The ways that customers interact with brands constantly change, and your business needs to adapt. Years ago, customers had very few ways to interact with a company and would have to wait days for a response to a query.
Modern customers have come to expect instant communication as a given. Failing to do so makes a poor customer impression that can move buyers away from your brand. As your marketing campaign continues to evolve, consider adding some conversational marketing strategies to improve the buyer experience.
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing uses the power of simple one-on-one conversation and dialogue to improve the customer journey. It allows customers to feel like the entire sales team works just for them and can help move buyers through the sales funnel while creating a sense of connection with your brand.
Conversational marketing focuses on using instant communication tools. Instead of having customers fill in a form or send an email, they can receive a response almost immediately by connecting to a live chat or another conversational marketing channel.
The Benefits of Conversational Marketing
If you're to add conversational marketing to your marketing campaign, you need a good reason to do so. Luckily, conversational marketing offers several unique benefits that will impact your entire sales cycle.
Customer Convenience
An engaged customer is a happy customer, and nothing provides as much engagement as a one-to-one interaction. Most live chat options are also available 24/7, ensuring that customers get their answers no matter when they ask their questions.
Providing this on-demand service makes your brand seem more reputable and serious about customer satisfaction while ensuring that your customer journey remains as smooth and friction-free as possible.
You can also diversify your conversational marketing to encompass various query types. Live chat works great for answering idle consumer questions, but it can also provide essential after-hours support for customers who've already purchased your product.
Scalable Solutions
Most small businesses can't employ a hundred-person sales team to handle every customer's questions. Conversational marketing can handle hundreds of conversations simultaneously, meaning that you can spend more resources on other inbound marketing strategies.
Even better, you can continue to scale your conversational marketing tools as your business grows. You can give every customer individual and personalized attention, no matter how great the demand for your resources may be.
Conversational marketing relies on AI systems to function and scale correctly. This means that when customers have an escalating demand, you can still allocate them to a human. All that your conversational marketing does is help allocate your resources for maximum results.
Source of Demographic Data
Modern marketing strategies help you track your customer throughout their journey, and conversational marketing acts no differently. Not only can you identify where people started their journey and at which stage they start to interact with your conversational channels.
You can also use conversational marketing to pinpoint common concerns and questions. In addition, you can find out what interests your customers have and how you can leverage that interest.
Common Conversational Marketing Channels
Text Messaging
The main benefit of SMS marketing is its incredibly high open rate of 98%, meaning that almost every sent message gets read by the recipient. The instantaneous nature of text messages lends itself well to conversational marketing, especially as a conversation starter.
Instead of relying on your customer to get in touch with you, use SMSs to provide customers with exclusive offers and then await their response. You'll need to time and phrase your communication properly to avoid feeling spammy or salesy, but if used correctly, text messaging can enhance your current conversational marketing campaign.
Chatbots
Chatbots are the most visible form of conversational marketing. You can use chatbots in two different ways—as a conversation starter or as an informer.
Conversation starter chatbots use a small pop-up when a customer visits a site and will ask a question to learn the customers' needs. These questions can include why they're visiting your website, their purpose, and whether they are ready to buy something already. The chatbot can simplify the buying process and help move buyers along their journey.
The second way to use a chatbot lies with a support role. Instead of sending an email to the sales team, the customer will ask the chatbot directly. For a simple question, the customer will get an immediate response from the bot. Otherwise, the bot will transfer the query to a human who can answer more complex questions or quickly handle complaints.
Emails
While conversational emailing doesn't provide the immediate response of chatbots or SMSs, adopting a conversational tone in an email can significantly impact a customer's response. Customers have started viewing brands as characters, and the more personable and approachable you can make your brand, the better.
Presenting information in a casual and friendly manner appeals more significantly than a dry or scientific tone and can likely result in many more conversions.
The main benefit of email marketing is that you can structure it according to your sales cycle. You can start by asking customers to describe their primary concern or problem and then present your products or services as a solution. By keeping the tone light and casual, you're more likely to keep the readers' interest and have them identify themselves in that problem scenario.
Conclusion
Conversational marketing offers plenty of opportunities for companies to interact directly with their customers. Unlike social media, conversational marketing allows you to control the interaction, resulting in a more predictable customer journey and experience.
You can take advantage of a wide range of conversational marketing techniques. Some work very well with existing forms of inbound marketing, while others offer a completely new experience that can drive sales even further.
At TouchSMS, we've seen the power of conversational marketing. Not only can it improve your relationships with customers, but it can dramatically improve your sales efficiency. To find out more, don't hesitate to get in touch with our live chat or via our online form. Let us show you how to take your marketing to the next level!