively.
Upselling and cross-selling becomes even easier because of the heightened levels of trust in play here.
Shorter sales cycle
By interacting with your leads over chatbots and live chat, you are able to understand their requirements much faster and give them the information they need in a far quicker sales cycle. You don’t have to wait for them to fill a form, wait for replies to each other’s emails, or set a time for a call when both parties are available.
It helps you guide your leads down the sales funnel at a quicker pace.
Higher conversion rates
When you converse with customers, understand their needs, and present solutions that match their needs, they’re more likely to buy from you. In fact, according to ICMI, using live chat can cause a 40% increase in your conversion rate.
What are the best practices for conversational marketing?
The best practices for conversational marketing include:
Plan it according to your customer journey
Map your customer journey out, look for points in the journey where customers typically get stuck or confused. Now you don’t want to force your customers to hunt for information on their own when they reach these bottlenecks. If you increase the effort involved in doing business with you, they’ll just not want to do business with you at all. You should use conversational marketing in those areas to help them get their doubts solved immediately with minimum effort..
Use it with your regular marketing
You don’t need to eliminate your normal marketing activities and campaigns to focus purely on conversational marketing. Use both together.
Conversational marketing should supplement your traditional marketing activities.
Automation and the human touch
Use chatbots to scale conversational marketing up. Intelligent chatbots would be able to answer about 80% of the queries that your customers may have. Transfer the complex ones to live agents seamlessly by using live chat along with your chatbots.
You would also want to make sure that you’re transferring these queries to the right agents, not to agents who would need to transfer the conversation to another agent or even have to escalate it. Engati Live Chat can route your customer conversations intelligently, based on context from the messages to the agent that is most equipped to handle these conversations, without forcing customers to have to converse with other agents and keep getting transferred.
The right touchpoints
Look for channels and touchpoints which your customers use the most and engage with them there. It doesn’t need to be just your website, you can also engage them on WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, etc.
Adapt your tone
You don’t need to have to same tone across all channels. An email can be slightly more formal and structured, but on WhatsApp, you’d want to be more casual. When your customers are on WhatsApp, they’re pre-conditioned to feeling like talking as though they are talking to their friends. You need to adapt your tone according to the channel that you are engaging your customers over.
Additionally, on whichever channel you are using to converse with your customers, you should make sure that your brand personality shines through to some extent.
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