Conversational Marketing
Christine wants to buy a washing machine and she is going through many websites, brands, series, specifications, and reviews to find the right one which suits her needs, but is unable to find one. She is having a hard time finding the right one as she doesn’t buy washing machines every day and hence, might not be aware of all the brands, series and specifications. Also, the specifications are too technical for her to understand. She really needs help here! Instead of spending hours and hours online on these websites, she can simply speak to someone who understands her needs and can give useful recommendations. She also wants someone who can help her understand the specifications, terms and conditions, warranty, etc. She is also interested in knowing the best deals and available payment options /EMIs. If she can get all this information instantly, she would be able to take a quick decision.
This is exactly what conversational marketing does for users who are searching for help online. It personalizes the conversation with every customer, understands their needs and makes product recommendations quickly, thereby converting visitors to prospective customers.
Conversational marketing is the fastest way to move buyers through your marketing and sales funnels through the power of real-time conversations. It builds relationships and creates authentic experiences with customers and buyers. Instead of forcing people to go through lead capture forms and wait days for a response, conversational marketing uses targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with people when they’re on your website.
However, conversational marketing is not limited to converting visitors to customers. What if the customers could place the order on Slack or Facebook Messenger and you could confirm the order, send order status, inform them about the offers, all on the same platform? This is another area of conversational marketing that e-commerce companies are trying to implement to delight their customers post-purchase.
E-commerce websites typically have a huge catalogue. As a brand, you don’t want to leave your customers scrolling through thousands of products for hours instead, you want to walk your customers to the right product and save their time and effort. The main benefit of conversational marketing for brands is to improve their conversion rate by reducing the purchase journey time of their customer by guiding him to what exactly he is looking for rather than letting him get frustrated while he browses through thousands of products online. With customers’ expectations increasing day by day, you don’t want to miss an opportunity to delight them by having a personalized conversation with each customer. Businesses have realized the importance of conversational marketing and are taking steps to add conversation and personalisation to their websites.
Here is how brands can implement conversational marketing:
Understand the user base
Start by knowing how many users land on your page every day, what kind of queries they ask, at what time you are receiving most of the queries. If the traffic to your website is high and you see a pattern in the type of queries users ask then you can think of implementing a chatbot to attend to the users. If you see most of the users are posting questions at night or in the evening then you can either make your workforce available during those hours or implement a chatbot. There are many platforms offering chatbots that will help you attend to each user and have personalized conversations with them. But if someone is asking questions about his health and needs some suggestions, then a chatbot can’t answer the question and also, suggestions made for one user cannot be the same for another. In that case, you might want to make the right person available to answer these questions.
Supporting technologies
How do you have a conversation with your friends or colleagues? Do you repeat your name every time you meet them? Do you ask where do they stay, where do they work and their family details every time you meet them? Surely, not! Similarly, if the users are visiting your website multiple times, organizations are expected to save the information so that customers don’t have to answer the same questions every time they visit your website. Also, in order to share the requested information quickly, your customer representative needs access to different applications like CMS, OMS, etc. Connecting the chatbots with CRM will empower them with customer information like customer name, their preferences, past purchases, complaints raised, etc. This information would certainly help brands in having a personalized conversation with the customers.
Mode of conversation
How about giving an option to your customers to post queries on messengers like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Slack every time he has a question to ask or an order to place. As most of the users, these days are available on social media platforms, connecting with them through their favourite social media channel certainly gives them a personalized experience. Also, the population of mobile users is on the rise, hence make sure all your communication content with your customers is mobile friendly.
Know your customers
Before you start the conversation, it will be very helpful to know basic information about your customers. Check your CRM to know whether it holds any information about the customer. For new users, you may want to know about their demographics to get some background to start the conversion. To get this information, you can simply ask a few questions to the user or you can ask them to fill out a form.
Listen to users
Of course, users are talking to you because they want some information or they want to raise some concern. Listen to them carefully and understand their problem. If you are using bots, they should be smart enough to interpret what the users are talking about and identify the exact issue rather than just showing them a long list of FAQs. That’s not the purpose of conversational marketing. If you are using bots to respond then make sure you have a mechanism to improve your conversation by making chatbots learn through experience (machine learning).
Resolve quickly
Well, that’s the whole purpose of conversational marketing! You want to resolve the customer queries by sharing the requested information quickly. Time is the key here. Your customer might want to buy something on your website but wants to clarify a few things before he makes the purchase. He might ask you a question when he is having his coffee in the morning or on a weekend or he may continue to ask questions after a gap of two days. In any case, you don’t want to keep him waiting and lose a customer to some other business. This is your chance to respond quickly and convert your website visitor into a paying customer. To answer customer queries, you might need assistance from internal departments such as sales, marketing and operations. To get quick resolutions from these departments and answer the customers quickly, it is important to have a strong process mapping within the internal department.
Author: Supriya Pachpute, Project Manager, Isobar World Services
We’ve come a long way from letters and telegrams. For the first time, people are having meaningful conversations with businesses on a massive scale thanks to automation with bots, a CRM, and new channels. Conversational marketing is changing the way companies talk with their customers by making interactions seamless and faster than ever before. Your customers are having conversations. Why not join in?
