What is Conversational Marketing?

When it comes to improving the customer experience, no one can deny the power of meaningful relationships. What matters most in this relationship is the fact that businesses care about customer concerns and provide viable answers and solutions in a timely manner.

The best way to learn about customer concerns and form meaningful relationships is through conversations: two-way dialogues that allow customers and businesses to express their concerns and get answers. Conversational marketing is an umbrella term for all activities that encourage communication between a business and its customers, whether on social media, company websites, email, instant messaging, SMS or any other channel .

In this article, we'll talk about the intricacies of conversational marketing and how it helps improve the customer experience.

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to expand your marketing funnel and ultimately your sales funnel by harnessing the power of real-time conversations—the interactions that shape customer perceptions and relationships with your brand.

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

A good conversational marketing strategy has two main elements:

1. Customers determine the logistics of the conversation. Customers determine through which channel, how and when they communicate with you. This is why most startups hire customer service professionals from locations across different time zones. With a little help from chatbots, you can provide 24/7 support.
2. Achieving progress is the ultimate goal. Being responsive is the first step, but you must show progress. As a customer, imagine receiving customer support emails in response to your complaint. Would you be happy just to get an answer, or would you like to have a conversation worth your time?When a client makes a request, even if you can't implement their requirement at first, you must tell them what the process will be and where exactly it is located . It is important that your customer service agents are aware of various customer-related issues. Using an education platform like StuDocu is a cheap and effective way to do this.

How can conversational marketing improve the customer experience?

It's almost intuitive for business owners that consumers expect quick and helpful answers to their customer service questions , and in fact, 90% of consumers say so. What is often overlooked is the fact that 82% of consumers rate immediate response as important when asking a question about sales or marketing . This means that a fast and reliable line of communication between you and your prospects will help you convert them easily.

Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift, one of the fastest-growing B2B startups, mentions how they got rid of forms and started having real conversations with prospects, and how this is driving their growth:

eBay, the multinational e-commerce giant, also benefits greatly from its chatbot, which works via voice command to allow consumers to browse seller catalogs and find the best deals. The giant also sends the best deals to customers' phones, making online shopping easier than ever.

To summarize, we can say that the main advantages of conversational marketing are:

And of course, conversational marketing improves metrics beyond customer conversion and support. This is a great way to hear the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and increase lifetime value. The Solitaire Bliss team, for example, found that improving response time increased the number of games played per user and revenue by 10% .

Any seasoned professional knows by heart that conversion is an important metric , but if you can't keep customers coming back to your site, you can't talk about sustainable growth. Conversational support helps you retain customers by tailoring your message to customer needs and preferences, and moves your business forward .

Types of Conversational Marketing

1. Messengers

Messenger selling is a strategy in which companies use instant messaging as their primary channel of communication with customers throughout the purchasing process. Messengers enable fast, personalized and largely informal communication , which creates an environment where customers feel free to ask questions and are more proactive in finding the right solution for their needs.

Businesses benefit greatly from messaging apps such as WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger and Instagram in the sense that they provide the opportunity to consolidate all marketing materials such as advertisements, posts, events, stories in one place.

For example, you can use Click-to-Messenger and Sponsored Ads to lure potential customers to Messenger and offer truly personalized and useful content that they can benefit from. Even if they don't convert on the first interaction, continuous conversation will be extremely important to their buying process, not to mention its impact on customer lifetime value.

2. Live Chat

A study conducted by Help Scout found that 90% of live chat reviews received from customers are rated “Excellent,” while only 69% of email reviews are rated “Excellent.” This is not a coincidence. Customers expect an immediate response to their requests because they likely have a busy schedule and barely find time to make a request in the first place. This is why live chat is becoming increasingly popular in both B2C and B2B industries.

Offering live chat support basically means having someone within reach of customers via live chat 24/7. This is a great way to understand what the client needs during the onboarding process and help solve their problems. Keep in mind that customers don't want to repeat themselves often, as 72% of customers expect that you know their details - their support history, purchase data or account information. That's why you should have a system that records every interaction and makes it available to your agents.

Add to the list of benefits of live chat the fact that it also improves the productivity of customer support teams: Most live chat tools allow customer service agents to handle multiple chats at once, a convenience that is not provided by email, direct calls or virtual calls, meetings.

3. SMS

53% of customers are more likely to make purchases from companies with whom they can communicate directly. Although SMS is not a new technology, customers still expect to receive some information related to their purchases via SMS , and most companies do so .

There are different ways to encourage customers to use SMS when interacting with you. One way is gamification. Let's say you put Easter eggs on your website and announced that you will be rewarding coupons to those who find hidden messages and send replies to your company number or short code via SMS - almost all SMS marketing platforms provide this feature .

