What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is an effective strategy that focuses on engaging customers through direct conversations.
It eliminates the need for manual processes like telephone calls, emails or website forms by allowing businesses to communicate directly with their customers in real-time using automated chatbots or customer service agents.
It enables marketers to share useful information faster than ever before while providing personalized responses based on individual customer preferences and needs.
How does conversational marketing work?
There are several different tools and strategies used in conversational marketing, but the concept revolves around creating meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers throughout the buyer’s journey.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common methods:
- Messaging apps: Through messaging apps, like Messenger or WhatsApp, companies can create interactive customer experiences by leveraging automated chatbots to provide personalized messages at scale. Customer service agents can also help guide users through their purchase decisions from beginning-to-end within messaging apps rather than switching between email or phone conversations.
- Live chat: Companies are increasingly turning to live chat services for customer support—not only to answer questions quickly but also to upsell products during interactions with customers. When integrated with AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), live chat can be even more effective by understanding context resulting in faster resolution times for customer inquiries.
- Lead qualification: Automation tools can be used to qualify leads through conversational pathways that ask targeted questions while providing additional information related to a product or services being considered by prospects. This helps increase conversion rates since sales teams don’t have waste time qualifying leads that aren’t qualified yet or contact contacts who might not even be interested in what’s being sold.
Overall, conversational marketing is becoming an essential part of every digital marketer’s toolkit due its ability to provide immediate support and deliver personalized experiences throughout the entire buyer journey — from pre-purchase research all the way through post-sale advocacy opportunities for loyal customers.
By utilizing messaging apps, live chat functionality and lead qualification automation, businesses have been able to significantly improve both their acquisition efforts as well as overall retention rates for long-term success in today’s competitive landscape.