Conversational marketing is marketing that engages customers through dialogue that puts the focus on interactions with the customers through two-way communications in real-time conversations. Conversational marketing includes engaging website visitors, converting them into leads or being a vehicle for existing customers to continuously engage with a company.

Conversational marketing allows for quicker engagement and encourages an increased pace through the customer journey. The term was originally coined by Drift, a marketing and sales company.

It changed the way companies can communicate with their prospects and customers, allowing teams to communicate faster with their website visitors and ultimately get those visitors the answers and information they need in a timely fashion. This creates an authentic experience between the brand and the consumer and often builds a stronger foundational relationship between the parties.

• What are Some Examples of Conversational Marketing?
• What are the Benefits of Conversational Marketing?
• Types of Conversational Marketing
• Why Conversational Marketing is Important for your Business?
• Why is Conversational Marketing a Rising Trend in Digital Marketing?
• Conversational Marketing Companies
• What are Conversational Strategies?
• What are the Best Conversational Marketing Technologies?
• What is the Scope of Conversational Marketing?
• What is the Difference Between Conversational Marketing and Conversational Commerce?
• What are the Best Conversational Marketing Techniques for Small Businesses?
• How Does SEO Work With Conversational Marketing?
• What are Conversational Marketing Platforms?
• How do you Use Artificial Intelligence for Conversational Marketing?
• How Important are Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing?
• How can you Leverage Conversational Marketing Without Automated Chatbots?
• Why is Conversational Marketing Perfect for Your Tech Business?
• What are Some Ways to Use Chatbots and Conversational Marketing for B2B Marketing?
• What is Conversational Email Marketing?
• How do you Use Conversational Marketing?

What are Some Examples of Conversational Marketing?

To roll out a conversational marketing strategy, human-directed rules and strategies should seamlessly blend with the technologies used to deliver and capture conversational experiences. Many companies use some or a combination of tools, such as chatbot or live chat software, customer support, marketing automation tools, SMS texting and even streaming services for live video conversations.

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Social media platforms also have built-in messenger features that allow social followers to reach out to a brand from their social channels just as they would on a customer support portal or marketing website. Many companies employ conversational marketing well, including the following examples:

Whole Foods

Chatbots are becoming more commonplace in the food and beverage industry with an aim at increasing brand awareness, booking reservations or providing recipe and meal ideas. Whole Foods has a Facebook Messenger bot that prompts users to decide the groceries they may need or recipe ideas.

Through various filtering options based on meal or event types, they can narrow down the options a user may need to find the perfect meal for their occasion. They also make it fun and interactive, showing they have a clear understanding of their personas.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a leader in marketing automation software and has its own chat tools built into its technology. Whether a prospective customer is looking for a solution to fit their needs or an existing customer seeks to support, conversational marketing is used at various steps. HubSpot also offers a form of video conversational marketing through their social and streaming channels, hosting user groups for thought leadership sharing or new tips and updates.

Okta

Conversational marketing doesn’t always have to begin at the first touch opportunity. Okta uses a return visitor chatbot. Their website stores cookie data in the user’s browser to detect when a user begins a repeat visit and personalizes it with a “Welcome back” prompt to help let the user pick up where they left off. This is helpful for encouraging more conversion-focused activities, such as booking a meeting with the sales team or getting in touch with a support representative.

What are the Benefits of Conversational Marketing?

For marketing teams adopting conversational marketing tactics, there are a significant amount of advantages and reasons to allocate resources and tools toward this effective route, including the following:

Humanize the customer experience. Conversational marketing gives sales and customer experience teams the ability to deliver a more human touch with prospects. This begins the relationship on a positive foot, especially when the conversation is more personalized for the user.

Increase engagement. One-to-one communications with a brand give consumers the feeling that they have direct access to the lifeline that they need. This may lead to an increase in engagement from prospects who may not have previously identified themselves as someone who may need information or support.

Provide a boost to the sales funnel. When conversational marketing is a deployed tactic, businesses are able to quickly identify quality leads as they come in and share information that is crucial to the selling process. Through a conversation, this could lead to an increase in conversions and a shortened sales cycle.

Quickly recommend products or services. Through inputs or comments from consumers, live agents and chatbots can be used to direct consumers quickly to recommended products or services that may be aligned with their needs. With data about past purchase history, chatbots can also pop up to make recommendations for other products based on customers who may be a part of a similar persona profile group.

Maintain customer relationships. Being able to rapidly respond to customer support issues or provide information on other products and services provides a positive feeling for those customers. With customer retention and revenue growth over time, conversational marketing will not only maintain a positive customer relationship but can also grow one as well.

Respond in real time. Especially with customer support issues, submitting a support ticket and waiting to hear back can be a cumbersome and frustrating experience for teams. Being able to respond in real-time reduces the resolution of an issue, but also could lead to more sales from new prospects, as they work through their customer decision-making process.

Collect important visitor data easily in the engagement process. When dealing with static lead capture mechanisms — such as forms — marketers can collect data from prospects, but often not without hesitation from the end user. Forms are commonplace and many users are hesitant to give information up about themselves. With conversational marketing, data point collection can be built into the interactive experience. The data points collected will be shared organically through the conversation and collected in a marketing automation or CRM tool.

Types of Conversational Marketing

Chatbots, social media, customer support/service, and sales are just a few examples. And every day, people are inventing new ways to use it.

So, we’ve broken down the types of conversational marketing to show you all the ways you can use them:

Personalization — For Hims

For Hims has an excellent idea with their conversational marketing tools.

When you arrive on their website, they offer a quiz to find your perfect haircut. Then, using a few questions, it spits out a haircut for you.

And, to make this a great inbound marketing tool, they hint at some products of theirs.

This is an excellent example of using conversational marketing uniquely.

Lead generation — Formidable Forms

If you’ve ever filled out a standard form, you know how boring it is. We’re instantly transported to a doctor’s office and start shuddering. But what if forms could be fun?

Conversational forms are perfect for replacing boring forms. It presents one question at a time and in a simple way. So, user’s complete your form more often.

Plus, you can turn a conversational form into a quiz and really ramp up the lead generation. How does making a viral quiz sound for getting visitors to your site?

Conversational forms are the future of online forms.

Chatbots — Drift

Did you expect the company that invented the term ‘conversational marketing’ wouldn’t use it on their website?

This little chatbot pops up to start a conversation as soon as you arrive on Drift’s website. And it shows different messages to different visitors. So, you spread multiple messages from a small tool.

A proactive marketing strategy is best for lead generation, and chatbots are an excellent way to be proactive.

Social Media Chat — WHO + WhatsApp

Conversational marketing doesn’t always have to be for a sales purposes.

Sometimes, you can use it to provide information in a natural and fun way. For example, WHO and WhatsApp paired up to get COVID information to people. Instead of reading like a news article, you ask questions as if you’re texting someone.

You find a similar thing on Facebook Messenger.

Over time, people and companies find unique ways to use conversational marketing.

Sales — Amazon Echo

This piece of conversational marketing often goes overlooked but is right in our homes!

If you have an Amazon Echo and ask about a product, Alexa tells you about it. But, then Alexa asks, “Would you like me to add this to your Amazon cart?”

A genius idea by Amazon.

