Digital Remote Communication with Customers in Extraordinary Times

May 25, 2020

In such an uncertain time, it’s more important than ever to communicate with customers in a way that is timely, responsive & reassuring.

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With the ongoing COVID-19 shutdown, entire marketing channels have been put on indefinite pause. In such an uncertain time, it’s more important than ever to communicate with customers in a way that is timely, responsive, and reassuring.

Retail storefronts, call centers, and offices are mostly closed, making communication with customers tougher than ever. Marketing and communications are moving increasingly to digital, by necessity and innovation. But that doesn’t mean that you need to learn to code and become a “hacker” overnight.

Upgrade Your Digital Communication with Conversational Marketing

Traditionally, digital channels of communication (such as email, social media, and display advertising) have been relegated to one-to-many, unidirectional messaging. The customer sees a post, ad, or email, and then engages with the brand on a website or retail outlet. This archaic level of digital engagement lacks the ability to truly engage a customer, and can leave brands completely in the dark as to which extra information potential, and existing, customers might need.

Conversational Marketing is the solution: it’s marketing that talks with customers, not at them. Using advanced machine learning, intelligent chatbots can not only engage with customers, but learn from them, and at enterprise scale. Where traditionally, it would fall to customers to contact a company and make a specific request, which may then end up as a help desk article or possibly catch the eye of a marketing manager, conversational marketing shifts to proactive engagement and makes things easier for both brand and customer.

Understanding Customers, Utilizing Technology

The COVID-19 shutdown has impacted several channels traditionally used for building customer understanding, from brick-and-mortar retail to events to tradeshows. That doesn’t mean that you have to stop learning – on the contrary, now is the best time to learn more about the needs, pain points, and successes of your customers.

If chatbots are new to you, or the concept of Machine Learning seems daunting, don’t worry! Spectrm is built for marketing teams. Designing conversation flows, optimizing performance and automating re-engagement to specific segments is all possible right in Spectrm – no engineering required! Developing a conversational AI that understands your unique set of customer intents and training your chatbot to get smarter over time is possible in simple workflows in our platform.

At Spectrm, we provide exceptional white glove service to clients. Just having a chatbot is not enough; we’ll work with you at every step to make sure you’re activating on the right channels, asking the right questions, and dynamically leveraging data and analytics from customer interactions to your advantage.

Put simply: we’ve done this a lot, and we’re here to help you leverage our experience for your conversational marketing success. We’re here to give you a frictionless path to growing and delighting customers.

Reach Your Customers Where They Already Are

If you’ve worked with chatbots in the past, you’re likely used to the old paradigm: a chatbot appears on a company’s homepage, ready to answer questions. This is a reactive, customer service-centric understanding of chatbots. The problem here is that you’re making customers come to you, instead of going to where they already are. For that reason, the conversational marketing chatbots powered by Spectrm integrate with Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and other messaging channels.

Spectrm chatbots also integrate with conversational display ads, a new channel that connects your chatbot directly to conversational display ad units that leverage Google’s extensive display network to reach 90% of internet users in real time on websites and mobile apps. That means you can connect with customers in chat directly on the websites and apps they already spend all their time on.

The closer you can start conversing with your customers at the top of the funnel, the more customers you’re likely to convert. By creating a seamless first touch point on social media or a display ad, you’re accessing an advanced level of attention and able to individually cater to customers from the beginning. Conversational marketing with Spectrm combines the power of proactively guiding customers from discovery to action in an interactive, mobile-friendly experience with the ability to adapt dynamically to changing market conditions and customer concerns..

Customers React to COVID-19

How are customers reacting to the COVID-19 lockdown? One advantage of implementing automated conversational marketing is the access to troves of new data and analytics to improve your marketing and your customer understanding. While CPMs initially took a dip due to general uncertainty early in the shutdown, at Spectrm we’re now seeing many of our clients pulling record orders and record months. With a focus on eCommerce and digital marketing, these companies have solutions that are contactless, and bring the full engagement of the retail experience to an enterprise scale digital platform.

It’s natural, during this period, for customers to have additional questions and concerns, whether about package handling, delivery times, product availability, or other queries. Addressing these new concerns reactively risks both losing customers higher up in the funnel, and overloading customer success teams. Spectrm’s conversational marketing bots utilize machine learning to dynamically identify and address common questions. You can also pre-load your chatbot to handle a number of anticipated questions, thus providing your customers with a more comforting and delightful experience, while saving time and effort for marketing and customer success teams.

Learn More about Conversational Marketing for FREE

If you’re trying to adapt a digital marketing strategy during this unprecedented time, let me just remind you: you’ve got this. And all of us at Spectrm are here to help with more insights and guides to getting your footing in conversational marketing.

If you’re ready to learn more about conversational marketing, we’ve got more knowledge (and success stories) to share! Whether you’re new to marketing on conversational platforms or just need a refresher, check out our guide on building campaigns in Facebook Messenger and our Webinar on Conversational Display Ads.

From Vogue to Red Bull to CNN, check out the stories of brands that have built conversational marketing strategies at scale, and their success stories, in our case studies section.