Take Personalized Customer Service a Step Up in 2023 with Conversational Marketing
The concept of having real-time conversations with clients across various platforms is known as conversational marketing. By using conversational applications like WhatsApp Business, chatbots, and social conversational messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, companies can build high-quality customer experiences for specific consumers.
Conversational marketing, like conversational commerce, personalizes the customer experience and moves customers further along the sales funnel. Brands can use conversational marketing to provide customers with individualized product suggestions or to assist them in navigating the purchasing process.
As an example of this, imagine a chatbot that could be activated by a consumer’s browsing history — for instance, in a case where the consumer is unable to find the ideal pair of sunglasses or jeans on a retail website. A chatbot could help them immediately in a warm, personalized, and engaging way.
Currently, 71% of consumers have expressed that they’d like companies to engage with them in real time. If your company isn’t yet leveraging conversational marketing, you’re likely losing out on countless opportunities to engage customers in a meaningful manner.
How Conversational Marketing Can Benefit Your Sales and Promotional Campaigns
Your company’s sales and promotional campaigns can benefit from conversational marketing in several ways. Conversational marketing not only produces tangible outcomes, but it can also increase your revenue. For instance, compared to the 23% of marketers who didn’t use conversational SMS campaigns for promotions or offers, 77% of those who did report revenue increases for the previous fiscal year.
Consider that 78% of consumers reported that during the coronavirus pandemic, their expectations about the ways companies would interact with them increased. For instance, nearly 90% of consumers anticipated quick replies from merchants’ customer service teams. To exceed customer expectations, brands need to not only interact with consumers across a variety of channels, but they must also do so promptly.
By satisfying both of these desires, conversational text marketing tools can improve customer experiences for businesses like yours.
Unforgettable Omnichannel Conversational Customer Experiences
An omnichannel messaging strategy is the foundation for improving conversational customer experiences for your business. By applying an omnichannel approach, you can assist and interact with customers on a variety of social media channels using omnichannel software products from Mitto.
Taking an Omnichannel Approach to Conversational Marketing Campaigns: What You Need to Know
It’s critical to approach your conversational marketing strategy from an omnichannel messaging perspective. If you interact with customers on just one channel, your business and outcomes will be constrained.
Every time you speak with a potential customer, you have a chance to trigger a purchase. The fact of the matter is that consumers are much more likely to purchase items when they’re engaged across a variety of channels.
How, therefore, might an omnichannel messaging approach be used in conversational text marketing campaigns? Here are some helpful pointers for implementing omnichannel techniques using conversational marketing strategies.
SMS Messaging
With an open rate of 98%, SMS messaging is an efficient way of reaching your target audience. You can add a personal touch to your SMS campaigns by offering tailored discounts, making product suggestions, or informing customers when their orders have been delivered. SMS is the most widely used conversational messaging platform in the world, and it’s a highly effective method to connect and interact with your customers.
Interactive Chatbots
An excellent way to alleviate some of the inquiries a customer support team gets every day is to use artificial intelligence (AI). Conversational messaging chatbots can answer straightforward queries in real time while retaining human qualities in their dialogue.
Without needing human intervention, bots can study behavioral data and customize their conversations to address a customer’s particular pain points.
To enable this, make sure the personality of your chatbot represents your brand. When a visitor first arrives on your website, have the chatbot welcome them. It can also then come up with buying suggestions and assist customers with check-outs.
Social and Chat Applications
On WhatsApp, chat, and social media platforms, brands can now have full-funnel conversations with customers who have opted in. Your company can communicate one-on-one with customers through omnichannel software messaging tools, completely customizing their experiences. Additionally, you can allow customers to pay for their purchases via Google Pay, Apple Pay, Paypal, or other online payment services while they’re engaged in conversations. Customers will value this convenience of purchasing.
Creating a Successful Campaign
Choosing the right approach is the first step to your campaign’s success. Effective conversational marketing strategies include the following aspects.
1. Leveraging segmentation
Divide your audience into groups depending on whatever data your business has access to. Based on the demographics, tastes, and purchasing patterns of your audience, you can utilize this data to develop detailed buyer personas for them. Then you can create campaigns that are tailored specifically to these personas.
2. Making sales via chats
You can create discussions based on segmentation results that efficiently focus on a target audience. Based on the personas you created, you can choose how your bot should reply when a prospective customer messages it.
The goal of the conversation should be to complete a sale as quickly as possible. To illustrate:
Bot: “Hello there! You’re looking for a new pair of sunglasses, I see. Do you have a certain style or color in mind?”
Customer: “I’m searching for a pair that’s small enough to fit into a pocket.”
Bot: “OK, compact designer sunglasses. Any specific color?”
Customer: “I want something flashy. Gold or silver.”
Bot: “Not a problem! These three choices are the results of my search through our collection. Each pair is a little smaller than average and comes in either gold or silver. Do any of these appeals to you?”
