3 Reasons Why Companies Need to Engage in Conversation With their Customers
eCommerce is an essential part of our lives. A truly useful tool. Yet, it has also become a space where brands mainly inundate online shoppers with ads or promotional content.
Brands tend to stick to this all-for-ads model and don’t always make online communication conversational.
And, without conversation, there’s no personalization
When you live in a time where voice assistants call you by your name (you got the reference), you want brands to get who you are, as in what you are looking for.
Ads, even targeted ones, do not keep that promise. As a customer, being a target is not what you want.
What you want is being considered as a real human being.
That’s what conversational marketing aims at: to break the one-way communication.
Here are 3 benefits of engaging in conversation.
Reason #1 — Bringing authenticity to the playing field
We all know the glory days of massive and successful push-marketing efforts are over, brands cannot just advertise their products and services anymore. Brands now have to talk to us, whether we are prospects or customers. They need to create meaningful, real and genuine conversations. Why? Because we now have new expectations: we want human interactions, personalization and transparency. And this can only be driven by authenticity.
What is authenticity? The definition is quite clear: it is a quality for which an entity — often an individual but also an organization — expresses with sincerity and engagement what it really is.
It’s about being true to yourself.
Getting us customers, to talk about a brand and its products or services, making us the best ambassadors, is one of the most simple ways to show authenticity: it brings transparency and improves loyalty. Brands need to embrace that because it’s already happening.
“Visitors are people who have doubts, questions and/or problems. 59% of these visitors who didn’t make a purchase would have done so if they had been supported in real-time to compare products or if they had received some advice about the products.”
Maxime Baumard, VP Marketing at iAdvize
Reason #2 — It’s a win-win collaboration between a brand and its customers
2018 saw the rise of the gig economy. Organizations can contract with independent workers for short-term engagements, including with individuals, experts in their field (photography, mobile devices, organic food, luxury items, name it) sharing genuine advice with their peers online.
Visitors can now get real-time advice not only from so-called customer service but from independent experts. My Uncle-Pete-who-knows-everything-about-Triton-tools, our former-colleague-who-started-a-soap-business-and-master-the-art-of-choosing-essential-oils.
They have expert knowledge and opinions. Brands working with experts acknowledge they are the ones more suited to answer questions about their offering and products.
They also are regular customers, normal people who have experience with products or services, they can talk about those in an engaging and useful way to online visitors, in order to convert them.
They show how transparent and authentic a brand is. Their only purpose is to share their passion with others and that’s why their peers are more likely to trust their opinion: they are not trying to sell the most expensive item, they talk about the one that is most suited to the visitors’ needs.
And it’s nothing new! 66% of shoppers trust the opinions of consumers they find online, Nielsen reported this data back in 2015.
“The experts we collaborate with have cutting edge and technical knowledge but I also want them to be able to sell and find the right words to trigger a purchase. The challenge is not win a contact race but rather a conversion race.”
Geoffroy Mailly — Marketing Manager — Ekosport
Aren’t you more willing to talk about a brand and genuinely promote it if you have a nice and warm contact with it?
Trusting independent expert means trusting people. Trusting people equals building a healthy relationship with customers.
Reason #3 — Conversational marketing makes brands available and relatable
When do you shop? Evening and weekends. Midday if you cancel that too-far-away-lunch. Initiating conversation with independent experts means being where the action really takes place: online, of course, but anytime.
Furthermore, conversational marketing is not limited to a channel (chat solution, video support) or a platform (Messenger or Twitter).
Conversational Marketing is not about over-promoting or sending brand messages everywhere (on mobile with push notifications, on television with commercials, on the internet with banner ads or on the streets with billboards).
It’s the exact contrary (or it should be, at least): it’s about answering customers’ questions, personalizing responses by asking questions back about their context and buying behaviors.
It’s about listening to understand a need.
It’s about being there when it is needed.
It’s about sharing true advice.
“Twenty years ago, if you wanted to buy something online, you had to configure your mind and behaviors to fit the design of the website and the bandwidth of your dial-up connection. That’s like taking the power of the human brain and forcing it to express itself through smoke signals. That’s not how people think; that’s not how they act. People are endowed with rich communication faculties and incredible perceptive awareness, and they know how to interact and converse to learn and act. Today’s conversational technologies are simply freeing people to be people.”
James McQuivey, VP and Principal Analyst of Forrester Research
