Here’s the only guide you need to choose the right conversational ai platform that works best for your business. 👇👇👇
As we’re reaching towards the end of the year, it’s time to think about your marketing strategy for 2023. We know, in our over-saturated business environment, it’s a major challenge to break through the noise and reach your audience.
Engaging prospects on traditional channels is getting more and more difficult. News feeds are cluttered, email inboxes are spammed, and the average attention span is less than 8 seconds. 🤯
What can you, as a marketer, do about it?
- find the channels your customers use on a daily basis
- engage them through one to one conversations
- get to know them better and convert them with relevant offers
- re-engage them like humans, not customers
All of this can be achieved with messaging. If you’re considering adopting a messaging strategy in 2023, you’ll need a reliable conversational AI platform to help you achieve your goals. Here’s your ultimate guide to choosing the right platform for your business.
What is a Conversational AI Platform?
Before we dive into the topic, let’s quickly summarize what a conversational AI platform is.
A conversational AI platform is a software solution that allows businesses to launch automated chatbots on messaging apps.
Using automated conversational experiences, you’ll be able to:
- Increase your revenue by capturing zero party data to recommend products and personalize customer journeys in real-time.
- Easily design chatbots and integrate different marketing channels with a few clicks, without coding.
- Optimize your marketing funnel and conversion rates by leveraging data on customer behavior and buying preferences.
- Retarget drop-offs by automating reengaging messages in chat that get 80% open rates on average.
- Develop unique conversational AI that understands your customers’ specific intents in natural conversation. Without having to rely on engineering resources.
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Why You Should Adopt a Conversational Strategy
Digital advertising is everywhere. Customers want a seamless shopping experience but their attention is limited while their options are limitless. Marketing is designed to influence customers’ decisions. Still, the majority of customers feel the ads they’re seeing are impersonal and irrelevant.
This is where conversations come into the picture. Every relationship starts with a conversation. This is exactly what customers expect from brands. They want companies to talk to them as humans, not customers. On their preferred channels, where they also use to communicate with their families and friends. This is how you can turn your poor-performing advertisements into an ongoing relationship with your customers.
One major benefit of conversational AI platforms is that they enable you to cut through the noise in an oversaturated market. Why? Because customers don’t pay attention to ads and emails anymore. Ads are irrelevant and way too repetitive while email inboxes are fully packed and spammed.
New channels, on the other hand, offer an opportunity to grow an audience. Messaging channels, in particular, unlock great potential for marketers to connect with their prospects. These channels enable private, one to one conversations. As such, each conversation is an opportunity to build a directly reachable and monetizable audience.
Once you grow your audience on a messaging channel, such as Messenger, it’s time to personalize your customer experience. Conversational AI platforms are used to deploy automated chat conversations, which ask questions from customers and recommend products based on their preferences. As the platforms are driven by AI, the bot is able to understand and translate customer needs into relevant offers.
Another great advantage of conversational AI platforms is that they offer automation. You can, for example, automate your whole customer journey, guiding customers through each step of the buying process and encouraging them to make a purchase decision. Customers these days are impatient and expect a business to provide them with an answer instantly. That’s why FAQ automation is a powerful feature of conversational AI tools, as it enables your business to offer 0-24 availability to your customers, even outside of working hours.
Increasing customer demands have paved the way for messaging, which officially became the preferred way customers want to engage with businesses. In fact, 60% of customers prefer messaging over phone calls and emails. Another reason why you should consider adopting a messaging strategy and look for a reliable software solution provider to support you with that.
Last but not least, constant privacy updates are a real headache for marketers as they lock them out of customer insights and limit their ability to reach their audience. But if you launch automated conversations through conversational ai platforms, you can collect valuable zero party data from the conversations. This data makes it possible for your business to better understand your audience and retarget them with relevant offers.
How to Choose the Right Conversational AI Platform for Your Business
We know that it’s a major challenge to survive, let alone thrive, in our accelerated marketing landscape. But the numbers never lie: conversational marketing is on the rise, and it’s only set to grow further in the upcoming years.
That’s why you’re here, looking for the right conversational AI platform for your business. Here are the most important factors you should consider when choosing a conversational commerce platform in 2023.
Easy to deploy, customizable chatbots
The right conversational AI platform will enable you to set up and deploy your own AI-driven chatbots, without having to invest in IT infrastructure and resources.
Many solutions on the market, including Spectrm, require zero coding. As such, any marketing team can have their custom chatbot launched on a messaging channel in 2-4 weeks without getting the IT team involved.
Here’s an example of how one of our customers, Happy Socks, launched their bot from concept to success only in 4 weeks!
What makes a chatbot easy to deploy?
- An intuitive conversation design interface anyone can use without any coding skills.
