What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing involves building relationships with customers and buyers through an authentic and personal experience. It helps aid in converting leads via dialogue-driven activities leading to a more personalized website experience for users. One effective way to incorporate this two-way dialogue into your business strategy is through the use of chatbots.
All About Chatbots
Chatbots are a unique tool that can help provide a more personalized experience for customers and buyers. They utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate conversations with a user via messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, and even through the phone. Chatbots are extremely useful when it comes to lead generation. In fact, chatbots convert four times more than traditional lead generation tools simply because people prefer having conversations.
A study from Harvard Business Review states that companies need to respond within 5 minutes of initial contact; waiting any longer decreases your odds of qualifying the lead by 400%. While employees cannot be online for 24 hours straight, chatbots operate 24/7 allowing you to qualify leads at any point in the day, even when employees are no longer working. In addition, bots ask the questions that are normally asked on form fills and cold calls. This allows them to qualify the lead before the potential customer even reaches a real person within your business.
How to Set Up Your Chatbot Effectively?
First things first, when setting up your chatbot it’s important that you make sure your bot sounds like a human. This gives the user an experience that is more interpersonal and feels like a human-to-human interaction rather than a human-to-robot one. Nobody enjoys talking to a robot.
Next step – organization. Always keep in mind – the ultimate goal is to enhance the customer experience by asking questions that users can answer quickly and easily, and that also provides you with the information you need to qualify the lead. To make it simple, we have broken down chatbot set up into three steps:
- Begin with a conversation starter in order to classify the customer. Obviously, you should start with a greeting message. Then, you want to start getting into the questions that’ll help you categorize the user right away. For example, you can ask if they are an existing customer or what type of support they need.
- Use lead capture tools in order to qualify the user. In this step, you should dive a little deeper, asking questions to better understand what the user is looking for – whether that be customer service, help with a product/service order, a sales representative, or something else.
- Direct the user to the appropriate team member. Now that you have all of their information, you will be able to connect the customer to the appropriate team member. You will also be able to give that team member a leg up on the conversation since you already have a lot of the preliminary questions answered.
With all of that being said, the importance of implementing conversational marketing into your strategy is crucial, especially when it comes to generating and nurturing leads. Not only does it help enhance the customer experience, but it also expedites the lead generation process for you. Utilizing chatbots allows customers to have 24/7, direct access to your business, leading to higher conversions and, ultimately, stronger customer loyalty.
