Marketing needs to get back to its roots. Conversational marketing must become the new norm. Digital marketing teams must move beyond data-driven decisions and instead focus on a customer-centric, personalized and needs-based marketing model. It’s all about having a conversation, creating a dialogue and reacting in real-time.
Having a chatbot makes this a reality.
Think about your existing digital marketing strategies. Are you satisfied with the results? Email marketing typically has a 20% open rate and a click-through rate (CTR) of around 2.5%. The average CTR on Adwords is about 2% and landing pages typically have a conversion rate of 2.35%. Think about all the prospects that aren’t being converted. Think about all those lost opportunities. Think about the lost revenue.
Regardless of how many channels you use, or how many strategies you employ, in the end, it’s getting more difficult to generate the kind of returns that were once commonplace with these aforementioned approaches. Most companies looking at their stats and marketing ROI would begrudgingly admit that their digital marketing strategies aren’t as good as they’d like them to be – and certainly aren’t what they used to be. So, what’s happening?
Been There, Done That
Customers have been conditioned by it all. There’s very little they haven’t seen, experienced or heard before and they’re tuning out these strategies in droves. Just think about how many people use ad-blocking software nowadays. It’s natural for a new marketing approach to gain momentum only to level out and drop off over time. This is exactly what’s happening with conventional digital marketing. Customers are more aware than ever before, and they’re tuning out the well-established digital strategies. Something faster and more responsive is needed.
Speed of Response
Customers aren’t willing to wait a couple of hours, a day or a couple of days before they hear from your sales team. They want answers and solutions and they want them now. There are far too many companies that understand that speed of response is critical to winning new business. Several of your competitors have likely adopted proactive digital marketing best practices, ones focused on responding within minutes and seconds, not hours or days. The faster you respond, the higher your percentages of closing that all-important first opportunity. Every second counts.
InsideSales.com lead response research shows how speed of response always wins. For instance, your odds of reaching a lead within 5 minutes of them arriving at your website is 100 times higher than if you were to try reaching them within 30 minutes. You’re also 21 times more likely to qualify that lead within the first 5 minutes than if you were to reach them within 30 minutes. Why the decline? Simply put, you can’t qualify a lead if your competitor has beaten you to the punch. Wait too long and your competitors will capitalize. It’s really that simple.
So, how much would your company benefit if it were to qualify a higher percentage of incoming leads at a faster rate? Better yet, how often does your sales team respond within 5 minutes of an inbound lead making contact with your business? Don’t be alarmed if your current structure isn’t up to par. In fact, according to Drift.com, only 7% of 433 business-to-business (B2B) enterprises responded within 5 minutes, 2% within an hour, 27% within a day and over 55% over 5 days or never at all. That’s a lot of wasted leads and a lot of lost sales.
Conversational Marketing
Today’s customer wants more interaction and that doesn’t mean tweaking your existing digital marketing strategies. It means giving them a voice, providing workable solutions and giving real-time feedback that creates a dialogue. It means providing a customized solution to a specific problem and that means reacting to inbound visits with an intelligent chatbot.
A chatbot will replace your landing pages with real conversations, ones that are entirely driven by your customer. It’s not about pushing information out to customers in the hopes they’ll act, and it’s not about tweaking a call-to-action in an endless pursuit of optimizing your conversion rates. It’s about answering customer questions in real-time and creating a dialogue that gets to the heart of the matter.
Our solution is called ConnectionBot. Its purpose is to move your prospect forward by asking intelligent questions and then following up with specific responses which lead to more intelligent questions. This personalizes the user’s experience. They drive the conversation and the answers they provide lead to a clearer picture of what they need and when they need it. The more a prospect progresses, the clearer their needs become.
ConnectionBot takes advantage of the rise in messaging. Aps are everywhere, and consumers have been trained to interact with them. Again, speed of response is what matters and our solution is built on speed so that you’re responding in seconds – not minutes, hours or days. Ultimately, ConnectionBot takes advantage of the conversational marketing funnel and condenses it into three simple steps.
1. Capture: Our solution replaces your static landing pages with context-sensitive dialogue. Prospects don’t have to search randomly through your website in search of information. ConnectionBot provides potential customers with real-time feedback and helps them define their problem so that both of you have a clearer picture of what’s required. It’s the hand-holding your new prospects need and the best introduction new customers could possibly have.
2. Qualify: Our solution reads and reacts to the real-time input your prospects provide. That means your leads are qualified faster. High-value prospects are identified and given top priority, while visitors just searching for general information are directed to specific locations on your website. You no longer have to go through the hassles of qualifying the lead. By the time you get the information, you’re well aware of who you're contacting and why.
3. Connect: High-quality leads are routed to the appropriate company representative based on the inquiry, territory or geographic market. By then several of the leads may have already been booked on appointments as ConnectionBot syncs with Office 365, Google and other services.
An intelligent chatbot can seamlessly guide new customers through your funnel and shorten the time it takes for you to engage them. It means the difference between answering visitors within seconds or hoping they're still interested days later. You'll have a better idea of qualified leads and be able to prioritize return calls based on up-to-the-minute data.
Interested in learning more about how a chatbot can help you increase conversions? Contact us.
Written By: David Carpenter
