Conversational Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing… do we really need yet another form of marketing? In the case of conversational marketing, the answer is a resounding yes!
Conversational Marketing is essentially a conversation on your website with your customers. Rather than customers filling in a form and waiting for a human to call or email them back, or having to scroll through a page of FAQ’s, conversational marketing allows your customer to get real-time help with their specific query.
In order to utilise conversational marketing, you need either a Live Chat function, or a Chatbot. A chatbot is an artificially intelligent software programme into which you can pre-programme responses, which enables them to have conversations with customers using conditional logic. Unlike Live Chat, it doesn’t require a human operative to function, which can make it a much more cost effective way to implement conversational marketing.
Conversational marketing reflects the fact that a large proportion of people now use messaging apps as their main form of communication. This has resulted in people becoming used to ‘instant’ answers, and being less likely to take the time to fill out a form, or wait for an answer to their query. Websites which use chatbots or live chat often have these pop up immediately asking ‘how can I help’ in order to capture the customer’s attention, prevent them from navigating away from the site, and hopefully result in them deciding to make a purchase.
Although the idea of a Chatbot might sound complicated and expensive, there are multiple website plugins available to make it relatively easy to programme and add a Chatbot to your site. Speak to your web developer to find out which plugin will be most suitable for your needs, and utilise the power of conversational marketing!