Jendrik Höft
Co-Founder @ Spectrm
No marketing generates customer insights better than conversations. However, every conversation is unique. Customers can say one thing but mean another. Several different messages can mean the same thing. Small variations seem easy to understand for humans but things can get tricky when you’re automating conversations using chatbots.
Understanding how people engage with your brand conversationally and what they want is essential when it comes to marketing chatbots. This data on what your customers mean when they say something, their actual intent, is called customer intent data. Identifying and classifying customer intent data is the key to unlocking enormous value from conversational marketing.
Customer intent data reveals the most important things your customers are saying and what their goals are. Marketers can use intent data to guide customers through a conversion journey by mapping intent to the most relevant responses and products. After all, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations. Not generic, one to many, messages that aren’t relevant to them personally.
NLP-powered chatbots are the best source of this customer intent data. They use a branch of machine learning called natural language processing (NLP). This form of artificial intelligence makes sense of human language.
But not all NLP is created equal when it comes to marketing chatbots. General NLP is great for telling you when you need an umbrella or help finding a restaurant. Basic questions about weather, locations, or information that is generally accessible. It’s not very useful when it comes to specific questions customers have about your products and services.
At Spectrm, we focus on domain-specific NLP. This approach learns how your unique customers speak. How they ask questions. What they’re actually looking for. How that maps to your product catalogue. What messaging they resonate with the most.
Every brand has distinct customer intents and you need an advanced NLP-powered chatbot to identify and classify them effectively. Good conversational marketing platforms should make it easy to train chatbots as more data comes in, making them accurately predict and match responses the more often they are used.
This article covers five ways a brand can leverage customer intent data from chatbots to increase revenue and marketing performance.
Align branding with how your customers speak
You can understand how your customers speak and what they want by analyzing their specific intents and using that data for personalization. Most chatbots only use basic NLP or none at all. These create poor experiences. They actively hurt your customer experience and don’t help achieve marketing objectives.
Spectrm marketing chatbots focus on guiding customers through the buying journey. Creating a delightful personalized experience that lifts conversions.
As you engage customers in one to one conversation, you collect data on how they interact with your brand conversationally. This helps you capture customer intent data to improve your chatbots ability to understand your customers. Not only does this improve the chatbot’s performance, but you can collect and organize examples of how customers speak in relation to your products and services. What messages they engage with. What they don’t.
55% of customers will buy products from a brand that they love. But they have to resonate with your story and messaging first. Marketers can use customer intent data and conversational intelligence to redefine how they speak to customers through all channels. This includes social media, email, website copy, and phone support.
RedBull, the world’s largest energy drink company, uses a personal and casual tone of voice on its website for example.
This same brand personality is found on its social media accounts such as Instagram.
This creates a consistent omnichannel experience no matter where customers have touchpoints with the brand. With chatbots and Spectrm’s customer intent management tools, you can better understand how customers speak and continually tailor messages that they will be excited to engage with.
Refine buyer personas and targeting
Using a buyer persona or ideal customer profile makes websites 2-5x more effective and easier to use by the intended audience. Marketing can’t be designed for everyone. It won’t convert. Each customer segment responds to different experiences, messages, and offers.
Buyer personas aren’t static either. Customer behaviour and your individual customer base evolve. They develop different needs. New interests. How they ask questions and speak changes. New concerns that arose around delivery and inventory availability during COVID-19 are a prime example of how quickly things can change when it comes to your buyer’s concerns.
Customer intent data can be used to continually update buyer personas so marketing campaigns always provide customized offers in a voice that resonates with your specific audience. Here’s a template that you can use as an example.
Ideal customer profiles should be continually updated with intent data to include the latest:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Budget
- Language
- Pain points
- Questions
- Personality
- Beliefs and values
Telekom, the global telecommunication company, struggled to provide personalized suggestions to customers at scale. It also desired to understand its customers better and collect feedback from them.
Using Spectrm, Telekom built a conversational contract finder on Facebook Messenger that provided millennials with contracts customized to specifically what they asked for. When launching the campaign, Telekom assumed the content bundle offered was the most important for their customers to make a buying decision. Once they started to engage customers in conversation with a Messenger bot, the customer intent data quickly revealed that most customers were asking about specific phones. They used this to revise their conversation flow and messaging and put the phone offers front and center. This resulted in a 9x contract conversion lift and a deeper understanding of their customers.
Offer personalized shopping experiences
The greatest benefit of understanding customer intent is the ability to personalize every shopping experience individually at scale. You can accurately map responses to each query. Give them the best suggestions. Guide them from discovery to conversion. This directly increases sales. It gives people a fun and satisfying customer experience they won’t forget.
