Conversational Marketing Strategies

Oct 05, 2022

A study by Forrester shows that 87% of companies realize a traditional buying experience is no longer enough to satisfy their customers. Conversational marketing is the response to this demand for a better customer experience.

Not sure what conversational marketing involves? It’s exactly what it sounds like - an effective way of engaging with your website visitors through dialogue-driven activities.

These conversations are meant to build trust between you and potential customers and establish a connection that provides an enhanced buyer experience.

In other words, conversational marketing is based on one-to-one interactions with your visitors in real-time across multiple channels.

This lets you customize your customers’ interactions and improve their overall experiences.

Personalized conversations like these often use chatbots, live chat, and messaging apps, all of which allow you to talk with your customers where, when, and how they prefer, building trust for your brand.

Any sort of two-way conversation can be part of conversational marketing, even via telephone and email.

Direct and instant messaging is the most popular method of communication in today’s world and so it’s natural that it is an integral part of conversational marketing. Everyone likes an instant response to their questions, which is why messaging apps like WhatsApp are so popular.

The key part of conversational marketing is understanding which channels your customers prefer and adjusting your tone of “voice” accordingly. Live chat or a chatbot usually mimics casual conversation, for example, rather than taking a formal tone.

In this special report, we’ll take a close look at the power of conversational marketing and how you can begin to integrate it into your business to maximize conversion rates and profits.

Conversational Marketing Strategy

An effective conversational marketing strategy is usually built around one or more solutions that let you reach out to your prospective customers and engage with them.

A typical system is built on several elements:

A Conversation Starter:

This is the message that usually pops up at the bottom right-hand corner of your website. Its job is to get the visitor to click and engage with you.

The link appears with a message that can be personalized to fit your exact action, landing page, or product/service.

Lead Capture Tools to Qualify:

After the visitor clicks your conversation starter, they will then take part in a short conversation with a lead capture tool like a chatbot.

This is the part where the chatbot asks a series of simple questions in real-time to determine whether the visitor needs customer support or sales assistance.

This is a good spot to include personalization and make your visitor feel like they’re engaged in an actual, meaningful conversation with your company.

This chatbot (often tied to a social media account) will qualify your leads and either complete the sales process or pass the prospective customer to the right person who can deal with more complicated questions or requests.

The idea is to get the visitor to customer service or the sales team as quickly as possible, giving them a quick solution to their problem without having to change their device or channel.

Live Messenger:

Qualified leads will then be put into contact with your sales team. Your conversational marketing platform should give the sales team members notes on the user’s qualifications and their answers to your questions - which is where the real value is added.

Your sales representatives or call centre agents should be able to guide your website visitors through their options - and, hopefully, convert them into a customer.

Conversational marketing is usually thought of as a part of inbound marketing - the “pull” tactic of attracting customers through the channels they prefer.

Conversational marketing uses actual communication between your company and the customer in these channels, while inbound marketing includes a broader range of strategies.

If you’re doing it right, this technique offers multiple benefits that can give you a market advantage over the competition:

A Better Customer Experience:

First, engaging in conversations with your website visitors gives you a better understanding of their needs, wants, and their pain points - what their problems are, which your company can solve.

You can collect the information you need to qualify them further. Based on this information, what they’re interested in and where they are in their buyer’s journey, you can adjust your communication and interact with them in a more meaningful way.

Your meaningful conversations can be run around the clock to help build trust in you and your company and to further develop your relationships with the customers.

Improved Lead Generation:

By giving your customers an interactive way to engage with your company, you can optimize their experiences and convert more website visitors into paying customers.

Your conversations will not only help convert leads but also qualify them for your sales team by asking the right questions at the right time.

Move Buyers Through Your Sales Funnels Faster:

With your marketing activities connected to your sales team, you can be sure your sales funnels are moving buyers through effectively. Your bots can send qualified leads directly to your sales agents on live chat, as well as book real-time meetings with them.

How to Get Started

The overall goal of conversational marketing is to understand your customers and communicate with them in the manner they desire. It’s not about you in this type of marketing, but about the customer.