It’s like having a small Amazon sales rep in your home. But, this minor feature leads to massive growth in sales for Amazon. 

And that’s one of the main goals of conversational marketing.

Customer Service — 1-800-Flowers

1-800-Flowers uses a flexible chatbot in this situation.

It welcomes customers and offers help. Based on the customer’s response, it will lead customers down different paths.

For example, if a customer wants to buy flowers, it leads them down a sales path toward the sales team. If a customer has an issue with an order, it leads them down a path to fix it.

Chatbots are versatile, and they handle multiple responsibilities on your website.

Information — HubSpot

You can even present information with this method.

Which, we have to say, is a much more engaging. To teach by doing, Hubspot used conversational marketing to teach the visitor about…conversational marketing!

Kudos to Hubspot’s smart conversational marketing strategy.

With a conversational-style page, the user sees how conversational marketing works. So, conversational marketing doesn’t always have to be through chat or to get qualified leads.

Capturing a website visitor’s attention is easy with this method.

Why Conversational Marketing is Important for your Business?

Conversational marketing involves having conversations with your potential customers to better understand their needs and pain points. This type of marketing is highly effective in quickly moving buyers through the funnel, as it allows you to build trust and rapport with them quickly.

Below are some reasons why your business should look into conversational marketing as soon as possible.

Learning About Customers

It’s important to note that conversations can provide a lot of useful information about someone. When a customer chats with an AI bot, the bot can learn about the customer’s interests, shopping habits, and more. This data can be used to create a profile that helps customize the customer’s experience.

Acquiring More Leads

Conversational marketing allows brands to connect with potential leads more naturally without interrupting their experience with forms or other barriers. By engaging in conversation with leads, brands can slowly move them through the sales funnel while also getting valuable insights along the way. Additionally, targeted messages can be sent to leads that are more likely to convert, making the most of every opportunity.

Fostering a Personal Buying Experience

Conversational marketing makes the buying experience more human-like. With conversational marketing, brands can engage with their visitors in a conversation rather than just having a generic catalog. This type of marketing can help brands to connect with their customers and create a more personal experience.

For example, Sephora has been using chatbots to help shoppers with their purchases. The chatbot acts as a personal stylist, asking questions and giving recommendations based on the shopper’s preferences and concerns. This allows shoppers to find the right products for their needs and makes the shopping experience more efficient and enjoyable.

Hastening the Conversion Cycle

Conversational marketing is a type of marketing that allows you to have conversations with your leads to generate more sales. You can actually level up your conversion game by making the most of conversational marketing.

Enhancing Availability

In other words, conversational marketing allows you to provide customer service and assistance even when your business is closed. This is possible because you’re using a chatbot that is available 24/7 to answer any questions or help shoppers with their needs. This type of marketing is beneficial because it allows you to reach shoppers when it’s most convenient for them, which could result in more sales.

Collecting Feedback

To create a great customer experience, brands need to collect feedback from customers. Conversational marketing allows brands to do this effectively, and the feedback they receive can help them improve their customer experience and boost sales.

Establishing Loyal Relationships

A brand that takes the time to get to know its customers can create a more personalized and meaningful experience for them. This, in turn, can build loyalty and a stronger relationship between the customer and the brand.

Your AI bot can send shoppers targeted offers based on their spending habits. For example, if a customer spends a certain amount, they may be incentivized to enroll in your loyalty program. You can also offer benefits when they sign up for your program, such as access to your new collection first or additional discounts.

Boosting Revenues

Conversational marketing allows you to improve your brand reputation by putting customers first and engaging with them in real-time conversations. This kind of marketing can also boost your revenue outcomes by collecting feedback to improve customer experience and using data to personalize conversations.

Why is Conversational Marketing a Rising Trend in Digital Marketing?

Conversational marketing uses various tools to turn prospects into customers. This compelling approach brings success to businesses as it is fast, and direct, and builds relationships. It removes all the barriers that prevent potential customers from making a purchase.

It does so by decreasing wait times for a response. 90% of customers rate immediate responses as essential or very important, so speed is crucial. This approach also makes customers feel valued by providing direct and personalized communication.

While initial audience research is valuable, interactions with your customers through conversational marketing have additional benefits. You can learn more about their wants and needs, which helps you build a report and serve them better.

Happy customers that you have personal relationships with result in trust and loyalty. The results for your business are positive:

• Increased sales
• Fewer complaints and negative reviews
• Repeat purchases
• Referrals

A considered approach, some knowledge, and effort are required to get your conversational marketing right.

Conversational Marketing Companies

We’ll introduce you to some of the best conversational marketing tools and platforms in the market.

1. Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger Chatbot is an effective customer service tool for various brands. According to Accenture, 57% of businesses state that chatbots deliver higher ROIs with less effort. With Facebook Messenger, you can provide shopping facilities, customer service support, order tracking, and many more.

For instance, you can add a “Buy Now” button within the Messenger app to allow customers to shop directly in the app without having to visit your site. This is quite important for customers because it shortens their buying journey and as a result, it helps you to increase conversion more quickly.

Here is an example from Next. Being the biggest clothing retailer in the UK, Next wanted to increase its online sales. Yet, they needed to provide a friendly and personalized experience to keep building one-to-one relationships like they’re visiting their physical store. To do this, they built a Facebook Messenger bot that guided customers through their buying process.

Customers are able to start a chat and ask about the jean’s color, how it would fit them, how they can combine the selected clothes and more through a chatbot. This then enabled Next to deliver retargeted campaigns and optimize their customer journey.

2. Instagram Messenger

Since the end of 2020, Facebook has updated the Facebook Messenger API and made this available on Instagram too. Previously Instagram accounts with more than 10k followers were able to create a chatbot but starting from August 2021 all brands can now easily integrate their Instagram messaging chatbot with their technology stack. This help brands on Instagram to drive more meaningful conversations.

We recommend using Instagram DMs to provide an exclusive customer service, make product recommendations and direct your followers to your site.

3. Google Business Messages

Today 75% of consumers prefer to engage with a brand over private messaging channels versus traditional channels. That’s why Google enables you to directly start a conversation via Google Maps, Search, and brand websites, creating a frictionless path to purchasing.

When customers google your name, they can directly see a “Message” button. If customers click on the “Message” button, it’ll automatically start a conversation with them. Then by only using keywords you can help your customers and engage with them.

This will also allow you to collect more personalized data about your site visitors. You can then re-engage with those customers via segmented and retargeted messages. Google Business Messages is certainly one of the most promising conversational marketing platforms and it is set to become a major player in the future.

4. MobileMonkey

MobileMonkey is a set of marketing, sales and customer service platforms for B2C companies which offer different chatbot solutions to reach more customers on Instagram, SMS, live chat & Facebook Messenger. From conversational marketing chatbots to customer support, AI and automation tools, there are plenty of different solutions designed for creators & brands, digital agencies, in-house marketers, SMBs and more.

Within this list, MobileMonkey certainly stands out for its wide range of solutions and pricing options.

5. WhatsApp Business App

“WhatsApp has become the center of gravity for billions of users around the world. It’s where we
message the people we care about most.” says HubSpot’s Head of Conversational Marketing, Connor Cirillo, and then adding that, “Businesses always want to build relationships and meet customers where they are. WhatsApp can become one of the most important marketing channels.”

