Customers like to message businesses on their own terms. When they have a need. When they have questions. 75% of consumers prefer to engage with their favorite brands through private messaging channels. Google’s Business Messages is one of the latest mobile conversational channels that has sprung from this.
It’s an untapped channel to have rich conversations with customers that leave them delighted and loyal to your brand. Marketing chatbots integrated with Google’s Business Messages accelerate its benefits. You have more meaningful interactions with customers at scale and increase the amount of touch points they have to reach your brand.
This article details the use cases, benefits, and entry points for marketing chatbots that integrate with Google’s Business Messages. It will teach you how your brand can get started with this channel and measure success with key performance metrics.
Use cases for Google's Business Messages
These are three Google’s Business Messages use cases that marketers can use to drive revenue and create meaningful connections with customers.
Automate FAQs to educate customers
Customers are going to have questions. About your product, brand, pricing, and more.
Being able to answer these questions in real-time through automation establishes trust and credibility. Educate them about your brand and the benefits of buying from you. Answer questions about shipping, returns, and hours.
Answering pre-purchase questions quickly in their moment of need gives them a positive brand experience and the information they want to inform their purchase process.
Don’t make customers wait for an answer. Spectrm’s conversational marketing automation platform can help you create chatbots that provide a frictionless path to purchasing.
Automate your FAQs and continuously collect a treasure trove of declared data to truly understand what consumers want. Optimize conversation templates with each conversation to continually improve the accuracy of your responses and drive the actions valuable to your business.
Looking for best practices on how to drive action among your target audience with conversations? Download Spectrm’s D2C conversational marketing playbook to learn how to set up messaging channels for the best performance.
Guide customers through product discovery
91% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that provide relevant offers. Why is this? Because it gives them a delightful experience without friction.
Google’s Business Messages helps customers easily start a conversation and get questions about products, services, and content. Marketers can guide prospects from discovering your brand to purchasing. Give them tailored suggestions based on their individual preferences.
Marketing chatbots connected with Google’s Business Messages can accelerate customers through the mid to lower stages of your funnel. Take them from discovery to consideration to purchase in a single conversation.
Conversion tracking with Google’s Business Messages is done through Floodlight tags. This is an inframe or image tag installed on a conversion page. When a customer lands on the page, the information is sent to Google and conversion data is stored. Marketers can use this to determine what products convert the best and which conversion flows generate the most revenue. Conversations are synchronized across Google’s channels so dialogues keep context if a customer leaves and returns later.
Improve branding and create meaningful connections
Customers want deep connections with their favorite brands. They don’t want to feel like a cog in the wheel. That’s what generic responses and one-to-many advertising creates.
Google’s Business Messages improves branding by delivering fun and customized experiences. These experiences are founded on direct one to one communication within a persistent messaging thread. They get what they want. When they want it.
This builds trust and loyalty. Consumers will come back to shop again. They will tell their friends and family. You will generate positive reviews on Google.
In a time of hyper-communication, it’s more important than ever to understand how consumers message brands. Download Spectrm’s infographic on the growth and future of messaging apps to learn more.
Entry points to Google's Business Messages
Entry points are where a customer discovers your marketing chatbot and enters a conversation. It’s how a brand brings customers into a Google’s Business Messages conversation funnel. Google’s Business Messages empowers brands to leverage several entry points for maximum discovery and engagement. Customers will find it effortless to discover your business and chat in their moments of needs.
Google’s Business Messages has several organic entry points. The first is the Placesheet. This is the small bar at the bottom of Google Search when someone searches for a specific brand or location. They can instantly jump into a conversation after searching for your business and seeing a CTA to send a message. Having this available increases the ROI of search marketing as people have one more way of finding and connecting with you.
The second is Google Maps. When users search for location-specific queries or your brand, they will be able to start a dialogue. When your business secures featured snippets in organic search, users can select the “Chat” option. Sitelinks will also display an option to speak with a brand on Google’s Business Messages.
Thirdly, web widgets on partnered websites gives customers a conversation entry point into your marketing bot on Google’s Business Messages. You can even send a direct URL through social, email, SMS, etc.
This means other owned channels can be easily integrated with Google’s Business Messages. Help customers easily discover and connect with your business directly through your website. Brands can increase the amount of meaningful conversations they have with customers within Google’s most popular products.
Multiple entry points into Google’s Business Messages makes it effortless for anyone to discover your brand online and instantly connect in one to one conversation.