Creating a successful strategy for your company consists of three basic elements:

Start Your Conversation with an Engagement Tool:

Your first message must entice your website visitors to click the link. This is the only one of the elements you have control over - and your most important element.

If your prospective customers aren’t interested in clicking your link, you have to find some way to drive the action quickly.

Your goal must be that click, and to get that, you must craft the perfect opening message. For your conversational marketing strategy to be a success, you’ll need something beyond just a simple chatbot, though.

Ideally, you’ll want a more complete tool with a chatbot, broadcast, and live chat features. The tool should be embedded in your website and offer chat or call - or even video - conversation starters. These are those little messages that invite you to click and engage!

Discover Searcher Intent:

Once your visitors start a conversation with you, your goal is to understand, qualify, and ultimately meet their needs.

You’ll need to enter the conversation and find out a few things about your prospective customers:

Are they looking for customer support?

Are they looking for sales assistance?

Are they interested in making a purchase?

But you can’t just come right out and ask a bunch of blunt questions. You want your visitors to feel like they’re taking part in a real-time conversation, and you want them to feel confident enough to continue that conversation with a member of your sales team - or even to make a purchase from you.

“Look at the traffic to the site,” says Whisbi, “the pages they are on, their engagement level, and decide what is appropriate for each audience.”

Traffic coming from one of your “Buy Now” ads will need different chat conversation starters than those from an educational blog. Depending on which of the above pathways your visitor is travelling on, your conversation will veer off in a different direction to satisfy their needs.

Some examples of things you need to consider include whether the visitor is:

On a product page - maybe they’d like a live-streamed demo

A new visitor who has completed several stages of the buyer’s journey

Arriving via a special product advertisement or campaign.

You also should consider how long the user has been active on that page.

Give Sales the Wheel:

Although your priority should be helping your visitors resolve their problems and issues, you should have clear conversation pathways through your conversational marketing strategy.

You need to keep in mind where each visitor is headed and what they need to get there. If they’re not ready to purchase, maybe they can download an informational PDF, subscribe to your newsletter, or be put into contact with a member of your sales team.

One conversation will lead to another naturally. In your best-case scenario, your visitor will be interested in a continued conversation with you.

Once you’ve got a clear idea about what groups of people you’re engaging with, you’ll need to qualify them. It would be great to send every visitor directly to a staff member, but that’s simply not possible in real-time, so you need to think about the following three elements for each audience type:

The Trigger:

What action is going to start your conversation?

The Conversation Starter:

Which message or video will invite your visitors to engage?

The Script:

Which questions should the lead capture tool ask to qualify the visitors correctly?

“On the backend of your content management system or conversational marketing tool,” says Hubspot marketing coordinator Eric Izazaga, “your sales team will document the visitor’s questions, qualifications, and needs for a quick follow-up.”

The team’s job is to try to convert those visitors into customers, and the more information you can give them, the easier their job is.

Conversational marketing gives them essential information about these prospective customers - and gives you a more interconnected view of your customers.

Conversational marketing is one of your most powerful tools. “Thoughtspot.” Reports Izazga, “saw 10 times more sales conversations, 70% more marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and 64% more meetings booked by using conversational marketing.”

Zero Motorcycles gained 30% more leads with conversational marketing. These statistics might not be enough to convert you to the conversational marketing bandwagon, but they ought to convince you to keep reading.

To get started, you need to figure out how to improve your visitor’s experience with your company. There are also three basic elements in this step:

Engage with Your Visitor:

Your first step is to let the visitor start a conversation in order “to create a more personalized experience” for themselves.

Filling out forms might still end up with leads for you, but every website under the sun uses that approach so your visitors won’t see anything unique if you go that route.

Understand Your Visitor’s Problem:

Comprehending what we call the “pain points” of your visitor is essential. You need to know what has driven them to seek out your company.

What problem do they have that you can solve?

When your visitors engage with your website, you should ask common questions about your product or service and learn what their needs are. One great place to start is with questions typically asked during kick-off or qualifying calls.