Yet, today only 7% of marketers use WhatsApp for business purposes. If you want to be accessible to your customers, then we highly recommend using WhatsApp for your business. You can use WhatsApp Business for more than customer support. For instance, when you have a new product or collection, you can promote it on WhatsApp as well.

One of the examples that we loved most is from Hellmann’s Brazil. What did they do differently? Well, they used WhatsApp for creating story-based chat flow conversations. You can text WhatsCook about the recipes or even send photos of the progression and then receive video-based instructions. The app also reminds you when the dish is done too! By using chat flows and labels, they also provided a choose-your-own-adventure story to engage with customers.

6. HubSpot Live Chat

HubSpot is a platform that offers inbound marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM solutions. HubSpot states that “today’s buyers want information — and they want it now”. Conversational experiences on landing pages (such as customer service chatbots and live chat) convert 3 to 4 more than a traditional landing page. And that’s why they provide a free live chat tool.

They want you to use live chat to directly connect with your visitors, prospects and customers in real-time. This will then allow you to route customer inquiries to your customer support team, and pass your leads to your sales team to close deals faster.

HubSpot’s Conversational Marketing Manager Connor Cirillo says,

“Your conversational marketing audience is much more insightful than your other channels. They’ll tell you in their own words how they want to interact with your business. There’s no inferring or guessing, like with web traffic.”

This means that you can collect data and insights at scale, especially from messaging channels such as chatbots. This can help you to optimize your customer interactions, improve your product offers, create more personalized content and recommendations.

What are Conversational Strategies?

A conversational strategy is a game plan for turning conversations into opportunities. Your conversational strategy should include: 

• Business goals and opportunities 
• Current and future use cases
• Which conversational channels you’ll use (like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram)
• Your vision for the user experience
• Key performance indicators (how you’ll measure success)

1. Define the scope and use case

Planning your conversational strategy starts with defining a specific business problem. Try to avoid beginning with a wish list of everything you’d like your conversational app to handle. 

Instead, begin with a specific business problem, or use case, that could be solved or improved easily. This will help ensure your conversational strategy is adding long-term value to your business. 

When defining your use case, start with processes that are repetitive and fairly predictable. At the end of the day, you already know that 20% of FAQs generate 80% of your traffic.

But remember, while efficiency and cost reduction are valid goals, the focus should always be on how you can improve the customer experience. If your conversational strategy does not also make your customers happier, you’re setting yourself up to fail. 

• Can your conversational strategy help you solve your customers’ problems faster? 
• Can you integrate data to make experiences more contextual? 
• Could your customer experience be more personalized? 
• Can you anticipate what the majority of your customers want to ask?
• Which conversational channel is better for each use case? Example: Webchat might be a better pre-sales tool for communicating with customers on your website while messaging channels like WhatsApp are usually better for post-sales support

These are the types of questions that should guide your conversational strategy. 

2. Focus on the customer experience

The goal for any digital innovation leader is to reduce friction in the customer experience. Every new step or delay is a chance for customers to abandon their journey. 

Customers want their transactions to be low-effort and uncomplicated. In short, they don’t have time for friction. Thankfully, conversational apps help create the zero-friction future that customers want, reducing customer effort dramatically compared to traditional channels. 

That might seem simple, but it’s easy to get sidetracked during the planning process. Businesses tend to gravitate towards KPIs that serve themselves and directly impact their bottom line. 

An easy way to keep the focus on the customer is to make customer lifetime value (CLTV) a priority. CLTV is the value a customer contributes to your business throughout their entire relationship with your company.

It’s hard to improve CLTV without a customer-centric approach. As long as improving CLTV is at the top of your to-do list, it’ll be hard to go wrong. 

3. Define the go-live strategy

After you’ve developed your conversational app, how do you get your customers to use it? The good part is, conversational experiences, like the ones we build at Hubtype, are built on the messaging channels people use every day. 

Bear in mind that conversational channels generate a lot of traffic (after all, it’s where we spend most of our time). So, make sure to have a well-controlled and well-managed roll-out. 

A good example of a controlled rollout might start by promoting your new channels to certain traffic on your website, or only showing them in the Android app. 

This makes it easier to guide people towards engaging with you. Another example is that if you’re currently using phone IVR to greet customers, tell them how they can find you on WhatsApp, Facebook, or whichever messaging channel you’re using. They’ll probably be happy to hang up and find you there.

Keep in mind, before you start sending messages to customers, you’ll want to get them to opt-in. An opt-in is when customers give explicit consent to receive messages from your business.

It’s important to get opt-ins right. Businesses that don’t could be in violation of GDPR regulations and local privacy laws. It’s always good to partner with an expert, like Hubtype, to help you stay compliant. 

4. Start fast, scale later

Next, analyze how customers use your conversational app, then adjust accordingly. Learn from the limitations and expand based on where you’re seeing the most opportunity. 

For example, if 70% of people ask for tracking information, this is a good area to integrate with your shipping platform. Just don’t lose sight of your original use case, and make sure that the potential actions your customer can take are clear. 

Also, avoid overcomplicating the conversational design with AI in the beginning. This often leads to wasted time, money, and effort. 

While AI can complement a conversational strategy, it is usually not needed as a core focus. More often than not, our clients find that rule-based bots are flexible enough to handle their use cases.

5. Evolve constantly

Your job isn’t done after your conversational app has been deployed. Continuous improvement is important for a successful conversational strategy. So, measure, learn, and improve constantly.

Identifying limitations will give you important insights into both your conversational strategy and your business. 

You might be surprised to see how people are interacting with your conversational app. Remember that limitations represent new opportunities to improve. 

What are the Best Conversational Marketing Technologies?

Implementing a conversational marketing strategy can be difficult, especially with so many tools and software available. To achieve your marketing goals, you must think about the needs of your business before deciding which platform is best for you. Each tool has its own unique features and functionalities that may benefit your brand, but it’s important to consider the usability from the customers’ perspective, too.

Here are some examples of conversational marketing tools that are suitable for businesses across a range of industries. 

1. Facebook Messenger

If you’re looking for an effective customer service tool and your brand is in the e-commerce space, then Facebook Messenger can help improve your ROI. According to research conducted by Accenture, 57% of businesses agree that chatbots deliver higher ROI with minimal effort required. 

Facebook Messenger enables brands to provide customer service support, order tracking and shopping facilities all within one simple tool. Customers don’t even have to visit your website! Instead, they can shop within the app if you have added a “Buy Now” button, which reduces the buyer journey and increases the number of conversions more quickly. 

2. Instagram Direct Messenger

Instagram helps encourage more meaningful conversations by allowing brands to integrate their Instagram messaging bot with their technology stack. Messenger API supports Instagram messaging, giving brands the ability to manage customer conversations at scale. If you’re looking to provide an exclusive experience for your customers, then you can use Instagram DMs to make specific product recommendations and send personalized discounts that direct them to your website.

3. WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp is one of the most used apps in the world, with over 2 billion active users worldwide. The UK has over 30.1 million active users alone! According to Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp at Meta, over 175 million people message a business account on WhatsApp every day, which demonstrates the importance of having it as one of your key marketing channels. 