Customer intent collected from NLP-powered chatbots allows brands to offer deeply personalized product recommendations. Every shopper is different. Some are shopping for themselves. Others are shopping for a loved one. Suggesting products that are based on their intent increases revenue and loyalty.
NLP conversational chatbots extract entities from each conversation like “shirt” and “Reebok.” These are filtered by other traits like size and colour to recommend customers the most accurate products out of a brand’s catalogue.
The mattress retailer Purple needed to develop new and more efficient ways to prospect customers in its highly competitive market. They created a “Mattress Finder” chatbot with Spectrm to help customers find the perfect mattress for their sleep preferences.
The guided shopping experience helped Purple understand its customer’s language, their sleep style preferences, increased revenue, and educated customers about their brand at the same time. It generated:
- 1.03 million one to one brand engagements.
- 80% of revenue from ad touchpoint closed in 7 days.
- 4x return on ad spend.
Chatbots get smarter when trained with customer intent data
Machine learning powered chatbots become smarter as you engage more users with them. Scale brings even stronger performance. Every message can help train the chatbot through the customer intent data it collects. This improves conversion rates by increasing how often you have an accurate response that guides shoppers to relevant products or information.
A chatbot’s ability to be trained with intent data creates more benefits such as:
- Offering more natural and casual conversations. Like a friend speaking to a friend. People expect bots to have human-level conversational abilities.
- Build on existing customer relationships to improve loyalty and recurring purchases.
- Accurately mapping responses, suggestions, and information to what customers are searching for.
- Generating variations with machine learning to better classify intents and get much more accurate data faster.
- Taking a limited amount of conversational data and predicting over one million variants to map to responses. This helps generate more accurate matches faster.
Our conversational marketing chatbots at Spectrm make this easier than ever for marketers. An easy to use interface and assistant help you optimize your chatbot and understand customer intent without touching a single line of code. Just log in and train the bot with a few clicks.
Don’t worry if you have niche requirements or little data. Generative adversarial networks take limited information to predict over one million variations of intent and match them to the most relevant responses. The more data, the more variations our chatbots can train with. This iterative process helps create a better customer experience, lift conversions, and improve your bottom line.
Use customer intent data for keywords in search campaigns
Think about all of the different questions your brand receives every single day:
- “Do you have a sizing guide?”
- “How do your shoes fit?”
- “Do you have my size in stock?
- “What sizes do you have available?”
- “What brands do you sell?”
They could be in the hundreds or thousands. Using an NLP chatbot to collect data on these variations and generate ideas can also be leveraged for improving SEO campaigns. You will know exactly what customers are searching for and how they ask it. These can be used as keywords.
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Targeting these phrases on blog pages and product listings can increase the amount of organic traffic your website generates. It also attracts a hypersegmented audience. Your ideal customer profile. You can answer their questions and lead them into your marketing funnel to drive conversions.
Marketers can take key phrases from customer intent data and enter them into a tool like Ubersuggest. This further increases the amount of ideas you generate as you supplement your data on how customers actually speak with search volume and related keywords.
Click the “Keyword Ideas” tab to see related keywords and their search metrics.
Use suggested keywords to continue understanding what your customers are searching for, how they ask it, and for producing relevant content.
The bottom line on customer intent data
One to one conversations with customers are the best source of marketing data. It tells you exactly what they want. How they engage with your brand. How they ask for products. What language they use.
Marketers can collect customer intent data directly from NLP-powered chatbots using Spectrm. Our conversational marketing platform focuses on improving your customer experience and scaling conversions for brands using proprietary machine learning.
It helps you collect domain-specific customer intent data based on your customer’s individual needs, preferences, and language. Spectrm chatbots are trained to make more accurate predictions and recommendations the more they are used. This positively impacts marketing performance in several ways.
The first is through better alignment between your branding and how customers actually speak. Brands can use customer intent data to improve messaging across marketing channels such as social media, email, and their website. Speak in a way that’s natural for them. In a way that makes them comfortable and likely to purchase.
Secondly, intent data enables you to continually refine your ideal customer profile. Customers change. And so does their behaviour. Being able to update buyer personas keeps messaging and conversations as relevant as possible as the market evolves.
Lastly, use customer intent data to improve search campaigns. You understand exactly what customers are looking for and how they ask for it. Use this intent data as search terms on web pages and content. Drive more organic traffic and answer questions that attract the most relevant audience to your website.
Schedule a demo with Spectrm now to see how our NLP conversational chatbots can increase your brand’s revenue with customer intent data.
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