Personalize Your Business with Conversational Marketing

In the world of marketing, we seem to have reached an impasse. In recent times, we’ve seen a decline in landing page conversion rates along with a reduction in the effectiveness of cold calls and emails. Among other things, one of the biggest problems has been the impersonal nature of advertising. In the modern world, conversations have moved online…but businesses and their marketing haven’t necessarily kept up with this change.

With most businesses, potential customers go through all sorts of steps before a conversation even begins. You might recognize the following funnel:

• Customer lands on website
• They fill out a form
• The CRM platform labels them as a ‘lead’
• They’re scored and assigned
• You reach out for the first time
• They (hopefully!) respond
• A qualifying call is scheduled

Only at this point does the consumer get to speak to you, the brand, for the first time. As we’ve already seen, fewer people are answering cold calls and the open rates of emails are constantly fluctuating. Therefore, only a small percentage of all people who land on the website will actually reach the stage of talking to a representative from your business. This is why there has been a rise in conversational marketing, and it’s what we want to highlight today.

What’s Conversational Marketing?

Ultimately, conversational marketing is all about feedback and willingness to listen to the needs of your customers. Not only do you communicate with customers one-on-one, you continually adopt your marketing strategy based on the feedback offered by them. If you’re currently available across social media and offer live chat support, it sounds like you’re getting closer to the ideal conversational marketing strategy. If you’re not yet offering this level of communication, now is the time to get started.

You probably know all about social media and the wonders it achieves for customer relationships, and this is why we want to provide some other examples to get you started. When you only think ‘social media’, you’re going to limit yourself because there are a variety of other opportunities.

Live Customer Support — Firstly, we know that many businesses keep marketing and customer support segregated, but we believe in a cohesive system where the two are intertwined. As long as the role is customer facing, you’re impacting the reputation of the brand. If customer support is poor, even the best marketing strategies will struggle to overturn the impact this has on reputation. Therefore, we highly recommend considering the following:

• Designated social media support accounts
• 24/7 helplines or live chat
• In-app chat
• FAQs pages

Email Marketing — Yes, email open rates are fluctuating because most companies abuse the fact that they have a customer’s email address. However, with the right strategy, email marketing has the potential to contribute greatly. The worst mistake you can make is constantly boasting about your business and how great you are. Consumers are tired of this, so we recommend moving to a conversational strategy. You could launch a survey asking for their biggest pain points, for example, and then use this information to improve your marketing approach.

Loyalty Schemes — What better way to keep customers than by rewarding them for staying loyal? In addition to keeping their custom, this also helps you to build a connection with individual customers. With a better relationship, you can send personalized offers while they provide valuable feedback.

Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Before we get into the tips to get started, what are the main benefits of choosing conversational marketing techniques?

Get Valuable Insights

Over the years, we’ve watched the whole marketing operation become rather convoluted. We force customers into actions just so we can produce extravagant reports and attempt to spot patterns in them. In reality, the easiest way to gauge what customers want is to ask them directly. There’s no guesswork and no trying to pick up on patterns… just the customer giving their opinions in their own words.

Experienced marketers will spot an issue; it’s all well and good getting opinions in this way, but how do you gather them at scale? Well, with the techniques mentioned in the previous section, it’s possible to collect data from emails, live chat features, and loyalty schemes. If you send out a survey, it could be as simple as plugging the answers into a word cloud generator. Here, you’ll see the words that pop up most frequently.

If we look at live chat as an example, there are a number of benefits of implementing conversational marketing. For one thing, we get a better understanding of the concerns and problems that customers have. This could be relating to products and services, or it could even relate to the website. You could be suffering poor sales because of a problem with your website as opposed to your marketing efforts.

After tech issues, you might glean opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and even launch a completely new product. Either way, conversational marketing leads to brilliant insights.

Encourage a Positive Relationship

With social media and messaging applications, businesses have a chance to build real connections with customers (something we thought was impossible when the world first went digital). We learn what customers want, we can show off the personality of the brand, and customers feel as though their opinion is actually valued. Rather than their views getting lost in the ether, they feel as though their opinion counts and will help to improve the business. Customers will begin to see the business as a group of great people rather than just ‘another business’.

Introducing Conversational Marketing

Most importantly, we should say that this isn’t a new strategy where you need to tear up your old strategy and start again. Instead, it’s about optimizing your current approach and potentially making some adjustments. For the basic framework that comes with conversational marketing, there are three main steps:

• Engage — At this first step, we want to engage in conversation with a potential customer as early as possible. Rather than using forms to generate leads, we want to chat. Even if it’s a simple chatbot, this is better than a boring form. Customers know that you can’t have somebody available 24/7 for conversation, so intelligent chatbots are the secret. In fact, you can even initiate the contact yourself rather than waiting for them to find the chatbot.
• Understand — According to Harvard Business Review, the best opportunity to qualify a lead comes within the first five minutes. This is a problem considering that most approaches need days of nurturing emails and marketing automation. With 24/7 bots, we can qualify leads almost immediately. Bots can ask the important questions, even the same questions you would ask in a form, but the answers are understood much faster.
• Recommend — As you’ve probably noticed, we’re not restructuring the funnel completely, we’re simply adjusting how people move through it. If a sale is close, this is the time to introduce human contact to suggest the next move. With intelligent routing using the bots, they know when to book meetings and face-to-face contact. Now, your reps are spending their time with the leads most likely to convert.

With this system, you benefit from the following:

• Insights into customers
• Better conversion
• More interaction for each customer
• Optimized scheduling for sales staff
• Shortened sales cycle
• Bigger sales pipeline

Best Practices — Getting Conversational Marketing Right

If you’re going to get conversational marketing right, the first tip we have is to offer quick, efficient communications. Being that we are all customers, we know that there’s a demand for everything to happen immediately. Whether it’s maintaining the performance of chatbots, your Twitter support team, or your loyalty scheme, keep this in mind.

Next, as well as a quick service, customers also expect a personalized service. If you copy and paste the same message to every customer, they will simply click away to a service that tailors their approach. Do all you can to interact with customers in a personal way; remember, the aim is to boost the relationships you have with customers.

Finally, don’t be afraid of customer data and analytics. With the right tools, they will make sense of large quantities of data when you can’t yourself. The more you’re willing to analyze, the better picture you will generate of your customer base. From here, you have ammunition for advertising campaigns, shaping the marketing and sales funnel, and even for future product development.

If you want to see an example of conversional marketing done well, we recommend checking out Domino’s Pizza. Their AnyWare campaign included conversational channels through text message, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Twitter. As long as text ordering was enabled, customers just had to send the pizza emoji to get started. Otherwise, research London & Company, Sephora, and HelloFresh.

Bonus — Free Marketing Tool!