The modern age consumer has different choices, which has made the present markets an interesting and colorful platform to show products or services. As the consumers and markets work together they are getting more diverse day by day, hence the development of products and services is faster than ever, which initially has increased the pressure on marketers to keep up with the fast pace of change.
But with the change in time and the market, how can one be sure that their marketing plan is up-to-date? It would need comprehensive market research, to study the market and understand it. Today, a brand’s success doesn’t only depend on the product it offers. It also depends on the use of these three basics – technology, marketing, and human behavior.
Smart marketers have understood this cloverleaf, and are now ready with their latest strategy of lead generation practices revolving around conversational marketing.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a marketing strategy through which you can get your customers via establishing more communication with them. It relies upon real-time conversations to build a connection with your customers.
In simple words, it’s a real-time channel that allows you to develop meaningful relationships that have to inspire trust, improve customer experience, build loyalty with your potential customers, all of which will result in more sales.
Let’s learn more about Conversational Marketing
Earlier, you must have noticed that many companies used complex and unhandy methods to generate leads, especially in traditional outbound marketing which includes, cold calling, emails, ads, and not to forget lengthy website forms which would last days or even weeks. Too Hectic!
With conversational marketing, things are easy. The customer service representative can quickly address questions and issues, and move the prospect or client further through the sales funnel.
Recently, if you have visited any website, you may find a chatbot pop-up option on the home page, most likely at the bottom right. This Chatbot interacts with the customer and acts like human customer support, they will start asking you the questions as soon as you land on the website. Many marketing companies have started using these chatbots on their and their client’s websites to implement their conversational marketing strategy.
The idea behind using these artificial intelligence computer programs aka Chatbots is to initiate a conversation between a customer and company. Not only that, With conversational marketing strategies, but companies also don’t have to wait for potential customers to fill up lead generation forms and send them to the former.
Advantages of conversational marketing
The two main advantages of conversational marketing are:
- Gaining relevant marketing data
- More sales achieved in lesser time
Another considerable advantage of conversational marketing is the efficiency of chatbots compared to those human customer support representatives, chatbots are faster, and their response towards a live chat facility is always positive. Moreover, a quick response is a further assurance to the customer that there would be a quick solution too. Whereas, with real human communication, sometimes there are delays or inappropriate behavior which is quite annoying for many customers.
Always remember, a satisfied customer could become a lifelong customer.
Why do you need to use Conversational Marketing Strategy?
Sales teams from small scale businesses to large scale have been hardwired into believing that selling is all about mailers, ads, and cold calls. Although the main agenda of marketing is to add prospects to the sales, today the marketers also need to look at how people react to their messages.
According to a survey by Twilio, the following is what has happened in recent years:
- Not more than 43% of people respond to cold calls
- The open rate of emails has fallen to just 20% and is still going down
- The landing page conversion rate is just 2.5%
Nowadays everyone uses social media and enjoys chatting on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. These real-time conversations are conversational marketing strategies in terms of marketing, which makes things so easier.
A definite conversational marketing platform is a new way to move people through your funnel and create a new lead generation funnel to your existing marketing strategy. You aren’t creating a new marketing structure altogether, rather helping the existing one cope up with the new world.
We believe now you have understood what a conversational marketing strategy is, now let’s understand how conversational marketing strategy is used for Lead Generation.
Engage
It’s a good thing when a new visitor browses your website and you don’t force them to fill the lead form and also don’t push notifications to sign up newsletters. Think from their viewpoint. For example, you have a store and a customer comes in for the first time, at that particular moment, he wants to check out all that is available there. Perhaps, he hasn’t yet made up his mind to buy anything at all. This ‘customer’ is kind of lost out in your store. Similarly, it happens with the website, to cope up with this situation, chatbot plays a crucial role. It initiates the conversation with a simple ‘Hi’ or ‘May I help you?’.
You could continue the conversation by noticing what all your customer does while they are at your website. Several tools analyze your customer’s activities on the website.
Based on their behavior, you could form out questions that can reveal your customer’s purchase plan. It’s not necessary to create specific questions for all your customers. It makes better sense to have a standard list of queries for all your visitors.
This is how you engage with your customers and start conversational marketing. Several companies make chatbots creative for this kind of marketing. You can reach out to them for making customized bots for your marketing and sales funnels.
Understanding your customers
Traditional digital marketing says that sending e-mails to customers can get you great marketing results. But looking at today’s time and market, this isn’t true. Let’s understand this For example a customer X, who fills up a feedback form or a request form in your email and sends it back to you. For some reason, you didn’t open that mail immediately and now you lost a valuable lead forever. Any primary contact if not responded to within 5 minutes is a lost marketing opportunity. While mails may help in lead taking, their conversion rates are getting lower.
Yes, every company sends out bulk mail to their email list, and with obvious reasons, these emails truly stand out. To ensure high conversion rates from email, you need to ace email marketing. However, even with a good email marketing plan in place, it all boils down to the response rate. This is where your chatbots step in.
You can program your ‘intelligent ‘agents to frame natural questions without leaving it for the customers to ask first. As soon as your visitor answers your first question, respond to them within 5 minutes via a clever and natural chatbot. This way your chatbots double up as virtual sales reps.
Recommendation
After understanding your customer and engaging with, you have got a fair idea of what your customer wants. This is the perfect time when your chatbots can make way for a human to human conversation. The fact is, sales are done best by humans and not by computer programs. Once your chatbots have recognized your target customers, it is time your sales reps take over. This is the whole purpose of the ‘recommend’ stage- convert conversations into sales. A chatbot must go on to further compliment your sales team, and that is the whole point of a good conversational marketing plan. You can use these chatbots to share the right leads to the right representative and your sales would rise.
Conversational marketing is not a new concept but can be used to boost your lead generation efforts and manage conversations about products and services. The secret of a successful marketing strategy is closely related to customer experience. At FunnL, we consistently deliver sales qualified leads for clients and understand each of our customers and their unique requirements. Our engagement models are designed to be flexible, efficient, and cost-saving.
Want to generate Leads? Contact Us!