Recommend Their Solution:

The closing stage in your marketing approach is where you guide and suggest solutions to your visitor. With all the new information from your previous steps, you can now engage in person-to-person interaction with the ultimate goal of guiding them to the right resources.

Successful Examples

Let’s look at a couple of good examples of conversational marketing strategies put into action:

Domino’s SMS Messaging Tool:

Domino’s customers can now order pizza anywhere through SMS marketing.

The company recently introduced Domino’s AnyWare, which lets them send the pizza emoji through Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger, or text message - and that starts their order.

What’s their goal?

Saving customers time and simplifying the conversation! By cutting the need to dial in or pull up a website, Domino’s has made ordering pizza as easy as hitting a button. And people are going to remember how easy it was the next time they want pizza.

This is an excellent example of conversational marketing that works.

Webstack’s HubSpot Chatbot:

The first thing HubSpot wanted to do, says Izazaga, was “immediately engage with our visitors.

Instead of the standard ‘Hi, how can we help you?’ we started with a phrase sure to grab their attention: ‘Psst, want to know a secret?’”

With an opener like that, it’s no wonder people click the link! Next, they wanted to understand how they could help visitors reach their goals.

To do that, they built their chatbot to offer a personalized experience with no dead ends. Once the prospective customer engages with the chatbot, they will “be guided to the right resource based on their inquiry.”

To give you an example if the visitor clicks “I need help,” a list of HubSpot’s core services appears.

If none of those is what the visitor needs, they can select “Something Else,” and they can then share with the company why they engaged in the first place.

Then, not only is the customer happy, but HubSpot has just gotten more lead qualifying information for the next time.

Quick-Start-Guide

Let’s imagine you’re selling new cars. Your company generates a high amount of traffic to your website and can even get them to the product configuration page (where they can design their particular car to their specifications).

You’ve also got all the usual tools in place - but your form submission conversion rate is still poor.

Start with Goal Setting:

In this case, your goal will be getting your visitors to complete submissions for test drive requests, something your company wants to see more of.

At the present, you have a Call to Action on the product page driving traffic to this form and you’re measuring the effectiveness of this particular plan on this key performance indicator (KPI).

For a more inclusive viewpoint, though, you should be thinking about additional metrics.

Set the Trigger:

For those visitors who match your audience specification, you need to decide which action will create your conversational starter.

For this example, let’s say it’s when your visitor has landed on your product configuration page, has then edited one or more options, and/or spent more than 20 seconds on your landing page.

This is the trigger for your conversational marketing strategy to begin.

Define Your Conversation Starter:

Think about which message you reckon will work best for this audience.

In this example case, it could be something as simple as “Would you like me to walk you through some of the options on our configuration page?”

Qualify and Filter Your Lead:

For this stage, your objective is engagement, so the chatbot should be as fast and to the point, as you can make it.

Think about the absolute minimum you need to know to put your visitor in touch with a member of your sales team. In our example case, let’s look at some options:

Question 1: “Would you like to speak with the sales team or customer support?”

{The visitor selects ‘Sales Team”]

Question 2: “Great! Just to help me out. Are you looking for a sports car, SUV, or electric car?”

{Visitor then selects one of the three]

Question 3 (Assisted): “Perfect! Would you rather be connected via voice or chat?” OR

Question 3 (Unassisted): “Would you like to book a test drive? Just pick a dealer from the dropdown menu and schedule the date and time you’d prefer.”

This process will give your visitors a direct line to your test drive (so long as they know what they want). It will also give those visitors who aren’t certain contact with a member of your sales team who can help them make up their minds.

In our example, your sales team member, after the visitor answers relevant questions, will direct any qualified leads to your series of questions which end with them setting up a test drive.

This final part can be automated through a chatbot, or it can simply deliver to the form with a little guidance from the sales team.

Your goal is to make this process as personal as possible while automating whatever can be automated so you’re not wasting the sales team’s time (and so the process is more scalable).

This is only one example. There are as many different configurations and options for your page, audience, and goals as there are businesses.

You may need to run a few tests to discover what works best for your particular goals and audience, but in the end, you can make it work.

