Let’s be honest, we all aim to increase our sales. The difference is in the various methods we use to achieve it. Conversational marketing proposes the importance of listening to and knowing in detail the consumers to be able to provide a better service, satisfy them and, finally, increase revenue.
- How to establish these conversations? In the most convenient way for the client.
- What are the most appropriate means? The ones that provide what is needed fast and in a simple way.
- What role does technology play? It’s fundamental. Chatbots, messaging apps, social networks, and even online surveys can be useful resources to strengthen your conversational marketing strategy.
Keep on reading to learn more on the subject and how it may be useful to boost your business.
Get closer to the client through conversational marketing
Several specialists in marketing have pointed out the importance of understanding the relationship with a client as a conversation. This isn’t new in the marketing world. As part of that dialogue, listening to your client is fundamental.
You should put a lot of effort into meeting them, studying them and paying close attention to what they say (and what they don’t say). What has changed, especially with the development of the internet, is the need to keep those conversations through different channels without damaging the quality of the relationship.
The current digital environment has created new channels of contact and dialogue. Therefore, conversational marketing has become more relevant, as a necessary discipline to help bring a brand closer to its clients.
With this new way the brand and clients are relating, in which the digital channels gained strategic importance, new challenges appear: real-time and customized conversations. Let’s see what these two features are:
1. Real-time conversations
Nowadays, the relationship between your brand and your clients is a permanent and ubiquitous dialogue.
Put yourself in your consumers’ shoes: they want everything as fast as it takes googling something. Now! We’ve all turned more impatient and, if we refer to brands and clients in specific, that can turn into a series of problems that may affect the relationship.
If you’ve got an ecommerce store and promise to deliver products in 24 hours, your user will be ready to demand you keep your word. If you don’t, they will ask for explanations right away. That’s why you should be prepared to meet their needs in real-time. Firstly, it’s about being ready to answer those contacts and knowing how to deal with the client. Then, you will have to mend a mistake (if there was any).
This led to social networks gaining prominence not just for branding but for post-purchase attention. Plus, more companies are using WhatsApp for Business to be in the place where their clients are, as the app won’t stop growing. Lastly, we can’t forget the chatbots skyrocketing (which we’ll delve into later).
2. Customize the conversations with your clients
All the channels previously mentioned -social networks, WhatsApp and chatbots- share the feature of being tools clients can have access to immediately, at any moment on any device. More and more companies are incorporating them since they allow real-time communication as well as a customized conversation with the client.
In any dialogue in our everyday life, the more we know about the other person, the better. It will help us establish the right frame for the dialogue to be on the right path.
In this way, another point to bear in mind is how to improve the bond by knowing better the other and using that information to improve your conversations. For instance, if you have chain restaurants and you accept takeaway orders (orders for pickup) through WhatsApp, the first thing you should ask each client is in which restaurant they want to pick up their food. In this way, you can then go on with the rest of the questions (what to order, at what time the pickup is, payment method, etc.).
In the last couple of months, the number of companies using chatbots to answer questions through WhatsApp has increased. This is due to the fact that the development of this technology has made it possible for a person to chat with a virtual assistant who seems to be a person... but it isn't.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a computer program that, with the right development and training, turns into a virtual assistant who simulates a human conversation.
Even though there are different types, the most used is the service kind, which allows companies to provide an effective solution to answering questions in real-time and in a customized way through digital channels. Clients meeting their needs thanks to the attention provided by a chatbot might be the best path towards achieving the conversation desired.
Going back to the example of picking up food at a restaurant, a well-trained chatbot will not only ask firstly at which restaurant to pick up the food, but it will also greet in a friendly way, congratulate the client for the food choice and add emojis as we would in a conversation between friends. Of course, it will express its gratitude at the end.
Therefore, it’s not weird that more and more companies are incorporating conversational assistants. A recent investigation at Salesforce indicated that 53% of the service organizations plan to include chatbots in the near future. Banks, public institutions, electronic commerce platforms and delivery services... the chatbot universe is expanding by leaps and bounds.
