Conversational Marketing is one of the best ways to start a real-time conversation with potential customers and move them through your sales funnel. Real-time conversations are a powerful mode of marketing that can provide an authentic experience for customers by building a solid relationship. 

Engaging more with your customers will help you in fetching more leads in a quick time frame. Rather than forcing customers to go through several processes and wait for several days, conversational marketing targets users with intelligent chatbots and targeted messages to engage customers when they are on your website. 

In this guide, you will get detailed insights into conversational marketing and what are the main elements of it. 

How Conversational Marketing Is Changing the Way Your Customers Buy

The traditional way of marketing will no longer be suitable now. For years brands have been following a method to market and sell their products. They make a call, or fill out a form or enroll email automation, but it becomes obsolete now. Consumers don’t have time for such a long process, but they prefer to communicate through messages because it actually feels like a real-time conversation.

Below are the numbers to support the above paragraph

– Only 43% of consumers answer cold calls.

– A survey conducted by Twilio states that 90% of the customers want communication with businesses. 

– The average email open rate has come down to 20%

– The landing page conversion rate is just 2.35%

How to Start Conversational Marketing

Do you have a prior idea of how to start an effective conversation with customers as part of your marketing campaign? Here are some guidelines that can help you in starting a conversation with customers on the channels where they spend the most time. 

Conversational Marketing Guidelines 

Conversational marketing is a kind of asynchronous relationship, which means businesses should be available for conversation whenever the consumer prefers. While it’s important to converse in real-time, it is equally important to finish a conversation at the customer’s preferred pace.

1. Make simpler and shorter texts 

Any text that you create for email, push notification, or any other marketing deliverable should be conversational. They should be short, simple, and more like the way you talk. Any sort of jargon or complicated words shouldn’t be used as it won’t look conversational. 

So, what is a conversational text? 

Your sentences should be short, but encouraging enough for the customers to continue the conversation. Make use of suitable verbiage for your clients as it will make you more approachable. 

2. Connect With Context

The businesses should get smarter to collect information because the context makes message information. With the proper information, bots will be able to avoid asking the same questions every time. To make your conversation more engaging your context should be clearer and be able to connect with customers easily.  

As per the statistics, over 70% of the customers prefer customized advertising content. 

Marketing that offers personalized experience had witnessed over 20% sales increase

Understanding the context will make your marketing efforts easier and build a strong bond. Ultimately, this will result in higher chances of conversion. To achieve this you should better understand the customer’s preferences, location, challenges faced by them, and their purpose of using the mobile app. 

3. Understand your customer’s challenges

Marketing is not all about explaining your products and services, you should also allow your customers to share their thoughts and feedback. A true conversation is all about dialogues, you should be attentive and open enough to listen to their questions, challenges, and feedback. 

If you want to know your customer’s feedback, the best way is to send them a quick survey link in email or chat. You can also send them in-app surveys to get ratings for the new feature of your app or any new changes in it. 

Furthermore, for a long-lasting relationship, you should pay attention to the mentions of your brand name on all social media, or at least on the most active ones. This will give confidence to your customers that their thoughts are being counted. By listening, you will get the opportunity to address their issue and address them outside of the app. 

4. Be responsive and available to your customers 24/7

Being consistently responsive to your customers will enable you to build a long-lasting relationship. A recent survey states that over 36% of the brands incorporate customer support systems through various features like chatbots, live chat, and trigger campaigns. 

Live chat is the best way to engage customers with the human support system. Chatbots are the advanced version of the chat with AI. 

Using chatbots brands can engage with their customers 24/7, over 40% of the customers don’t care about the AI chat, all they need is the solution for their challenges. Till 2018 there were over 300,000 chatbots on Facebook Messenger. Furthermore, they are cost-effective.  

Trigger Campaigns are the AI-powered automation tools that trigger campaigns as per the user’s action. Rideshare is an example that sends a push notification to inform you when the ride is near you. 

The Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is not a new strategy, brands have conversations with their customers every day. So why should you utilize tools that enable optimized conversations for business? Here are some of the key benefits:

– More delightful method for consumers to get their problem solved

– Great way to get more insights about your customers

– Helps in building relationship

Conversational marketing examples

Domino’s Pizza

The recent update on Domino’s marketing is Domino’s AnyWare initiative that lets consumers order their favorite pizza from any location. This includes a few conversational channels like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack, and text messages where they can simply send the pizza emoji.

Consumers should first enable text ordering options and set up an “Easy Order” on their profile, after which they can just make the order by just texting. 

HelloFresh

HelloFresh is a meal service (subscription) which recently launched Freddy Freshbot chatbot. Through this chatbot, consumers can chat and update on recipe ideas, and provide answers to customer’s questions, and send meal reminders. 

With their chatbot, they do great customer service by providing support well beyond the menu, order, and delivery process. They ensure customers’ comfort and eventually getting more new subscriptions and renewals 

Takeaway

The final takeaway is, conversational marketing is all about being available 24/7, customized customer experience, communicating with your customers, addressing their issues, rather than just utilizing chatbots. Real-time communication sounds like conversing with people. It means you should communicate with the customers by understanding the context.