What is Con­ver­sa­tion­al Marketing?

For SMBs on the cutting edge of the latest tech­no­log­i­cal trends, there’s a new kid on the block in the fast-moving world of marketing and it’s designed to help you build real con­nec­tions with your customers. Con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing is making big waves, and for good reason. If you’ve been looking for a better way to engage customers and grow sales, then con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing might be just the thing you’re looking for!

Over the past 20 years, email marketing has been the de-facto method of reaching out to both new and returning customers. Its ad­van­tages are clear; it is fast, cheap and allows companies to share in­for­ma­tion across mul­ti­me­dia formats using large mailing lists. Today, however, the landscape is beginning to shift, with customers in­creas­ing­ly seeing email marketing as intrusive, dis­tract­ing, and ul­ti­mate­ly, annoying.

Whether or not email marketing has had its day is still up for debate, but as our world has become in­creas­ing­ly tech-oriented, the com­pe­ti­tion for our attention has grown ex­po­nen­tial­ly. If email marketing’s blanket style approach to customer en­gage­ment is no longer working for you, then perhaps a more direct and personal approach is answer.

Loosely speaking, con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing aims to create a more human buying and selling ex­pe­ri­ence by con­nect­ing you directly with your customers. Crucially, it centers around engaging customers on a one-to-one basis, stepping away from mass mailing lists and non-targeted email campaigns in favor of real-time con­ver­sa­tions with in­di­vid­u­als. The un­der­ly­ing concept is to reduce the scat­ter­gun approach of email marketing and replace it with a tailored approach that nurtures only the best leads. In turn, this tends to result in greater con­ver­sion rates and happier customers.

The growth of con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing is in­trin­si­cal­ly linked to the de­vel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies that allow more re­spon­sive online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Busi­ness­es can benefit from these tech­nolo­gies thanks to the low adoption costs and intuitive func­tion­al­i­ty. Most recently, the advent of con­ver­sa­tion­al email has given both busi­ness­es and in­di­vid­u­als the chance to engage customers more re­spon­sive­ly, promising new and dynamic ways to com­mu­ni­cate by combining the best parts of email and instant messaging.

For instance, the email address listed on your website no longer needs to be a silo of forgotten customer queries. With con­ver­sa­tion­al email tech­nolo­gies, it becomes a real-time messaging link to would-be customers, en­cour­ag­ing greater en­gage­ment and deeper con­nec­tions. Not only are customer response times improved, but the con­ver­sa­tion­al nature of email messaging also helps you speak more directly with the best leads.

Let’s say you offer a service or product that is pushing new and in­no­v­a­tive features. Sometimes, your potential customers may not un­der­stand how those features will integrate with existing workflows or op­er­a­tional set ups. However, by taking a more con­ver­sa­tion­al approach, your team is on hand to not only answer questions, but also tailor those answers to the customer’s specific re­quire­ments.

Of course, this type of customer en­gage­ment requires a level of human in­ter­ac­tion that smaller companies and start-ups may struggle to provide. In order to keep response times down and en­gage­ment up, there needs to be a voice at the end of the line, someone to answer queries and sales questions instantly. However, as coun­ter­in­tu­itive as it may sound, that voice doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to be human, the rise of chatbots is helping to make con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing a pos­si­bil­i­ty for busi­ness­es of any size.

Chatbots act as an automatic lead qualifier, providing instant answers to the most common questions 24/7. If a customer has a question or query that the bot cannot answer, they are au­to­mat­i­cal­ly connected with a sales rep. In many cases, the customer may not even be aware that they are speaking to a bot and as this type of tech­nol­o­gy becomes in­creas­ing­ly so­phis­ti­cat­ed, chatbots will be able to answer even more customer queries and guide in­di­vid­u­als through the entire sales process.

Finally, the de­vel­op­ment of chatbots and the rise of Big Data are creating a perfect storm of customer en­gage­ment. Unlike a human sales rep, chatbots will be able to instantly retrieve huge amounts of data relating to in­di­vid­ual customers, from the way in which they browse your site initially to previous behaviors relating to orders, returns and other more so­phis­ti­cat­ed queries. As chatbots develop, this type of data will become in­valu­able, allowing instant per­son­al­iza­tion of responses designed to refine marketing efforts and drive customer en­gage­ment.

The new tech­nolo­gies of today are designed to bring us closer, to bridge the gaps created by a truly global world. From mobile phones to social media, savvy marketing ex­ec­u­tives have always looked to the latest devices and platforms to provide an advantage over the com­pe­ti­tion. By combining these two core concepts, con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing aims to fulfil the need for greater en­gage­ment by speaking directly to those customers that already show some interest in a company’s business or service. Put simply, a more human approach to marketing offering con­tex­tu­al and timely con­ver­sa­tion with customers is the answer to in­for­ma­tion overload. Whether through humans or bots, con­ver­sa­tion­al marketing offers busi­ness­es the op­por­tu­ni­ty to adopt this approach.