Customer: “Oh nice, the second one is pretty cool. What’s your return policy?”
Bot: “90 days, with free return shipping. I’ll even throw in a limited-time 20% discount. Should I add the bag to your cart?”
Customer: “Great, yes, I’ll take it.”
In the above conversation, a browsing consumer has been transformed into a paying customer by your automated system.
3. Enabling real-time chats with customer service representatives
Ideally, customers should be able to have real-time chats with your service representatives on a customer’s preferred channel. For queries that are too complicated for a chatbot to handle, human associates could step in.
For instance, in the aforementioned example, you could configure the bot to guide the query to a live agent if the consumer had provided a criterion that wasn’t addressable via the automated system. A customer service representative could quickly take over the engagement and finish the ongoing conversation.
Or, perhaps there’s a shipment that’s subject to a delay after a customer has already placed an order. The customer tries to get additional details, but the ordering site only displays the word “delayed.” In this case, the customer might be able to access live help through Facebook Messenger to learn more about the status of their package. This adaptable, asynchronous assistance benefits both your business and the customer. Customers stay loyal to brands when they get continuous assistance, even if their delivery is delayed.
Drive Your Conversational Marketing Initiatives With Conversations
With Conversations, a pre-built tool developed by Mitto, you can easily see all your conversations in one location. You can talk to large numbers of consumers across a variety of channels from a single, user-friendly dashboard.
The following are the top three advantages of an outstanding omnichannel conversational customer experience.
1. It simplifies the buying process
These days, consumers don’t want to wait for customer service reps on hold. Many are unwilling to email you at all. Smart consumers demand prompt replies and continuous assistance. They want brand interaction on the applications they currently use. An omnichannel messaging strategy eliminates friction and simplifies the customer experience, whether it’s via WhatsApp or Viber.
2. It increases customer satisfaction and brand loyalty
Can you picture having to introduce yourself to someone each time you speak? A brand can lose a customer’s loyalty if it fails to call them by their name or forgets their preferences. You can develop relationships at scale by giving your customers an amazing experience. Support that’s both ongoing and relevant is crucial.
3. It enables the customer to take the lead
As previously stated, customers like to be in charge. Thanks to conversational customer experiences, they can have a conversation with a brand in their way and at their own pace.
What Makes for a Fantastic Conversational Customer Experience?
A fantastic conversational customer experience needs to have three key components: proactiveness, personalization, and automation.
Customer journeys are accelerated through proactive communication. By taking a proactive approach, customers can be informed about shipping delays, item availability, and limited-time offers.
Customers want to be heard. By having personalized conversations with customers, brands can show that they understand customer preferences and problems. Customers will feel appreciated if they get personalized purchasing recommendations, continuous assistance, and prompt solutions to their problems.
Automation guarantees that you provide prompt customer service around-the-clock. AI can be used to rapidly answer common queries so that shoppers aren’t left hanging.
Successful brands
Retail beauty chain Sephora is a brand that utilizes conversational technology to deliver personalized experiences to its customers. Every step of the way, from reminding shoppers about items that are back in stock to dealing with abandoned shopping carts, their virtual assistants help consumers.
Erica, a virtual shopping assistant at Bank of America, is an example of conversational tech being used to communicate with customers in a tailored and proactive manner. While interacting with Erica, customers can redeem rewards, and the bank alerts them if duplicate purchases are made.
Conversational Commerce Restores the Personal Element of Shopping
Customer shopping experiences have changed a lot in the last 20 years. Can you still recall visiting businesses in your car, being welcomed by salespeople, and discussing your desires with them? In today’s world, these actions can seem like old memories. The way people buy products has changed significantly as e-commerce has grown. In 2022, the majority of purchasing will be done by customers who do research from the comfort of their own homes, click a few buttons, and hope to find what they’re looking for.
But what if we were able to reintroduce a sense of intimacy to shopping? What if we had a way to bring back the beneficial advice an educated salesperson offers? The solutions that “conversational commerce” provides are exactly what’s missing from today’s e-commerce.
A few years ago, investor Chris Messina took the idea of conversational commerce mainstream when he declared that “Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare.”
In some ways, conversational commerce combines the best of what’s old with the best of what’s modern. We’re no longer battling traffic and congestion when needing to go across town to the local shopping mall. But by the same token, we don’t need to get lost down a Google rabbit hole when looking for answers to our product-related inquiries.
Conversational commerce attempts to bring the formerly personal task of shopping into the digital world using new communication channels, including SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Business, and Instagram. These channels are great for text marketing and customer support, but they’re also ideal for conversational commerce. Customers can ask inquiries in a two-way interaction and, in the process, make purchases while conversing with a real person, an AI bot, or a mix of the two.
Contact Mitto today to find out more about how conversational marketing and conversational commerce can take your business’s personalized customer service to the next level.