If you want your brand to be accessible to your customers, then WhatsApp Business provides the tools to do just that. Not only does it enable you to speak to your customers, but it also allows you to promote new products or collections as well.

4. HubSpot Live Chat

With HubSpot Live Chat, you can connect directly with your customers and prospects in real-time and collect data at scale, which can then be passed on to your customer service and sales teams. Conversational marketing tools like HubSpot can help provide more insights into your customers than any other marketing channel. In fact, chatbots and live chat can convert three-to-four times more customers than a traditional landing page

HubSpot provides free live chat software, which enables you to create targeted messaging that connects with different segments of your audience. 

What is the Scope of Conversational Marketing?

If you’re a customer-focused marketer, a robust conversational marketing strategy can transform your customer relationships by identifying the best ways to connect with your customers. Here are the key components of conversational marketing to consider when refining your strategy:

1. Customer-time –  Conversations should occur when the customer wants to engage with your brand, whether that’s when they have a spare moment before they go to bed, or once they’ve dropped the kids off at school. It’s an asynchronous relationship that requires businesses to chat in real-time, with the added flexibility of starting a conversation at 8 am and finishing it at 1o pm to cater for busy lifestyles. Focus on the needs of the customer, not the needs of your business. 
2. Scalable – As conversations happen on the customer’s time, they need to be scalable, which can often be problematic for small SMEs with few resources. Chatbots can provide support 24/7 by answering common questions that already have the information readily available. They offer customers a more personalized way of accessing information and can formulate accurate responses based on the context of the conversation through machine learning.
3. Context – Without context, messaging wouldn’t be convenient as you risk wasting your customers’ time and patience. Customers want to get to the answer as quickly as possible, so it’s important to leverage CRM as a key part of your conversational marketing strategy. The more data you have on your customers, the more value you’ll provide – but make sure you are in compliance with GDPR!
4. Channels –  Conversations should always take place in the channel that the customer prefers to use, whether that’s over the phone, via WhatsApp, or via a chatbot. Conversational marketing is about providing value to your customers and engaging with them on their terms, just like inbound marketing. 

What is the Difference Between Conversational Marketing and Conversational Commerce?

Many experts are talking about the beginning of  the conversational era, or the “age of conversational”. Conversational marketing, conversational commerce, and conversational shopping are often used as terms in this context.

The term “conversational” clearly implies a “conversation” or “talking”! This might sound trivial, but it’s a huge contrast to traditional one-way marketing that’s almost exclusively based on bombarding consumers with information (if they want it, or not).

In contrast, conversational marketing is a direct interaction between companies and (potential) customers. It opens up the way for a two-way conversation. That’s also why conversational marketing is also called “interactive marketing”. Due to its conversational character, this type of marketing often takes place on instant messaging apps. Messaging apps are basically interactive chat tool!

It’s important though not to confuse conversational messaging or marketing with conversational commerce. Conversational commerce refers specifically to the sales process in direct conversation with customers, for example via WhatsApp. The other, more general terms, refer to the practice of engaging in conversations with customers through a messaging service.

While companies in conversational commerce try to sell something to the customer through dialog, conversational marketing is more about brand positioning, awareness and attention.

Matthias Mehner, VP Global Marketing, Sinch

Often, the term “conversational” is also equated with chatbots or even artificial intelligence, but this is not particularly accurate. Sure, chatbots are a conversational technology, but conversational marketing is not the same as using a chatbot. It can actually also be handled entirely by humans. So, while some companies might use conversational chatbots in their conversational marketing efforts, it’s not a must.

The term “conversational commerce” has been around since 2015. It was UX expert, Chris Messina, who has worked for Uber and Google, who first floated the phrase in a blog post.

In it, Messina defines c-commerce as follows:

Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.

Conversational commerce emerges thus at the intersection between shopping and conversation. It is important that to note that the idea of “conversational” is for the exchange between customer and company to be dialogue-based. It is therefore not a one-way communication from the companies to the customers like an ad banner, but a two-way exchange.

Whereas typical advertising messages sound like: “Buy this, buy that!”; conversational commerce sounds more like: “What do you need today and how can I help you find it quickly and easily?” This approach doesn’t only sound more pleasant and customer-friendly, it actually is!

Surveys among consumers show:

• 91 percent of consumers want help in real-time
• Live chats can increase conversion rates by up to 82 percent
• more than one billion users contact companies on messenger apps every week

This is precisely why experts and companies believe that c-commerce is the future of customer communication.

What are the Best Conversational Marketing Techniques for Small Businesses?

Conversational marketing platforms can help businesses better communicate with their audience, but how can a company create a successful conversational marketing strategy? Here are a few tips to get started.

1. Use chatbots smartly

Chatbots are beneficial for:

• Easing customer pain points
• Gathering actionable information quickly
• Surfacing content
• Directing prospects towards the best solution

Casper mattresses went even further and created a bot to keep insomniacs company in the wee hours of the morning. 

2. Implement self-service options

Not only do self-service options lower the burden on reps, but they can also lead to higher customer satisfaction. Giving customers the option to engage with a live rep is wonderful. It empowers them with the ability to resolve an issue on their own. 

3. Boost your social media presence

Many businesses are turning to social media channels to engage with their audience. This includes 1-800-Flowers, which was used as an example by Mark Zuckerberg to demonstrate the power of conversational commerce on Facebook Messenger. Sephora also uses Facebook Messenger to let their customers book appointments based on geo-tagging. 

4. Fast track your qualified prospects to live reps

If self-service options can’t solve an issue, you’ll need to prioritize leads for live support. Conversational marketing platforms enable businesses to identify which leads are most likely to buy and then move them to the front of the line. 

5. Use bots to arrange meetings

Deploying bots to qualify prospects and book meetings with a rep is a good way to put the customer at the heart of the conversation. Instead of waiting for reps to return their calls, customers can quickly book a meeting through a bot and move on to other matters. 

6. Turn to text messaging

Once meetings with prospects have been booked, you can use text messaging to send helpful reminders as the date nears. Or, you can take a page from Ikea, which uses SMS alerts to inform customers of new products at their branch. Or Reebok, which uses SMS to send out relevant promotional offers. It’s important to remember that these conversational marketing examples are part of a holistic strategy that adds value to the customer experience. 

7. Map out the customer experience

As omnichannel experiences become the norm, mapping the customer journey is becoming more important. Creating a map of the customer experience can help businesses pinpoint the places where conversational marketing platforms can ease pain points by connecting prospects to chatbots or live reps. 

8. Understand your audience

One of the biggest rewards of conversational marketing is the amount of data it provides. Every time a visitor engages with a chatbot speaks to a rep, or fills out a survey, they’re generating more information about their needs. Conversational marketing platforms enable reps to see how and where they’re succeeding – and what they can do better. 

9. Skill up sales reps

Providing sales reps with training on strategies and tools can help them unlock the full power of conversational marketing. The ability to have real-time conversations with prospects that have already been qualified and prioritized is a time-saver. But it’s important that reps also have the soft skills required for effective conversational marketing. On-demand training platforms like Trailhead can help them get started. 

10. Put a premium on conversations

It’s easy to get caught up in analyzing what’s converting into the pipeline and what’s not. So don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal: building better relationships. Every conversational marketing interaction is creating a positive or negative experience for the prospect. And the more positive, personal interactions they have with a company, the more likely they are to become loyal and buy in the future. 