How brands can benefit from Business Messages
These are three main benefits your brand will experience when using Google’s Business Messages to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
Connect with customers on Google Search and Google Maps
You need to connect with customers where they already are. 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Google’s Business Messages combines organic search, websites, and Google Maps for a seamless cross-channel experience.
Customers browse and shop from different devices and channels. They jump from one to another. Being able to deliver one-to-one conversations no matter where they engage you will maximize customer experience, help you acquire customers faster, and create more lifetime value from every customer.
Google’s Business Messages helps customers contact you on their own terms. When they need or want to. Whether it’s Google Maps or Search, your brand is at their fingertips to get product suggestions, content, and information.
Businesses on Google are expected to respond to people in a timely manner. It’s essential to maintain a positive customer satisfaction and merchant response rate. However, it’s possible to re-engage customers up to 30 days after they initially message your business. This opens up retargeting opportunities that can be personalized at scale using marketing chatbots.
Offer personalized and timely recommendations
81% of consumers find it difficult to communicate with a business. They are accustomed to the one-to-many advertisements they see every day. People receive messages and offers when they don’t need them. Or that aren’t relevant to them. This can negatively impact conversion rates and the customer experience.
Google’s Business Messages connected to Spectrm chatbots with product feeds empowers brands to deliver dynamic product recommendations in real-time and answers when customers need it the most. They can come to you on their own terms and get the exact product or piece of content. It doesn’t matter if they are shopping for themselves, friends, or loved ones.
Improve search engine performance and ROI
Google’s Business Messages integrates with Google’s organic search to give customers more opportunities to find and engage with your brand. This increases your search engine equity and the return on investment of your SEO strategy. The keywords you rank for organically can now lead to direct conversations that turn into sales.
Rich snippets like answer cards and sitelinks give customers more information and ways to contact you. They can click the “Chat” option to instantly start a dialogue with a brand and move towards action. This also makes your business stand out from all of the other search results.
Google Business Messages performance metrics
You can measure these two key performance indicators directly within Google’s Business Messages to evaluate your performance on the channel. For more extensive measurement of marketing chatbot ROI, read our full list of marketing chatbot KPIs.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Google measures customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) with surveys directly within the messaging experience. It’s presented as a percentage and brands should maintain a CSAT of at least 80%. If you fall below this threshold, Google may reach out to discuss how it can be improved.
Google themselves suggest to increase CSAT scores, businesses should stay on topic. Don’t send messages that are irrelevant or unwanted. Products and services should be related to the original message. Businesses shouldn’t repeat messages when users don’t respond. Excessively long messages or excessive use of emojis and URLs should be minimized.
Using the right conversational flow and training your chatbot with brand-specific natural language processing (NLP) to better recognise unique customer intents is a key way of ensuring a good CSAT score that continuously improves.
Merchant response rate (MRR)
The merchant response rate (MRR) of your business is the frequency you respond to new conversations through live agents or a marketing chatbot. It’s presented as a percentage and brands should maintain a 95% MRR. Otherwise, Google will reach out to discuss your performance. Marketing chatbots are the only effective way to achieve a 100% response rate at any scale.
Google recommends responding to messages without technical issues. Confirm that your webhook receives and routes incoming messages without errors. Agents should have a fallback strategy in case required fields or data is missing.
Reply to every message and automate FAQs for repeated questions. Be aware of customers’ entry points and adjust responses accordingly. For example, people coming from Google Maps may be more interested in location-specific information like store hours.
All of these context and customer intent specific triggers can be managed when using a conversational marketing platform for Google’s Business Messages like Spectrm.
Final thoughts on Google Business Messages for marketers
Google’s Business Messages is an untapped channel to help customers connect with your business when they need it the most. It offers many different organic search entry points to start conversations. This includes organic search, Google Maps, partner websites, and owned channels.
Brands can use Google’s Business Messages to automate frequently asked questions and educate customers. Answer common questions about shipping, pricing, locations, and hours. Help consumers understand why they should purchase from you and build a long-lasting relationship. This also improves branding as people get fun and engaging experiences that are difficult to find elsewhere.
Google’s Business Messages can also be leveraged to deliver personalized shopping recommendations. Guide customers from discovering your brand to purchasing in a single conversation flow. Help them find the exact product based on their budget, needs, and desires.
Customer satisfaction and merchant response rate are the main metrics you will measure for Google’s Business Messages success. However, read Spectrm’s full list of marketing chatbot KPIs to get the most ROI out of your chatbot.
Want to learn more about how Google’s Business Messages and conversational marketing chatbots can help you create deeper connections with customers and drive revenue?
Get in touch with one of Spectrm’s conversational marketing experts today.
