Supercharge Your Sales Pipeline with Conversational Marketing

As communication channels have evolved, one of the goals has been to remove obstacles. The Pony Express served a purpose, but no one liked waiting days or longer for a response. So, the telegraph was invented, but those messages took forever to compose, send, and decode. Email and mailers still work for marketing, but they're one-way communications with the customer.

A growing trend that businesses are embracing is conversational marketing. This method of communicating with prospects and customers not only heightens the customer experience but can also supercharge your businesses' sales pipeline.

What Is Conversational Marketing?

According to Drift, which is the company that coined the term, conversational marketing is a "one-on-one approach to marketing that companies use to shorten their sales cycle, learn about their customers, and create a more human buying experience."

In most cases, this is an automated conversation with your website or social media visitors. Using artificial intelligence and pre-loaded information, you can ask visitors different questions based on their responses so that you can gather meaningful information.  Gartner has reported that over half of medium to large businesses will have chatbots by 2020. 

This type of marketing extends beyond the use of chatbots; it also includes Facebook Messenger, texts, and Slack. Essentially, it is any channel in which a customer wants to communicate with your company in real-time. 

The Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Communication methods evolve as a means to eliminate obstacles. One of the reasons this is necessary is that people have become incredibly impatient. According to HubSpot Research, 82 percent of consumers rate an "immediate" response as very important or important when they have a sales or marketing question. That figure jumps to 90 percent with a customer service question. What is considered "immediate"? Today, that refers to about 10 minutes or less. 

That's one of the primary benefits of using conversational marketing, but there are several more.

• Create a more human buying experience. When you use conversational marketing, customers no longer have to rely on lead forms to get your attention. Now you can say "hi" to those visitors and allow them to engage with you at their convenience. 
• Learn a lot about your customers and buyers. Those traditional lead forms can only tell you so much about what "problem" a customer is trying to solve. Conversational marketing can collect more information about a visitor's pain points and the product features that they see as priorities.
• Convert more and better leads. This type of marketing can allow you to boost the number of qualified leads into your sales funnel. In short, you'll be capturing many of the leads that never bothered to fill out forms before but will engage in a quick chat. 
• Short your sales cycle. Qualified leads that are captured through conversations tend to close faster than ones captured through traditional methods. Using this type of marketing, you can shorten your overall sales cycle on average. 
• Enlarge your sales pipeline. In one case study, data science platform RapidMiner was able to influence one-quarter of its sales pipeline with conversations, which it estimates is valued over $1 million. 

The Elements of Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing might seem similar to some of your other marketing strategies, but it has some elements that make it unique. If your company is focused on engaging with customers, it could be close in some of its initiatives. Here are four elements of this method that can help you refine your marketing strategy. 

• Conversations happen in customer-time. With conversational marketing, the customer gets to choose when the dialogue occurs, not you. This might happen after they finish a meeting at 10 a.m. or when they think of a question at 11 p.m. Likewise, that conversation might start one minute, and a customer comes back to finish it 10 minutes or 10 hours later. 
• Conversations have context. Conversations with the same customers shouldn't start from "Point A" each time. If a customer spoke with you last week, the information exchanged should be stored so that any future conversations have context. Machines and interactions should get "smarter" as your system collects more information. 
• Conversations are scalable. Customers don't care how many concurrent conversations you have running. They're only concerned about their question or issue. Your system should be able to accommodate 10, 100, or 1,000 conversations at a time, which is why bots are so popular. 
• Conversations meet customers where they are. You should be prepared to add value to your customer by meeting them where they are. This means that conversations should take place on the channel that suits your customer the best - a chatbot, Facebook Messenger, text. No one wants to be forced to use a certain platform because that's the one your company has chosen. Provide options. 

How to Use Conversation Marketing to Boost Sales

You can use conversational marketing to increase customer retention as well as convert more of your online traffic into qualified leads. The steps to do this are simple. 

1. Ditch the forms. Instead of a series of web forms for customers to fill out to get more information, allow them to instantly start conversations with your business through 24/7 online chat. 
2. Deliver results. Conversational channels should be set up to respond to leads as quickly as possible with the requested information. Ask qualifying questions to drill down further and move the customer through the sales funnel. 
3. Make recommendations. Conversational methods can only get you so far, and they may not be able to close the sale. At the appropriate point, they should offer to schedule an appointment or recommend the next step in the process. 

The shift that is taking place for marketers toward conversational marketing will bring a ton of benefits to your organization. Not only will it supercharge your sales pipeline, but it will also allow you to build brand loyalty and improve customer experience. For more information about marketing techniques that drive results, Contact Connection Model today.