How Does SEO Work With Conversational Marketing?

Most people jump online because they’re looking for an answer or a way to solve a problem. If your conversational marketing tool can help them do this more quickly and efficiently, it’s going to boost your brand. Here are some of the top ways that conversational marketing works well with SEO. 

Provide 24/7 Customer Support

One of the things we mentioned first was the consumer’s desire for convenience. Khoros also reports that 83% of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints, avoiding a poor consumer experience. And “poor” can be subjective, so being available 24/7 through conversational marketing can help your brand provide the highest level of support with things like:

• Answering basic functionality questions
• Assisting with shipping issues
• Troubleshooting products after the sale
• Handling return requests

While most websites have some customer support-related content, they may not provide every solution to a customer in their hour of need. Having a conversational marketing tool on your site can give customers the support they need as well as map some of the most-asked issues that you can further address in other forms of content and SEO. 

Adds Value to Products and Services

The product and service pages on your website are generally the ones that drive your business. But, they’re also where you’re likely to get the most questions. 

You can add value to these pages and support the content you’ve delivered by supplementing it with a conversational marketing solution. Since a page answering every potential question might be a bit dense, it makes more sense to have a chatbot on hand that can fill in those gaps by addressing some frequently asked questions.

Improves Time Spent on Your Website

One of the biggest benefits of conversational marketing to SEO is that it keeps visitors on your website longer. Google doesn’t specifically disclose its ranking factors, but the longer a person stays on your website, the more the search engine giant “likes” you and gives you favor. 

On the other hand, if a visitor shows up to your site, doesn’t find what they’re looking for, and “bounces” quickly, this is going to harm your rankings. Beyond that, your visitors that couldn’t find solutions to their problems are now frustrated and much less likely to return. 

With Drift Marketing, your chatbot solution can let the customer know they are standing by to give them a hand if they have any questions. When a customer engages with a chatbot, this keeps them on the same page of your website and will help improve your rankings. 

Boosts Customer Engagement

Another potential SEO ranking factor is a visitor’s engagement with your website. More specifically, this refers to multiple page views and time on your site, which we just discussed. 

A conversational marketing tool can boost your engagement on the former by getting visitors to click on different parts of your site. It can do this by providing an interactive tour of your site, giving a visitor links to other articles and resources, and using an effective call to action that gets a visitor to buy a product or sign up for a list. 

Delivers Valuable User Data

Finally, you can improve your SEO strategy by collecting as much information as possible about your typical visitor’s wants and needs. A conversational marketing solution is a perfect tool to tell you what is working with your brand and which areas you need to focus on to improve. 

Once you have this data, you can double down on your efforts to post more content in areas of interest to consumers and create additional content that fills in missing gaps. Information from these one-on-one sessions can also tell you if there are any navigation or technical issues with your website that might impact SEO and the customer experience. 

What are Conversational Marketing Platforms?

Although developing a good chatbot can take a lot of time and effort, there are still a lot of excellent platforms that help simplify the process. Consider using the following platforms to provide your customers with instant help.

SendPulse

This chatbot builder allows you to automate replies, manage customers’ inquiries, and move leads down the sales funnel. You can set up a chatbot on the most popular marketing channels like Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, and Instagram. By creating a chatbot using SendPulse, you have an opportunity to quickly consult customers and provide them with all the necessary information about your products.

SendPulse allows you to add up to 10 quick replies to make the process faster, use buttons to redirect users to your site, or provide the necessary information using links. To enhance your sales process, the platform enables you to receive payments from customers right in the chatbot by integrating your preferred payment system.

Chatfuel

The service empowers you to automate all your marketing efforts using a chatbot. It will help you manage your lead generation and customer support service. It provides you with an editor that allows you to design chatbots to your liking without any coding skills. The platform enables you to create a chatbot that can provide your customer with information and advice.

Since brands often use popular social media platforms, Chatfuel offers you to integrate with lots of other platforms. It also provides users with access to analytics to explore their chatbot performance and gather valuable insights.

13chats

13chats is a platform that suits the needs of marketers, support teams, and sales reps. With its Facebook chatbots and live chat option, you can boost sales volume and customer satisfaction. If you have a small or medium-sized startup, you can use 13chats to improve your online chat services. It allows you to use a drag-and-drop editor to create professional message flows with no coding skills or knowledge.

13chats’ chatbots enable you to update customer info, upcoming promotions, product releases, webinars, and personalized offers. Moreover, you have the access to chatbot analytics to evaluate your performance. These insights can help you deliver the best content that meets customers’ needs and desires.

How do you Use Artificial Intelligence for Conversational Marketing?

Artificial intelligence is all set to revolutionize the digital marketing arena. Mentioned here are some of the ways indicating how Conversational AI is changing the digital marketing landscape with effective marketing strategies. Take a look-

1. Customer Analysis

Conversational AI can automatically gather insights and other information such as key data points, track purchasing patterns , analyse habits of the customers. They can also store information on the types of questions being asked and the complexity of those questions, allowing you to be better equipped to answer future questions or upsell those customers with additional products.

2. Customer engagement and retention

Conversational AI-powered chatbots can engage leads in real-time. In fact, recent research from InsideSales.com shows that lapses between form submission and marketing or sales contact has a direct impact on whether leads are converted into customers’ also allow you to quickly and easily reach out to customers who may be at risk, and provide them with targeted messages, special deals, coupons, and other offers that convince them to stick with your brand.

3. Generating leads

Just as how Conversational AI can scan through big chunks of data to understand the user’s behavior patterns, it can also analyze huge data blocks to help you find the ideal customers. Other than this, conversational AI-powered chatbots can also help businesses find potential leads in their customers.

Moreover, it is effectively being used to sort through huge data reservoirs to carry out mundane or finicky tasks to speed up the whole information-sharing process. With regards to recruiting, conversational AI-enabled tools can help professionals scan through the stack of CVs to find the ideal candidate for the job role.

4. Email marketing

One of the best ways NLP based conversational AI can help digital marketers is by shooting personalized email marketing campaigns based on the behavior of the user. With the help of this technique, marketers can send emails that only get triggered if the customer carries out certain actions. Going beyond this, it also helps in personalizing content, which can further help marketers improve their email campaigns and maximize their results.

In short, if used rightly, chatbots powered by conversational AI can help digital marketing professionals reach the right set of audiences at the right time. The technology further makes sure that the content delivered is relevant, purposeful, engaging, and is most likely to fetch in a conversion.

5. Social media outreach

Conversational AI-powered chatbots help businesses scale their social media efforts of organizations by answering customer queries, delivering personalized content, and automating customer outreach. It can, for example, monitor social media profiles for new comments, likes, or messages, and respond in real-time by asking questions about their needs, by providing additional information, or by upselling your products to existing customers. They can also be used to connect landing pages and social media.

For example, when a customer registers for an upcoming webinar or other events, a chatbot could reach out to that individual via Facebook Messenger or other popular channel and engage with them in a meaningful and personalized way – increasing the likelihood they will actually attend and, eventually, convert. Conversational Ai-powered bots allow you to maintain an active social media presence – without the associated time or cost.