Why is chatbot adoption growing?
Let’s take the banks as an example. In many countries, they tend to be the consumers’ favorite target due to their bad service. Endless queues to get personal attention at the counter of a branch, long phone calls in which clients must choose between numerous options that tend to be aimless... if you’re a client of a bank, most probably you went through any of these situations.
At this point, you must have realized we’re not innovative when choosing this example to explain the value of chatbots. That’s why, it’s not a coincidence the banking industry has adopted it with great devotion.
Some good chatbot models from Latin-American banks are Blue (BBVA), Arturito (Banco de Crédito del Perú) or Gala (Banco Galicia from Argentina). Basically, anyone, client or not, can interact with these chatbots, true corporate conversational assistants, to solve a great variety of problems.
For example, Gala is prepared to answer questions on over 200 topics:
- Clients learn how to get their home banking password back, make a fixed-term deposit, have access to the loyalty program, and find out when they receive the card previously asked for, among other things.
- The ones who aren’t clients can find out what are the requirements to open a new account, the costs, the information on the services provided by the bank, etc.
- When developing your own chatbot, make sure it has a well-defined personality, which reflects your brand’s identity. In the case of these banks, it can be noticed they tend to be kind, helpful and nice. We could say these are three features any client would appreciate, so it makes sense the chatbot shares the same features as well.
Choose the apps for chatbot contact
If you’re considering using this resource to talk to your clients, it’s important that you train it to not only answer the most questions possible in a useful and pleasant language, but to identify the most relevant means for your public.
That’s why, we recommend incorporating chatbots into different channels of attention, which makes it easier for the clients to have access to the information they are seeking. Gala, for instance, is available, not only on the bank’s webpage and its app, but in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These two apps are very popular in Argentina, and in LatinAmerica as well. Nevertheless, there are other companies that develop bots for platforms such as Telegram, Viber, Kik and Slack.
How can I have my own chatbot? Is it expensive? Is it hard?
There are countless available alternatives for you to create your own chatbot with no need of almost any technical knowledge.
The HubSpot chatbot generator, for example, provides templates to customize and to adapt based on the features of your company. It’s a free tool that can be integrated with the HubSpot CRM.
There are several platforms to create chatbots that offer free versions and tend not to require too much effort with code, as Jivochat, Bot Kit and Botsify. Basically, they help you develop the bot flow so you can talk to your clients based on the different answers.
Besides, if you plan on creating a chatbot for a messenger service app, remember they tend to offer tools for developers that simplify the job. Such is the case of Facebook Messenger, which offers a wide range of online resources.
Chatbots, messenger service apps, social networks and online surveys can be useful resources to strengthen your conversational marketing strategy.
Talk to your client through online surveys
Besides messenger apps and chatbots, there are other alternatives worth exploring. For instance, have you ever thought about how to apply conversational marketing in the world of online surveys?
There are several other options to create customized online surveys and forms. However, not all of them are developed in a conversational format. That’s why, if what you’re aiming at is spreading friendly surveys for your users, in which filling them in is practically like having a conversation with someone, we recommend choosing a platform that includes the features required to do it.
For example, bear in mind if it provides features as variables, which allow you to use previous answers in future questions. Thanks to this feature, you could start the questionnaire by asking the names of the interviewees and then using the information to customize the rest of the questions on the end page.
Another useful feature is Logic Jump, which also uses each answer to trace a path according to the interviewee. Therefore, by drafting the questionnaire you can create rules or conditions to generate a different path based on the answer. Then, according to the client’s answer, certain questions will be skipped given they are not suitable for the profile. As with variables, it offers the interviewee a more human and personal experience and avoids wasting time answering questions on topics that are irrelevant to them and to you.
These are just some examples. We hope you find them inspiring for your future projects as, undoubtedly, conversational marketing still has a huge growth potential. What are you waiting for to start applying it to your business strategy?