In today’s digitised landscape, keeping up with the latest marketing trends is key to remaining competitive and boosting customer satisfaction levels. One of the most recent and important developments in marketing technology is something known as conversational marketing.
Even if you’ve never come across the term ‘conversational marketing’ before, chances are you’ve encountered it as a consumer. In essence, it is a personalised approach to digital marketing that involves directly communicating with customers in real-time via chat features or conversational landing pages.
The purpose of conversational marketing is to encourage consumers to purchase your products, speed up the sales journey, foster customer trust, and quickly address complaints or issues that could damage your reputation. According to recent stats, 86% of people who shop online prefer proactive customer support from chatbots and live messaging applications compared to more traditional forms of communication such as telephone and email.
The good news about conversational marketing is that it doesn’t require huge amounts of manpower. While it is a good idea to have several customer service team members on-call during business hours, cutting-edge conversational marketing platforms such as Botgate AI can help to generate efficient and natural conversations automatically using sophisticated machine learning tools. This means that businesses can interact with customers anywhere in the world at all hours of the day, answering common questions quickly and redirecting complex queries to customer service representatives.
We believe that every business should consider implementing a new AI chatbot or accessible messaging application on their company website, particularly if they rely heavily on e-commerce or subscription models. With 71% of online consumers now expecting companies to communicate with them in real-time, failure to equip your digital marketing strategy with modern chatbot AI could end up costing you customers and revenue.
AI chatbots are now a standard feature of e-commerce platforms and company websites across much of the world, so their primary benefit is obvious. Indeed, they allow businesses to maintain high levels of customer service and keep up with evolving marketing trends, thus ensuring their brand’s reputation remains polished. Other benefits include:
Data-driven marketing can help you to target key demographics more effectively and constantly improve your delivery of goods and services. With a chatbot, you can gain access to heaps of valuable data about, for example, common customer concerns and their motivations for engaging with your company.
By encouraging consumers to move through the sales funnel more efficiently, chatbots and live messaging facilities free up precious time that can be used to grow your business.
Personalisation is key to building strong relationships with customers and endearing them to your brand. Remember that happy customers are more likely to recommend your company to their friends or business partners and to spend money on your goods and services in the future.
The quick response times offered by chatbots are great for boosting customer satisfaction levels and reducing your number of complaints. High dissatisfaction levels can end up costing you money and reputational damage in the long term so should be proactively avoided.
If you have customers from all over the world, a chatbot can help to answer queries and offer personalised experiences out of office hours.
So, it should be clear by now that conversational marketing is a smart strategy that businesses across virtually all sectors should consider implementing. But how should you integrate it into your current digital marketing framework? Here are our top tips for success:
Rather than forcing customers to scour your website for a chat function, you should make your chatbot easily accessible. In fact, engaging your site visitors proactively with a greeting is an excellent way to personalise their experience and encourage engagement.
Typically, a chatbot will have an in-built script designed to suit the needs of your key demographics. A chatbot for a fashion retailer is likely to be very different from, say, a business intelligence provider or a corporate law firm. Consumers interested in the fashion retailer are likely to prefer a friendlier tone, for example, while visitors to the latter site may prefer more technical, highly specialised support.
Standard automated initiations could include something such as:
- Hi there! If you have any questions, I’m here to help.
- Good afternoon. May I help you with anything today?
- Hello, thank you for visiting [insert company name]. If you have any questions about our services, don’t hesitate to ask me.
You may wish to ask more specific leading questions such as:
- Do you want to know more about [insert product or service name]?
- What brought you to our site today?
- Tell me more about your requirements.
- Tell us whether you’re a business owner or sales representative and we will customise your visit with us today.
As well as directing customers to relevant sections of your site or to a relevant department in your organisation, asking these kinds of questions can generate valuable data about your customer base that can be used to hone your offerings and marketing strategies. It is also a good idea to add an email capture function to your chat so members of your customer service team can follow up on specific enquiries in future.
Customers like chatbots as they are adept at solving complex problems without having to ask personal questions or ask them to pass over sensitive information. In this way, it is a good idea to leave invasive questions out of your chatbot scripts and leave sensitive information collection to human customer representatives.
Presenting discounts and special offers to new site visitors via your chatbot is a great way to secure leads and build your client base. Just remember to emphasise that your deal is a one-time offer that will disappear if they don’t act quickly!
Most AI chatbots can monitor the behaviour of individual web visitors without even having to interact with them. Factors to analyse could include:
- Cart abandonments and saved items
- How and when they have required customer support
- Which browser they have used
- Which pages they have viewed or visited
- Geolocation information
This kind of information can be harnessed by AI technologies to provide personalised item recommendations, intelligent customer support and more. In other words, chatbots can be used for long-term customer engagement as well as one-time enquiry fulfilment.
Although chatbots are becoming increasingly adept at answering tough questions, customer service and sales team still have an important role to play in any company. To maximise sales, why not encourage your sales teams to work with the data collected by chatbots to reach out to customers and personalise their purchase journey even further? This could be particularly useful for B2B companies looking to sell subscription services or retailers hoping to dissuade customers from abandoning their carts.
Tweaking the look of your chatbot to suit your overall brand aesthetic will make your website look more professional and appealing. Don’t underestimate the importance of the small stuff!
Thanks to the data-collecting powers of chatbots, you can harness your conversation marketing activities to improve your email campaigns through personalisation. You could also bolster your social media campaigns by using data to improve your tone of voice and deliver content that customers will engage with.
If you work in marketing, you’re probably tired of hearing about user experience (or UX) by now, but it is vital for effective search engine optimisation (SEO) and ensuring that customers enjoy using your site. In this way, you need to ensure your chatbots are not randomly or incorrectly triggered. Constant pop-ups, irritating questions, or incorrect answers will reduce trust in your company and could end up costing you leads and revenue. Each chatbot script must be seamlessly designed to ensure your clients enjoy as smooth a purchase journey as possible.
Do you own a B2B company? Are you looking to improve your conversational marketing with an efficient, AI-powered sales and messaging platform? Botgate AI is here to help.
Our secure cloud-based platform uses cutting-edge AI technology to help businesses harness leads, supercharge sales cycles, and grow quickly. Get in touch with us today for more information.