6. Brand mention monitoring

Conversational AI can seamlessly integrate with existing brand tracking software, allowing you to quickly and easily monitor ongoing discussions about your brand online, gain a clearer understanding of how others interact with your brand’s products or services, and allowing you to uncover new reputation management opportunities.

7. Personalized marketing

Though it may take more effort to obtain and maintain a personal connection with customers, research shows that people who feel an emotional connection to your company are far likelier to purchase your products and champion your brand. Traditional marketing, however, is often insufficient to build trust and affinity or create customer advocates.

Conversational AI provides a more “human” way for brands to engage with prospects and customers. Chatbots powered by conversational AI can use the information gathered from your website, back-end systems, and past interactions to provide personalized experiences and to suggest products that closely match a user’s interest level, background, and needs.

How Important are Call Center Agents in Conversational Marketing?

A call center agent is in charge of many things. For example, dealing with customers’ calls, hearing complaints, and solving customer service problems. On the other hand, they also give general information and guide customers through the purchase process.

Besides, as a call center agent, you also have to let customers know about the terms and features of a product. Added to this, you also have to showcase the company’s expertise through voice and online chats.

A marketing strategy of this kind is usually built around either one or many channels.

Each one of these allows you to reach your website’s visitors and engage them.

Conversational Marketing and AI are here to stay, and they can bring a huge amount of benefits to the call center industry, but this doesn’t mean they will take away call center jobs.

Call centers have always found ways to take advantage of new technologies and improve their efforts and services. Chatbots and auto-responders are no exception.

But what will call center agents do if everything is being automated? Let’s find out in the list below.

1.   The human touch

Automated responders still have a long way to go before they can fully interact like a human. Expressing and reacting to emotions, making jokes, and showing empathy… are very hard tasks for AI still. Be sure to train your agents in empathic skills.

On the other hand, many of us still prefer to hear a human voice reply to us when we have an inquiry, complaint, or something urgent. Sometimes we need to feel that our question or query was understood and acknowledged by someone at the company. That’s where call center agents kick-in.

Automated responders still have a long way to go before they can fully interact like a human. Expressing and reacting to emotions, making jokes, and showing empathy… are very hard tasks for AI still. Be sure to train your agents in empathic skills.

On the other hand, many of us still prefer to hear a human voice reply to us when we have an inquiry, complaint, or something urgent. Sometimes we need to feel that our question or query was understood and acknowledged by someone at the company. That’s where call center agents kick-in.

2.   Mutual learning

As we told you earlier, conversational AI can offer and study a huge amount of data from customers and interactions.

It can also record and check each agent’s performance. As a result, you can use this data to keep improving your company’s productivity and create training sessions.

At the same time, new data from customers’ concerns, FAQ’s, and common issues are the pillars that will allow you to create your Conversational Marketing strategy.

You can keep adding to this information and keep it up to date to make your bots more effective.

3.  Creativity in sales

You need to be creative to close deals. AI is smart, ingenious, and accurate when processing huge amounts of data. However, it’s still far from being able to be as creative as a human being.

Factors like the moment of the sale, the customer’s tone of voice, or even holidays can greatly influence the result.

As a salesperson, you need to figure out the best way to answer customers’ questions. On the other hand, you also need to rebut their objection and make them understand. For all of this, one must be creative.

Now that you know it, you should start thinking of creating a creativity training session.

4.   Building a relationship

Today, most businesses understand how important is to build long-lasting relationships with their clients.

In this sense, AI isn’t yet better than humans when it comes to this.

We’re still a little far from saying to our friends “hey I met the coolest AI the other day, we had such a good laugh over the phone”.

This is still the agent’s territory and will continue to be for some good time into the future. Your brand needs to build relationships and your representatives must be the frontliners.

5.   AI is the opening, Agents are the Closing

Every sales team needs some opener agents and closing agents. The first ones take care of making the first impression and warming up a prospect to start a sale process.

This job is now being handed over to Chatbots and Auto-responders since customers like to be greeted the second they contact your brand. They like their questions to be answered fast and accurately and this is a job that AI knows how to perform very well.

On the other hand, when doing follow-ups, subscriptions, solving customer inquiries, or closing a sale, your agents will do a much better job than AI. For this, you need to train them on how to take advantage of AI data and improve the skills we talked about earlier.

How can you Leverage Conversational Marketing Without Automated Chatbots?

Conversational marketing is a powerful way to get better engagement from consumers and drive business results. Here are some top tips for implementing an effective conversational marketing strategy beyond chatbots

Make It Part of Your Omnichannel Initiative

It’s crucial to consider conversational marketing an omnichannel strategy and meet consumers on the channels they actually use. “Ensure that all marketing content you develop gives your audience something to react to, respond to, or act on,” Bojic explained, “and ensure that when they do react, respond, or act, they know you’re paying attention.” It starts with a solid omnichannel content marketing strategy, but brands also need to facilitate a two-way conversation as well.

“A real-time chat (automated or with a human) facilitates the process of moving the customers through the sales funnel in a paced and natural way,” added Ławrowski. That’s why a strong conversational marketing strategy requires brands to focus on the customer journey.

“Sketch each stage of their experience whenever they interact with your brand and see where and how your customers enter your marketing (and sales) cycle,” Ławrowski said. Using this insight, you can tailor potential conversations to the individual more effectively.

Keep Advancing Your Personalization Strategy

Personalization is crucial for engaging with consumers in a more human way. “Use data tools and innovative technologies (e.g., digital personalized kiosks, dedicated mobile apps) to personalize cross-channel engagement,” Bojic said.

She believes this will generate far more qualified leads and business impact than traditional marketing efforts. “Consumers are inclined to ignore irrelevant advertising and promotional content so brands have to earn customer loyalty with exceptional experiences and rich mobile engagement,” said Matt Ramerman, president at Sinch Engage.

Personalization means leveraging customer data to deliver relevant content to consumers, at the right time, on the channels that matter most to them. “Reducing churn is about cultivating and strengthening customer relationships, Ramerman continued, “by offering customers the most relevant experiences and personalized content.” 

Humans Are (Still) More Compelling than Chatbots

“The best tip for implementing a conversational marketing strategy,” said Malte Scholz, CEO and co-founder of Airfocus, “is to get rid of chatbots and employ a human touch.” He believes making sure customers talk to actual people and not bots or auto-responders is crucial for driving engagement. “Most people think that conversational marketing is all about live chat and chatbots,” he continued, “but there is much more to it.”

Ławrowski also recommends keeping conversations human-like, even when using bots. “Just because your customers speak with a piece of software,” he said, doesn’t mean they need to hear “the robot on the other side.” Instead, you can use humor or visual aids — GIFs, memes or videos — to make the conversation feel more genuine.

Online and Offline Channels Are Critical

While digital channels are a great way to reach consumers, in-person interactions have the most impact when it comes to triggering a conversation between a brand and consumers. “No matter what’s happening online,” Bojic said, “a face-to-face dialogue elevates the entire communication.”

That said, brands can still deepen communication with their audience through mobile apps, chatbots and social media. “Even in the context of a live event” Bojic continued, “technology can and should be leveraged to take the conversation to the next level.”

Why is Conversational Marketing Perfect for Your Tech Business?

