The most effective forms of communication are always bi-directional. Remarkably though, most businesses still rely only on unidirectional communication for marketing. Of course, this is because until now, technology only permitted one-way communication for marketing. Today, enter conversational marketing.
Today’s mobile and telecom advancements permit personalized, two-way communication to identify and remember your customers’ interests. This modern conversational marketing delivers both information and relevant special offers that customers actually want.
Far from being a trend, conversational marketing is here to stay, which is why understanding it is important to the success of your business.
What is Conversational Marketing?
This strategy takes advantage of the power of targeted, real-time messaging and intelligent chatbots, as opposed to lead capture forms. One of the most significant strengths of this methodology is that customers can engage with your business whenever it’s convenient for them — like for example when they’re visiting your website.
Brought to you by: Artificial Intelligence
To facilitate conversational marketing, applications called chatbots employ artificial intelligence (AI) to can create conversations with your prospective or current customers. Thanks to AI, these chatbot interactions can feel to your customers like actual conversations with people at your company.
To that end, a chatbot can identify a customer’s interests in a particular product or service. The can also learn a shopper’s hobbies and personal interests. This serves to create a bonding experience by engaging patrons on whatever topics they’d like to discuss and delivering appropriate responses throughout the conversation.
Conversations create conversions
With customer feedback as an integral aspect, conversational marketing increases conversions exponentially. The customer gets exactly what they want, because you’ve given them a way to tell you what that is.
The truest form of permission-based marketing, conversational builds long-term value by ensuring customer satisfaction, which in turn creates loyalty. This customer-centric approach has been missing from traditional marketing because it was just too labor-intensive to execute.
Whether you considering how to sell an ebook online, or electronics, furniture or cosmetics, a chatbot can be invaluable to sales, as the customer will tell the bot everything it needs to know to come up with the product best suited to the caller’s needs, tastes and budget.
The power of sharing
Every good salesperson will tell you his or her job is more about listening than talking. When you give them chances to do so, your customers will tell you everything you need to know to keep them happy and in your camp. This is why having a consistent source of customer feedback is so crucial to being successful.
With chatbots in your marketing mix, every interaction provides your shoppers the opportunity to tell you what’s on their minds, and how you can serve their needs better.
That’s all great, but…
As good as conversational marketing is, there’s still room for the more traditional methods of reaching customers. With so many communication channels now available, you’d be unwise to focus all of your resources in one direction at the expense of all others. Shoppers have come to expect choices. They want to interact with brands on their own terms, rather than having things dictated to them.
Ideally, all of your choices will serve to work together to support one another. This is one of the true advantages of conversational marketing; it blends seamlessly with all other forms currently in use, as well as those likely to be implemented in the future. Meanwhile, chatbot conversational marketing still delivers the key advantages its contemporaries do not have.
Understanding conversational marketing and implementing it into your marketing and customer service will give you significant insights into your customers’ lives, amplify your other marketing initiatives, and ultimately boost your conversion rate.
This is why your best new employee might well be a chatbot application. Are you ready to start hiring?
