Your leads aren’t turning into customers, your customers are not purchasing, you’ve hit a wall with your marketing strategy. What do you do next?
Turn to conversational marketing.
Conversational marketing is engaging the customer through a two-way conversation and leveraging learnings to meet their needs. It’s uniquely tailored for them, right when they want it, through messaging.
More people use a messaging platform to communicate nowadays than social media or other forms of communication.
Source: Aumcore
Several industries are using messaging to market goods and services and seeing results. CPG conversational commerce has taken off because they’ve used messaging to sell more products direct-to-consumer, creating a sustainable revenue stream.
Conversational commerce is the future of mobile commerce. It’s the answer to gaining new customers that will repeat business with your brand.
Brands can apply some of the old marketing tactics with a twist and get better results. Here are 5 ways brands can use it to attract new customers and keep them.
1. Free Trials
Giving anything away for free is sure to attract an audience. Attracting the consumers you want from free offers, ones that will buy and return, is the challenge.
Through conversational commerce, brands can send free offers and free experience trials to consumers they wish to reach. Brands like Sephora, have used the technology to creatively get customers to try out products and increase the chance they will purchase.
Sephora’s virtual artist feature allows shoppers to virtually try on makeup with an uploaded selfie. This feature and a bot that schedules a makeover in the store, have resulted in an 11% increase in conversion.
Free trials and offers are a great way for brands to test new products and reach new customers. When it’s done through messaging, it’s proven to have a higher conversion rate than other mediums.
2. Gain Feedback
The benefit of a conversation vs. a one-way message is that you get feedback. In a real-life conversation, you gain feedback from people through body language and what they say.
In traditional marketing, feedback is difficult to gather. You send a message out, hoping it lands and are left wondering what’s actually working.
The advantage of conversational commerce is that it’s a two-way conversation, not one-way. Your brand can program questions to learn customers’ likes, dislikes, frustrations, and problems.
50% of consumers don’t think their feedback will go to anyone who will actually act on it.
Source: Hubspot
Brands that do collect feedback and use it to provide a better customer experience will be successful in getting new customers and keeping their existing customers.
You can learn from what customers say and what they don’t say. An online chat doesn’t provide the ability to read body language but brands have the next best thing- behavior data.
Brands can match customer feedback with behavior to learn if what the customer is saying is true of how they are behaving.
Feedback is a valuable tool. It’s tough to hear that a customer doesn’t like something about your brand or service. But if you listen and pair feedback with behavior insights you will reach the customers you want and keep their attention.
3. Run a Retargeted Personalized Campaign
An effective way to regain lost customers or convert online visitors to actual buyers is to run a retargeting campaign. Conversational AI allows you to gather valuable data and use it to transform interested consumers into loyal customers.
For example, you can target people who have visited a page on your website and initiated a conversation in the chat but never purchased. Leveraging the data you already have on them from the conversation, you can send them a personalized message and offer like this one:
“Hi John!, I noticed you were interested in a new frying pan, here’s a 30% discount on home goods. What else can I help you with?!”
A friendly message sent over chat with a high-quality image or video and specialized deal is less pushy and more authentic.
Because conversational marketing is a more human-like experience, this retargeting strategy is more effective in converting customers.
Companies have found that by combining the elements of personalization with conversational insights leads to a better return on spend than other marketing methods.
4. Create a Reward System
Your mind may go to a coffee shop loyalty card or your kid’s chore chart when you think of a reward system. Purchase 10 cups of coffee and get the 11th one free! Probably sounds familiar, right?
Reward systems are a standby marketing tool to gain customer loyalty. They entice new customers and turn them into recurring customers by incentivizing them to keep purchasing.
You can think outside the box to craft a loyalty program fit for your products that attracts new customers and keeps them buying. Take Nike for example.
Nike has been successfully evolving it’s loyalty program over the last few years. As a Nike member, you can access exclusive apps, first access to new products, free shipping, and birthday rewards.
Nike’s program has been so successful that in last year’s letter to its shareholders they attributed 35% of their digital growth to expanding the loyalty program.
The key has been incentivizing customers through content, access, and exclusives vs. old fashion points and discounts. Nike has tapped into what consumers love most about their brand and it’s working.
Identify what your shoppers value most and create a loyalty system that rewards them based on those values. Creating an interactive element through conversational AI will help to engage customers and maintain their loyalty to your brand.
4. Maintain a Constant Presence
The growth of e-commerce and mobile commerce has changed the way consumers shop. Shopping now happens at 3 am when a mom is up with her baby. Consumers are on their devices at all hours of the day browsing and shopping.
And living in a world that never turns off, has made timing even more crucial. Consumers have increasingly shorter attention spans with higher demands for immediate responses and results.
According to HubSpot Research, 60% of consumers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less.
Your brand now needs to be there right when a customer needs you or you risk losing them to a competitor.
Maintaining a constant presence not only increases your chances of attracting new customers but also increases the likelihood of them giving you repeated business.
With the help of conversational AI, your brand can be there the instant a customer has a question, needs to book a service, or make a purchase. Brands provide a concierge-like service that exceeds customer expectations.
The ability to maintain a constant presence with consumers automatically, increases efficiency and gives your brand more face time with consumers. So the next time they’re up at 3 am and can’t sleep, you’re there to make the sale.
What’s Old is New Again
Take your old marketing playbook and refresh the concepts with today’s technology. Mine the data from two-way messaging to draw insights and make changes to better serve customers. And make sure your customer conversations are personalized, timely, and relevant. That’s what it takes to attract and retain customers. An experience that will wow them and keep them coming back.
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