The importance of developing a better customer experience is no mystery to any marketing professional. But if you are still worried about how to further improve your customer experience to generate more sales and conversions, then you might need to reconsider how conversational your marketing approach is. 

If implemented in the right way, conversational marketing can improve your customer experience to help you get more sales. One of the most successful marketing strategies to drive user engagement, conversational marketing helps expand your customer base by building trust within the potential customers and creating loyal customers.

This personalized approach of digital marketing moves buyers through the marketing and sales funnels faster by communicating with your customer in real-time and one on one. Thankfully, with the automation magic of digital marketing, your marketing professionals do not have to spend a huge amount of time to personally interacting with each of your customers. Rather, the automated conversation initiated by different kinds of tools available speeds up your conversational marketing approach with new leads and existing customers.

Moreover, the method allows you to ask different questions to customers based on their behavior and response, enabling you to gather specific details about your target market. By communicating with your consumers, right when they are eager to engage with your business, your marketing team makes faster lead conversion.

Conversational marketing aims to make customer communication faster and easier for customers to engage with your business, for faster and more qualified lead generation, but only if you are aware of how to implement conversational marketing in the right way.

1. Conversational marketing will enable you to gain genuine, valuable insights about your target customers.

With conversational marketing, your customers can communicate to you, in their own words, what they need and want. Listening to this feedback allows you to:

• Overcome barriers to purchase
• Improve products
• Create tailored customer interactions

TechCrunch estimates that customers spend approximately 5 hours on their phones every day. Chat interfaces can be utilized to record data on a large scale. Leveraging this information, you can deliver relevant content to your customers based on their individual preferences. You can also use this data to define trends.

2. Conversational marketing builds relationships.

Social media has made it easy for your customers to conveniently reach support. This continuous communication between you and your customers fosters organic conversations. Customers feel as though they are talking to a friend. These relationships provide businesses with the opportunity to encourage customers to share the brand and product with friends and family, cross-sell, and subtly solicit input, and even make suggestive sales.

Conversational marketing also allows you to show off the brand’s personality. Give your conversations more personality by using emojis, videos, and creative copywriting. This makes you memorable and reinforces your brand.

3. Conversational marketing captivates your customers as they seek answers.

There are over 2.7 billion smartphone users in the world. Consumers use their phones to access the internet and interact with brands across the globe. When consumers have questions about a product, their immediate reaction is to use their phone to look it up. Conversational marketing channels are mobile-friendly. Consumers want to speak to someone who can save them time by answering their questions quickly.

Chatbots and messaging apps allow customers to ask specific questions about challenges that are unique to them. It also gives you the chance to provide quick and personalized responses.

4. Conversational marketing changes the way your customers buy.

Messaging is fast and seamless. It also takes off the edge and makes customers more relaxed and comfortable. Customers are always on the move, and many do not have the time to write long emails detailing their issues. Conversational marketing gives them a quick and easily accessible avenue to reach you.

If you are a B2B brand, you know how cold and impersonal business can be. Through conversational marketing, your personnel can have personal conversations with prospective clients. With real-time conversations, you can improve conversion rates.

What are Some Ways to Use Chatbots and Conversational Marketing for B2B Marketing?

People always have and always will expect conversations with businesses to be helpful, personal, and empathetic. Conversational marketing is a tactic that can help you use technology to move away from generic mass communication to a unique customer experience. The technology that makes this work includes:

• Live chat
• Chatbots
• Apps such as Slack or WhatsApp

Conversational marketing gives you the ability to have one-on-one conversations at scale across multiple channels seamlessly. This allows you to engage and delight customers at a personal level.

But B2B marketing is different from B2C. We don’t have storefronts. Decision-making periods are naturally longer in B2B sales, so people are less likely to want to start a conversation right away. In this context, chatbots and live chat can be as disruptive to the customer journey as a pop-up.

1. Help prospects understand your offering

For example, B2B companies with complex offerings can use a chatbot to engage website visitors on their service pages to help them find out more. The chatbot allows the visitor to “choose their own adventure” and explore your content in a way that’s contextual and personal to them.

2. Provide better support for products and services

Conversational marketing is particularly effective on websites with high volumes of customers seeking support. In the past, a website might only have been able to provide support in the form of an FAQ. But by using live chat, customers get faster, more personalized resolutions to problems. 

3. Clarify complex pricing models

Many B2B companies struggle to articulate their pricing models on their websites. This is particularly true of companies with a consultative element to their offering. A live chat or chatbot on a pricing page allows you to provide personalized responses to complex pricing queries.

4. Increase lead generation

Conversational marketing can also be used in bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) interactions to increase lead generation. Instead of asking people to go through lead capture forms and wait for a response, they can book a meeting or demo call with a rep right away.

But be wary. When you bypass forms you can increase volume but not necessarily lead quality. Make sure you don’t lower the barrier to entry so much that leads aren’t qualified and you end up wasting time on low-quality leads.

These are just a few examples of how to use conversational marketing in B2B. But the thing they all share is that they’re contextual, personalized, and available at the customer’s convenience.

To make the most of your conversational marketing, HubSpot recommends that it has S.C.O.P.E.

• Standardize. Conversations should be predictable and repeatable. This is key to enabling scalability in your conversational marketing. Know what your customers ask most and provide answers for bots and live chat teams to use. This makes optimization and iterative testing much easier.
• Contextualize. We know that context improves user experience. Customers feel seen and understood when chatbots use information you already have to get right to the heart of their query.
• Optimize. Standardization helps you optimize. Learn from your past conversations so you can improve them in the future and remember that conversational marketing isn’t a cure-all to leapfrog from marketing to sales. It’s another tool that needs testing and optimizing.
• Personalize. This is the whole point of getting back to one-on-one interactions. Context provides a shared understanding, then personalization demonstrates empathy. And empathy is key to a positive conversation.
• Empathize. Using a chatbot to show empathy sounds callous and cynical, but simply acknowledging a customer’s feelings and understanding the problem can go a long way to building a rapport and a positive interaction.

To know when it’s right to use conversational marketing, you need to know your buyer and how they use your website. Audit your site to see how people are moving around it. Are they often looking for more information? Are they bouncing because they have nothing else to engage with?

In places where people need help, you can use chatbots or live chat to improve their experience by giving them contextual and personalized points of engagement.

If your FAQ or API integration section is getting a lot of traffic, having a live chat support team on hand on those pages allows you to give people the support they need when they need it.

What is Conversational Email Marketing?

Conversational email is when brands send emails to existing leads and current consumers to start a conversation on a specific topic. It is one of the fastest ways to reach your target market without being too pushy and encourages people to reply to the email by adding CTAs such as “reply to us if you need anything” or “we can’t wait to hear back from you”.

This particular strategy is a part of conversational marketing. The latter is defined as the way businesses connect with their audience, either through their website, social media channels, SMS marketing, or any type of marketing strategy that involves reaching out to a target market. It provides real-time and one-on-one conversations between the brand and its clients.

One of the many advantages of conversational email is having the chance to create personalized experiences for your customers. The more the receiver feels like the email has only been sent to them, the more likely they are to reply.

Here are a few other advantages of conversational emails:

Email Is Convenient

As we have mentioned, email marketing is one of the most convenient ways to communicate with your customers. No matter where your client is located, you can simply contact them via email. Also, unlike with phone calls and SMS, you can send attachments and include important links in the body.