Participants will not clearly feel that they are filling out a form or providing information that they would not like. They'll feel like they're actively participating and maybe even get rewarded, who knows?

4. Use Competitive Positioning to Improve Your B2B Messaging Strategy

One of the best tactics for developing a killer B2B messaging strategy is to research your competitors and position your brand in a way that gives you an edge over them. Start by listing your competitors and gather as much information about them as possible.

In addition to B2B messaging, the competitive information you collect may include:

• the best products or services and their key benefits and features;
• ICP, portraits of buyers and best clients;
• business partners, alliances, awards and certificates;
• firm graphics and technographics (technology stack, company size, revenue, etc.);
• CTAs, slogans, display ads, testimonials and case studies.

Play as a mystery shopper to track your competitors' response times and the actual B2B messages they use for various purposes. Check out the B2B messaging best practices they have for brand awareness, promotion, customer surveys and feedback, lead nurturing, deal closure, upsell or cross-sell, transactions, and more. As you continue your mystery shopping, ask your competitors what they are different or better than other industry players, especially your brand.

Another way to solidify your B2B messaging strategy is to explore the competitive messaging landscape and find areas that haven't been covered yet. Once you learn how to fill in the gaps in the competitive messaging landscape, you can better represent your brand and stand out with B2B messaging.

Using conversational marketing software

All conversational marketing strategies require some degree of automation , as they all involve information gathering, personalization, and real-time communication. These strategies help tailor customer service and support to the interests and preferences of individual customers, but they cannot be implemented without some level of automation.

That's why it's necessary to get a little help from conversational marketing software. Let's look at some of them to find out which one best suits your business needs and helps you achieve your goals.

Kommo (formerly amoCRM)

Kommo (formerly amoCRM) is a unified conversational marketing platform for businesses , to which they can connect accounts from popular instant messengers, including:

Business CRM

Users track every conversation scattered across these applications in one dashboard, ensuring that no customer request goes unanswered or ignored for too long . They don't have to enter data, open tickets or do any manual work; the software pulls data from many different sources.

The tool also comes with an AI chatbot that you can use to support agents by managing more basic conversations, such as when a customer just wants to book a demo or call. Kommo even lets you create a bot without code, without knowing anything about coding . For example, if you need certain information before booking a call, a no-code bot will ask those questions and gather the answers for you so you're ready to follow up with the customer.

In addition to integrating with messaging apps, the tool also integrates with email services, VoIP telephony, lead forms, and payment systems , allowing you to manage all your conversational marketing from a single platform .

AlphaChat

AlphaChat is another conversational marketing software that allows companies to use conversational AI on their website, deliver personalized and automated messages, and create workflows without any programming 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 try it before you pay for it.

Intercom

Intercom, one of the most popular conversational marketing tools on the market, integrates various systems and technologies into a marketing stack such as Salesforce, Marketo, Stripe to provide 100% transparency into a website visitor's journey through the website, helping companies have greater control and influence over their journey.

The software allows you to convey your offers and messages through a chatbot, such as informing customers about an upcoming campaign or promotion or simply offering them personalized offers.

Drift

Drift is a conversational marketing/revenue accelerator platform that advocates moving away from traditional lead generation tools like forms and helping companies achieve that goal. Drift's revolutionary approach makes a lot of sense given how consumers are able to find useful content and materials on a website without leaving contact information. So even companies that manage to lure people in with high-quality, useful content often fail to turn them into customers.

Drif's integration ecosystem allows you to see a contact's details as soon as they land on your site, suggest tutorials to them, ask them questions, and guide them to the next step. For example, you can immediately route promising leads to your sales representatives without spending a lot of time warming them up.

Mobile Monkey

Mobile Monkey is an OmniChat platform that allows businesses to communicate with customers in real time using web chat, SMS, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Mobile Monkey users can create chatbots and use them across multiple platforms, allowing them to reuse chat content with their content marketing tools .

The tool also offers a unified inbox that allows you to track all your incoming and outgoing conversations from one dashboard.

Ushur

Ushur is a 1-1 communication channel that optimizes customer interactions with conversational AI, enabling businesses to deliver branded messages to customers. You can use Ushur to support customers throughout the onboarding process, marketing campaigns, upsells and cross-sells.

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 no-code approach.

Instead of conclusions

If understanding your customers and meeting their needs is a top priority for your business, then conversational marketing is your strategy.

At every stage of their buying journey, customers are looking for answers to their questions and problems, and the companies that start conversations with them faster are the winners. Talking directly to your customers is also a low-cost way to gain the customer insights you desperately need for your marketing campaigns.

We at Brutal Marketing will select for you the best CRM program that you can use in your business. We will be happy to tell you about the program's capabilities and show you which settings will definitely help you achieve your desired financial results.