Consumers are more demanding than ever. They want effortless buying experiences that are designed for them. Not everybody.
In fact, 72% of consumers only engage with marketing messages that are tailored to their interests. Otherwise, they’ll navigate to a shopping experience that’s better suited for them. One that speaks directly to their wants and needs.
Personalizing the customer experience has multiple benefits for your business too. Firstly, it improves conversions and revenue growth by recommending the most relevant products to your customers. Secondly, deep insights into consumer intent can be used to optimize your campaigns, launch new marketing channels and improve your retargeting efficiency.
Enterprises can reap these benefits by deploying a conversational marketing strategy using chatbots. Here is a quick explainer of what these practices are and how your organization can adopt them for driving growth in today’s article.
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is, put simply, the use of chatbots to move customers through your marketing funnel quickly in a one to one conversation. It’s marketing that speaks with your customers. Not at them.
Many marketing messages make one of two mistakes (or both). The first mistake is they’re not personalized to each individual. The second is that they don’t create a unique and natural interaction. Conversational marketing is a format that gives your brand the opportunity to feel like a friend. Or, at the very least, feel approachable and easy to learn from. It’s a natural conversation flow that builds trust and feels fun.
That’s where chatbots come into the picture. They can add value and inspiration by acting as a personal shopper. They can help you find the perfect gift. They can guide you along a complex buyer journey with relevant and helpful info. All of this tailors the purchasing process for each customer. Chatbots instantly respond and offer a media-rich format, which is exactly what consumers enjoy.
Most importantly, chatbots build loyal relationships with customers. 69% of individuals in the U.S. feel more confident about brands when they are able to message them.
Well designed chatbots are a high performance marketing channel that is quickly becoming a key part of the marketing mix of enterprise marketing teams all over the world.
How chatbots and conversational intelligence drive growth
Next, I’m going to cover several ways enterprises can use conversational marketing and chatbots to drive revenue.
Chatbots guide customers from discovery to action
No buyer goes through the exact same steps from discovering a brand to converting. That’s why interacting with them directly to make suggestions is so powerful.
Otherwise, a business may recommend incorrect products, losing out on sales and offering a mediocre shopping experience. It’s not too late if you fall into this category.
While you can split up a funnel into many different parts such as awareness, consideration, and purchase, it often isn’t enough. Consumers are human. And that means they make up unique segments.
Conversational marketing, on the other hand, fast-tracks customers to the purchase as they are recommended products based on their direct input. Not assumptions. 47% of consumers are comfortable making a purchase from a chatbot. Even more consumers are willing to get recommendations in chat and then buy directly from a website in a seamless journey from discovery to purchase.
Chatbots ask questions to find out what customers really want. Not what you think they do. This turns strangers into loyal customers because unlike other brands, you understand them deeper. This is a chatbot Daniel Wellington designed with Spectrm for example:
Guided conversations like this give customers a fun and interactive way to shop with your company. You can find out who they’re shopping for (as it isn’t always for them), their budget, and what categories they’re searching for.
They also don’t need to leave their favourite social messaging app which collapses touchpoints and increases how quickly they are converted. You no longer have to worry about overserving ads or not presenting contextual messages at the right time.
Chatbots enable more efficient and scalable data collection
Data is everything. Having accurate customer information enables enterprises to improve their messaging and advertising. Sales, leads, and other KPIs are more easily accomplished as a result.
Chatbots collect the most important data on customers to achieve this. In particular, declared data. 61% of U.S. messaging app users have messaged a business in the past three months, directly stating what products, experiences, and language they want.
Here’s an example of what a chatbot conversation looks like from the consumer’s perspective:
This is opposite to relying on demographic and behavioural data that unfortunately makes your business rely on hunches. You also can’t engage with or measure consumers who don’t fit in pre-defined boxes like those comparing products or browsing for someone else.
Oppositely, solutions like live chat require large teams and hit a ceiling where you can’t scale because it’s human-driven.
The solution? Chatbot insights. They are designed to be easily used by marketing teams and capable of tracking incoming messages to continually build better performing and targeted conversation templates. It’s not just about having a chatbot. It’s about understanding how people flow through your conversations. What declared data you’ve gathered at scale. And how to make that declared data actionable for personalization and remarketing. Over time, you also build a treasure trove of data on customer intent as they send you more and more messages.
That brings me to my next point.
Machine learning builds profitable chatbots quicker
Humans are limited. Our energy and time are finite. That’s why technology like machine learning powers conversational marketing software. It uses natural language processing to analyze incoming messaging data to quickly build high-converting chatbots.
After all, not all companies have a lot of conversational data they can use about their customers. And every company has a unique set of customers intents. Machine learning, in particular the use of generative adversarial networks, is capable of taking limited data to predict over one million variants and help match this to relevant responses.
This is a great solution for enterprises that don’t have conversational data to start with. It helps you quickly build a library of customer intents that you can map to responses. When it comes to marketing, it’s essential to pair this machine learning approach with human supervision because every conversation is tied to achieving specific outcomes to reach your goals.
Chatbots improve remarketing and other campaigns
One of the most valuable parts of conversational marketing and chatbots is the backend. The insights. The data. This allows an enterprise to personalize buying experiences, optimize their conversational funnel and improve remarketing efforts.
The chatbot is in the frontend interacting with consumers but it’s what you do with the collected data that matters more.
70% of millennials become frustrated when brands send them irrelevant messages and promotions. Being able to retarget customers with the declared data you collect counters this.
It can be used to firstly retarget the customers personally, directly within the conversation if they didn’t check out. This can greatly improve conversion rates on messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger since the personalized conversation resumes.
Secondly, the declared data can be used to build more meaningful segments. You can even export these segments to match new audiences on Facebook and Instagram. Or build much more powerful lookalike targeting. You now have deep insights into the products customers want, who they are shopping for, and how they speak. All of this can influence targeting, messaging, and key aspects of other advertisements.
Telekom is an example of engaging customers at scale to collect declared data and drive conversions. They used Spectrm’s conversational marketing platform to automate one on one conversations, tailor product recommendations, and personalize retargeting messages.
9x
contract conversion lift
65%
conversation completion rate
35%
CTR to cart landing page
This resulted in a 9x contract conversion lift, 60% increase in conversation completion rate, and 35% increase in click-throughs to the cart page. Learn more about Telekom’s success in our case study.
Wrapping up enterprise chatbots
Consumers want fast and customized experiences. Chatbots and conversational marketing are very effective ways to bridge the gap.
It offers a fun and engaging experience while making timely product recommendations based on customer input. The declared data can be used to improve buyer personas, remarketing, and other campaigns.
The collected information is much more powerful than traditional behavioural and demographic data, as well. This is because it reveals how people are purchasing, who it’s for, their budget, and other hard to find information.
This is all powered by machine learning technology. In particular, natural language processing collects incoming data to discover patterns, trends, and customer intent. All of which is used to constantly improve the chatbot, its questions, and suggestions.
Schedule a demo with Spectrm’s conversational marketing experts to learn how your company can drive more revenue with chatbots today.