Personalized Experiences Leads to Customer Satisfaction

The more personalized the email is, the higher the chances of your consumers replying to the email. Send your leads personalized emails that you know they would appreciate by addressing them by their name, and sending special promos and discounts based on their past buying behavior. You can also send content based on blogs that they tend to click on.

A Better Understanding of Your Clients

Using testing and proper target market research can help with understanding your clients better. The more you know about your prospects, the better you can personalize your email conversations with them.

Here are a few ways to get a better understanding of your customer’s needs:

• Send out surveys. Provide surveys to your consumers by sending them to their email addresses. You can also add it as a prompt on your website. Ask questions that would add value to the business and to your customers’ buying experience.
• Take a peek at the comments. Comments and testimonials, whether from blog posts, Google reviews, or through social media can help you understand what your buyers really want. Make it a habit to read through all of the comments a few times a week and respond to them.
• Put yourself in their shoes. Creating personas based on the data that you collect can be a good indicator of what your clients are looking for. Study your customers’ buying behavior as well as the demographics for each customer segment.
• Meet with your sales team. Your salespeople are the ones who talk to your clients the most, so brainstorm with them at least once a month. Ask them the most common pain points your clients are experiencing. Work on these issues and see if the response gets better.
  Getting to know your buyers better will help you decide what content to put out in your email newsletters and that can help start continuous conversations.

The Chance to Create Positive Experiences

A good buying experience leaves a lasting impression on customers. Marketers might think that the only way to give their consumers a positive buying experience is through social media and their website. However, continuous email conversations can also be implemented to create a stronger bond with them.

Here are a couple of ways you can use conversational email to leverage your email campaigns:

Start With the Subject Heading

Customers won’t open an email if the subject line is not interesting enough. Therefore you need to encourage them to stop and read the email content before you can start a conversation with them.

Here are some tips for writing an inviting subject heading that encourages people to engage:

1. Keep it concise and straight to the point.
2. Pique the reader’s interest by asking a question, and then answer it in the body of the email.
3. Use numbers in your subject line.
4. Be creative and think outside the box.
5. Immediately address them by their name.

Set a Warm and Inviting Tone

A lot of companies think sounding like a robot means they sound professional. That’s not true. You can still come off as a professional without seeming too serious or robotic.

Humanize your emails by using a direct, warm, and inviting tone. Customers aren’t inclined to reply to emails that sound flat or feel as if they are talking to a brick wall. Use words that you would normally use in conversations, and see to it that the email flows naturally. Avoid using jargon and use words that your customers can easily understand.

Provide a Brief Q&A Portion

Present a question and follow it up with a direct answer. To make it even more conversational, add a call-to-action at the end of the email.

Here are some CTAs that you can use to encourage people to reply to the email:

1. “Email us back to know more.”
2. “Got any more questions? We’d be more than happy to hear back from you!”
3. “For more questions and answers, please reply to this email directly.”
4. “We love hearing back from our customers. Hit the reply button if you have any questions.”

Offering solutions to your consumers’ pain points can help start a conversation and build a relationship with the brand.

Personalize Your Email Campaigns

As mentioned earlier, keeping your emails personalized can increase the chances of your readers replying to the email.

Here are a few more tips to make your email content personalized:

1. Segment your email lists to make the content relevant to the receivers.
2. Address them by their first or last name.
3. Use behavior triggers based on their past actions.
4. Send personalized birthday email greetings.
5. Send tutorial videos and instructions based on what they have recently bought from you.
6. Suggest relevant items and send them content they’d love.

Include Your Business’ Contact Details

Give your audience the opportunity to reach out to you in different ways. You can do this by adding your social media links to the email, your business’ direct phone number, and even a map of your physical location (if you have one). The more options you offer, the better the chances you have of them engaging with the brand.

Give Your Audience Something in Return

Reward your clients by giving them something in exchange for their loyalty to the brand. If they are new subscribers, then make sure to send them a welcome email that contains what’s in store for them. Offer a coupon or discount codes that they can use on their next purchase. If you want to go the extra mile, you can always consider sending them actual gifts.

Read Also: Managing Conflict in a Team

Additionally, you can keep the conversation going by letting your customers know about upcoming contests and promotions. You. Take the opportunity to inform them of special tips and tricks on how to improve their chances of winning. Not only will it seem that the email sent to them is personalized, but they will also feel that you care enough to let them in on some “secrets”.

Try Different Approaches

There is nothing wrong with trying out different approaches to email marketing. There is no rule book or strict guideline that you should follow when sending out emails to your customers. Try different methods and see which ones your clients respond best to Track the metrics and see which strategies make your customers reply to your emails.
The best part about email marketing is that it is cost-effective. You do not have to worry about spending too much to build a relationship with your patrons. Stick to the methods that work and keep tracking those KPIs.

Keep the Email Short

Make your emails easy to read by keeping the content short and straight to the point. Long and boring emails are likely to be ignored by your receivers.
Also, your content should be easy to skim, use short sentences and paragraphs. Keep the topics segmented and use bullet points or numbers if needed. Try reading your email aloud and see if it seems too lengthy. Leave some breathing room so your readers don’t feel overwhelmed.

Don’t Send Too Many Emails

Avoid bombarding your leads with nonsensical emails as this can make them unsubscribe to your email list. Once they choose to opt-out, they are gone forever.
Only send them emails if you deem it necessary. Make sure that you have something valuable or important to say.

How do you Use Conversational Marketing?

Choosing the best strategy can be a bit subjective for the companies in terms of what they do and how they work. However, here are some generalized strategies that can be kept in consideration for a successful conversational marketing outcome. 

1. Choosing The Questions and Answers

Knowing the audience and the kind of questions they are likely to ask is the tool to solve this problem. Via the various channels be it online chat, bot-based chat, or even live-streaming what gets important is to understand the kind of questions that are related to the businesses and pre-record answers accordingly in the system. 

While doing conversational marketing you need to be aware of the purpose or the assistance you are going to provide via the chat. 

The determination of the call of action is what needs to be clear, the visitor is going to get a pop up of the chat to help in getting a purchase or to land on another specific page of the website or to answer the general FAQs about the website is what needs to be clear beforehand and in the case of a bot-based system, recorded in the features.

2. Personalization 

Personalization is the key to attracting any customer. Personalization of the chat based on what the customer is likely to ask for,  at what page the customer is, and based on the past activities of the customer can allow the conversion to take place and go in the right direction at the right time, being of most benefit. 

Relevance and on-point answers are of great help in building customer relationships. This can be achieved by the timely testing of the chatbot-based conversation and optimization to allow the conversation to flow in the direction of the findings. 

3. Asking for Feedbacks

Post the conversation the feedback can be taken about the chat system. This will not just enable the customer to feel that they have a say but also will help in the optimization of the tools after some time. 

If a website has a target timer of a popup message when there is a visitor on the same page for more than a minute and after that, a chatbot is to assist. 

It’s only the visitor who is likely to tell that if chatbot assistance was useful and the timer can be reduced or they can tell how they were looking for a straight option to connect to an executive via a phone call the whole time and that the conversation was not of any specific help based upon their experiences making the company to go for improvisation.