Automation with Chatbots

According to a Facebook study, 53% of consumers are more likely to shop with a business they can message, so having an AI bot is almost always a good idea.

Link: https://www.campaignlive.com/article/facebook-study-53-consumers-likely-shop-business-message/1404632

AI-enabled bots can help you to automate repetitive tasks and market your business better. If you’re planning to utilize a chatbot for digital marketing, you’ll want to know its 3 main components:

· You need to understand the context of each conversation to make it work more effectively.

· You should personalize each conversation so visitors will feel more connected to your brand.

· You should leverage the idea of chatbot marketing by engaging your visitors in real-time, either with a bot or with a real human being.

Let’s look at some proven ways to use a chatbot for conversational marketing. Chatbots can help you automate the communication process and ensure a timely response for your visitors.

Using a chatbot can also help drive visitors through your sales funnel toward a conversion.

Here’s how this can work for you:

Automating part of the marketing process:

Conversational bots can help a lot with the hassles of marketing, making it easier and more streamlined by automating some of the processes - especially at those crucial early stages.

A chatbot can handle initial communications and collect information from visitors for your sales team to utilize.

You can use a chatbot to handle 24-hour communication on your website or app, answer common questions, guide users through sales issues, and gather contact details for sales calls.

Boost your marketing conversations: “Marketing is all about conversations,” says Reve writer, Snigdha Patel.

The brands that manage to handle their customer communication effectively end up with a higher level of success compared to other companies.

Since your chatbot can automate a big part of your marketing process, that leaves you with more bandwidth to handle a higher volume of conversations so you can close more sales calls.

Chatbots, says Patel, can” help you reach out to more customers, start more conversations, and achieve a better engagement.”

Here’s how you can use marketing chatbots to increase your conversations:

· You can use a chatbot to market your products to new geographies, thus bringing you more chances for communication with prospective customers.

· You can personalize the ways you communicate with those visitors and take a data-driven approach to reach out to new visitors.

Auto-Qualify your leads:

Most companies don’t rely just on their sales teams anymore.

Nowadays, you can use a chatbot to automate your lead qualification processes and come up with more leads.

Bots are great at asking relevant prequalifying questions to your website visitors, which will qualify your leads automatically.

Also, chatbots allow your prospective customers to make quick, easy choices by simply selecting whichever option on your menu that’s the most relevant to them. This makes it more engaging for the visitor.

Chatbot marketing adds value to your lead generation process by reducing the sales cycle, improving the entire sales process, saving agents’ time and allowing them to focus on more important things or filter out poor leads, and ensures lead generation in real-time so your visitors don’t have to wait for an answer.

Nurture the captured leads:

Information your bots can gather with lead generation (about your visitor’s needs, preferences, behaviours, etc.) can be used to get to know them better and help convert them into customers.

Once your marketing chatbot filters out the sales prospects, it can then transfer a high-intent customer to the sales team for closure, or schedule a meeting with customer service or sales.

The benefits of nurturing your leads with a chatbot include an increase in sales conversions and business revenue, boosted customer satisfaction, and an improved brand image and credibility.

Schedule meetings:

Booking a meeting with your customer is an important part of your marketing process, and those brands which are good at it usually get more leads than other companies.

Managing your appointments is a time-consuming job, though, and doing it manually can tie up your resources and leave no time for the other complicated issues your company must deal with.

To avoid this, you need to turn to an automated chatbot to save you time with your meetings.

Chatbots make it simple to schedule, modify, and cancel a meeting - all without involving a human being - and that can help a lot with your time constraints.

The chatbot can update your schedule to show the meeting, too, or schedule the meeting based on the team member’s availability.

By using a chatbot you can save time by having the schedules of all your employees on hand and allow your customer to vote on their best time for a meeting.

It’s also possible to get a meeting scheduled in seconds instead of going back and forth with humans trying to coordinate their calendars.

Personalize the user experience:

According to an Adlucent study, 71% of customers prefer personalized ads.

Link: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/study-71-of-consumers-prefer-personalized-ads/418831/

A personalized ad ensures a customized experience for your website visitors.