- Easy to understand conversation paths and branches that make designing a conversation as easy as chatting with friends.
- Dynamic, one click product feed integrations that allow businesses to inject a carousel of product images, titles and descriptions directly into a real-time chat with your customer.
- The ability to seamlessly trigger actions in the chatbot to connect your marketing stack and other systems.
A modern interface that supports memes, GIFs, images, emojis, and other fun content to spice up your product recommendations.
The ability to deploy chatbots on multiple channels
Conversational AI is all about connecting with humans in the most natural way possible. The channels you do that on are key. If you want to connect your prospects like humans, look for the channels they already use on a daily basis.
Businesses adopt conversational AI to engage customers where they are, so being on messaging channels is a big part of unlocking that value of conversational AI.
So, make sure the conversational marketing platform you choose integrates with all the major messaging platforms. Make sure it’s easy to duplicate conversations to new channels. And make sure the platform has validation for message types on each different channel so your messages are accurately delivered.
Here are the top channels you want to ensure your conversational commerce platform integrates with.
- Facebook Messenger
- Whatsapp Business
- Conversational Display Ads
On Facebook Messenger, you can connect with 1.3 billion customers. On Instagram, 150 million people have a conversation with a business every month. WhatsApp has 2 billion active users monthly.
93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Through conversational display ads on Google DV360, you can reach up to 90% of internet users through Google’s extensive display networks on desktop and mobile devices.
These social, search, and display channels for conversational commerce are clearly a marketing gold mine, so if you haven’t started to leverage them, now is the time. Just imagine how many potential customers you’re about to lose if your platform doesn’t integrate with these channels.
Direct message and FAQ automation
No conversational AI platform should come without the ability to instantly reply to incoming direct messages from your customers and automate FAQs.
People these days want answers to their questions instantly. If you make them wait for too long, they will simply leave you for the competition.
Did you know that 70% of incoming messages on social are pre-purchase? Still, companies often ignore their direct message box on social media.
We know that handling all social messages manually takes a lot of time and effort. But what if you could automate your messaging with chatbots?
Automating your direct messages will ensure you don’t ghost customers. You can offer a fully automated guided shopping experience. You can retarget customers with automated remarketing campaigns. You can automate FAQs to educate customers about products and services. You can reach customers at scale.
With an automated customer journey, you can guarantee 24/7 availability to your customers. You can engage them in real-time, as opposed to 85% of brands that do not respond to requests in 5 minutes.
The best thing about direct message automation is that you can send messages to customers at the moment they’re most likely to make a purchase. To support this with data, 80% of consumers who used a chatbot for making a purchase would do it again.
Here’s an example of how the travel app, Omio, achieved a 62% automation rate and 94% CTR to relevant landing pages by automating their FAQs on Instagram. Read the full story here!
Easy integration with external platform
using several systems at the same time that are not integrated might result in messy processes and duplicated data.
That is why we always recommend choosing a conversational commerce platform that can be integrated with external systems and digital channels.
We also believe in this trend and consider it vital to integrate our platform with external systems. That’s why Spectrm’s platform can be integrated with a number of systems, including Zendesk, Zapier, Google Analytics, and many more.
Besides external customer service and live agent platforms, Spectrm integrates with the world’s most popular messaging channels, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Business, and Instagram.
Support and Training
Setting up the right conversational AI platform and launching your first chatbot is a great start. But your job isn’t done here. Optimizing your bot and elevating your campaigns’ performance is also an essential part of long term success in conversational commerce.
Implementation support, white glove onboarding, and ongoing customer success is critical for your enterprise to get fast time to market and sustainable success. When looking for the right conversational AI platform, make sure to choose one that has a dedicated customer success team.
A dedicated account team provides industry expertise, authenticity, and consistency. Customer success managers often have the most valuable industry knowledge around, and they are ready to share it with you.
They can use their experience to help you overcome specific challenges and make suggestions for improving your bot’s performance. They can help you analyze your data and optimize your bot accordingly. They can assist you in crafting converting chatbot conversations.
A goal of such services is to maintain the successful and long-term operation of the chatbots and help improve the overall customer experience.
So, don’t settle with a company that only sells you a software solution. Choose a conversational commerce platform that also offers ongoing support.
Spectrm is more than just a simple marketing chatbot development company. After the setup and training period, our dedicated customer success team continues to offer ongoing support as required. Using their extensive experience in digital marketing, they can help you optimize your bots and boost your performance.
Furthermore, if you’re really struggling with in-house resources, our conversational designers will help you create brand-specific conversations that convert.
As one of the leading conversational commerce platforms out there, we have seen many use cases and helped major commerce companies, such as Bosch, Deichmann, and Ford. Check out our case study library for the latest success stories!
