What is Conversational Marketing?

Instant messaging apps have changed the way businesses communicate with customers. Now, not only do they need to have great customer service, but they need to implement new strategies to have a successful customer relationship. That's when conversational marketing comes into the picture!

What is Conversational Marketing?

The difference with traditional marketing

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric and dialogue-driven approach to marketing. It has become the go-to strategy for driving customer engagement, improving customer experience, and growing revenue.

By multiplying the channels of conversations in real-time, conversational marketing responds to the need for immediacy that characterizes the consumer and the buyer today. A need that is not necessarily met by traditional marketing.

To meet this expectation of immediacy, conversational marketing sets up several channels with high response rates. These channels are:

• Instant messaging apps: an important part of consumers' daily lives (WhatsApp and iMessage).
• Social network messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Instagram's DMs, which are real lead magnets.
• Google's Business Messages: the messaging solution offered by Google.
• Live Chat: a conversation tool that allows consumers to engage in discussions with brands from their site without going through a social network.

To ensure the economic viability (ROI) of your conversational marketing strategy, you need to have some operational intelligence. Brands need to organize interactions along the buying journey to avoid putting too much work into the customer service team.

For this, you can rely on a chatbot, which is able to conduct intelligible and coherent conversations with customers. A properly configured chatbot (even powered by Artificial Intelligence) will save you from redundant answers while making leads progress in their buying journey.

Relationship marketing vs. conversational marketing:

Traditional marketing (until the beginning of the 2000s) focused exclusively on promoting the products sold to a target audience. But, this approach deprives the company of an important business opportunity: customer retention. According to this study (Harvard Business Review), acquiring a new customer costs between 5 and 25 times more than retaining an existing one. Relationship marketing has consolidated the relationship between the structure and its audience to go beyond the simple transactional relationship (buying and selling).

Conversational marketing is just an accentuation of relationship marketing. It adapts the business approach to the evolution of consumer behavior on the web:

• All customers use messaging apps. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have more than 1 billion users.
• According to this study, 82% of customers expect immediate feedback on the questions they ask brands.
• 79% of consumers say they are frustrated if they can't reach a business via their preferred communication channel.

The goal of conversational marketing is to align relationship marketing with new expectations from consumers.

Conversational marketing main goals

Improve customer experience

In a context where offers are less and less differentiated, it is the customer experience that makes it possible to stand out in the market. Giants like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb have based their business model on the customer experience rather than the product or service. By enabling conversations at each step of the journey, conversational marketing boosts the customer experience. In the end, it's the company's commercial performance that gains points.

Increase customer engagement and lead generation

Your audience will always prefer to send you a message on WhatsApp or Messenger rather than through an email or a contact form. They use messaging tools several times a day. Conversational marketing encourages visitors to your website and social media pages to contact you.

Bridges can exist between your Inbound action and your conversational marketing approach. The content produced can be distributed by your chatbots or messaging app, as you would do with an email newsletter.

Update your company's brand image

It would be a shame to limit the communication channels between the company and its customers to a simple contact form. By integrating conversation channels (Live Chat, bot or virtual agent, social network messaging, and mobile messaging), the company brings interactivity to its website. Its brand image gains in freshness and humanity in a context of unbridled digitalization in the wake of the pandemic.

Is this type of marketing appropriate for your type of business?

The truth is that all organizations are doing conversational marketing. The question is: Can your business benefit from a conversational marketing strategy?

The answer is yes for the majority of industries:

• Local businesses such as restaurants, hair salons and beauty salons can use conversational marketing to capture local leads. Instant messaging tools allow them to send multimedia files (photos, videos, audio) to showcase their products and services and enhance the user experience.
• Companies that are overwhelmed by their customers can use chatbots or virtual agents to relieve their teams.
• B2B companies with a long and complex sales cycle can use conversational marketing to accelerate the buying process.
• Companies that have customers in different time zones can rely on chatbots. This will provide them with 24/7 customer service.

Examples of successful conversational marketing strategies

Domino’s AnyWare

Domino's now allows its customers to order pizzas from conversational channels like Google Home, Alexa, Messenger, Twitter, and even from their Smart TV. This omnichannel strategy allows the company to adapt to the new web uses of its customers and to reach a wide audience.

National Geographic and the Einstein chatbot!

National Geographic is the "El Dorado" for science enthusiasts. In 2017, the channel launched a new show, "Genius," about the life and work of Albert Einstein. To promote it, it opted for a rather original conversational marketing strategy. When users sent questions on Messenger, the user received an audio answer with the voice of Einstein. The program was a great success!

Nolah Mattress: +27% in sales!

The Nolah Mattress website had good traffic. But visitors were leaving the site without buying. This was because their website was 0 intuitive, with sometimes not very accessible technical terms. The implementation of a Live Chat solution on the site solved this problem, and this with a 27% boost in sales!

At ChayAll, we started with a simple observation. While the contribution of conversational marketing to the overall performance of companies is undeniable, the market did not offer an accessible, effective, and fun tool to move to the implementation stage. This is why we have developed an all-in-one conversational solution. It allows you to talk with your customers on the most used messaging systems, with no limits. Use:

• WhatsApp Business API
• Facebook Messenger
• Apple Messages for Business, the business version of iMessage
• Instagram DMs
• Telegram.
• Google's Business Messages. The messaging integrated with your company's Google My Business listing
• A Live Chat tool.

Thus, you have a single interface that centralizes all your conversations with a wide range of practical features. You will also be able to create your chatbot easily, without having to code. It is compatible with WordPress, PrestaShop, Shopify, and Joomla! ChayAll offers you the ultimate solution for high ROI conversational marketing.