Using a chatbot, it’s amazingly simple to not only personalize their experience but to ensure relevant offers and discounts. The good news is that all you need to do is utilize the data provided by the visitor, and then leverage that to customize their visit.

This data can include their name, gender, location, browsing history, and even past purchases.

Program your chatbot to initiate conversations with your potential customers, therefore obtaining details you can use to customize their visit.

You can also use chatbot surveys to understand what a visitor expects of your brand, then use that information to bridge the gap between what your company is doing now and what you should be doing.

Offer order tracking and shipment details:

The last thing a customer wants to do after they order is to wait! Their frustration levels only grow when they can’t get any updates or status reports about that order. You can avoid this sort of thing by automating the process of order tracking.

Logistics companies are using AI-powered bots to increase their efficiency across the value chain. Customers can track their order in real-time by using your chatbot messenger and simply asking “Where’s my order?”

Widen your brand reach:

AI is a fantastic technology. It can widen your company’s reach without any substantial investment in terms of infrastructure.

AI-driven chatbots on social media messaging platforms allow your business to reach out to a larger audience and tap into new demographics without a huge investment.

Chatbot marketing can also help with lead generation in new markets, which means more growth for your company.

Your chatbots can be integrated across multiple messaging apps, thus allowing you to be more available to help customers and opening new opportunities to increase your sales.

With a chatbot, you can grab your visitor’s attention - and even learn from the interaction, which allows you to send more relevant data about your products and services.

Using a chatbot can also help your business upsell and cross-sell in an engaging, conversational, and personal way.

Measure Effectiveness

Measuring the effectiveness of your conversational marketing campaign is as important as implementing it in the first place. You’ll need centralized data collection tools or tools that can integrate data.

The metrics that will be important to you will, naturally, depend on your business goals. You’ll want to think about the product/offer and intent of each audience group.

As an example, if you’re running a live streaming educational broadcast on one of your pages, you might look at the number of views-to-lead-captures since it was a research point for the buyer.

But a lead capture tool running on a pricing or product configuration page should be measured in views to sales (or test drives, if you remember our earlier example).

You should figure out how long your sales cycle is for qualified leads that come in from your conversational marketing solution and for those that come from your forms or other pages without marketing assistance. This will give you a good indicator of dollar value - and will benefit your bottom line at the end of the month.

You also shouldn’t discount customer satisfaction.

You can look at your Net Promotor Score (NPS) for that. It’s that question “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend?”

You get a score between 1 and 10 and what makes a good NPS score can be different depending on your region and your industry.

If you’re getting low scores, however, your customer experience ought to be a priority for you. It’s always a good idea to measure the general trend of your NPS and a conversational marketing solution ought to increase that over time.

Think about the visitor-to-engagement ratio instead of thinking of engagement as a vanity metric.

This ratio will help show whether your conversation starter is working - and it will give you an idea of how many visitors are interested in talking with your staff.

Finally, the combination of all the above means your customer acquisition cost should be reduced over time (all other qualifications being equal).

Your conversational marketing solution will automate the qualification process and let those who just want to buy do exactly that without any fuss. And over time, this will give you a much lower customer acquisition cost, while continuing to increase sales.

Final Words

Conversational marketing is one of the best ways to engage your prospective customers and convert them into actual customers.

You can easily implement a conversational marketing strategy using a chatbot, voice assistant, live chat, phone call, or other types of AI to guide your visitors throughout your sales funnel.

The idea behind the technique is one-on-one dialogue, either with a live human or with an AI-powered chatbot. This will improve your customer’s experience and create a sense of trust and loyalty for your company.

It also allows you a better idea of who’s using your website. Knowing who’s there and what sort of conversation they would like helps you create an even more enjoyable experience for your customer.

You’ll want to move your most promising leads to live representatives. Speed and personal communication are a must with conversational marketing.

The idea is to create the sort of experience your customer would get if they sat down for a personal talk with you or a member of your team.

If you can accomplish that, you’ll experience an immediate increase in conversion rates and profits!