Conversational marketing is a quick way to move buyers through your sales funnels with the power of real-time conversations.

Let’s face it; we all want conversations with the businesses of our choice, and we don’t want to get information from some old FAQs section.

Instead of forcing our website visitors to go through lead capture forms and wait for days at length for a response, we can use targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with visitors while they are on our website.

Helping website visitors engage with your business will help you convert more leads faster, which means better revenue, profit, happier customers, and a growing company.

The Shift in Selling and Marketing

Buyers have changed the way they buy things; we are yet stuck with old marketing tactics.

People love communicating with messaging because it is fast quick and feels like a conversation. A recent survey from Twilio revealed that 90% of consumers want to use chatbots to communicate with your business.

Still, most businesses want their customers to jump through hoops for getting in touch with them. But buyers and consumers don’t have the time for the traditional marketing ways and statistics show this.

• Only 43% of people answer cold calls and entertain them today.
• The average email open rates have reduced to 24%.
• The average landing page conversion rate has fallen to only 2%.

The traditional B2B selling process has become impersonal cold and is pushing consumers away. To fix this method, we need to put people business. Conversational marketing can help build relationships and create authentic experiences with consumers.

Conversational marketing can be executed with chatbots deployed either on your website or social media platforms.

Conversational marketing can be a practical addition to your social media strategy and a way to enhance your websites’ incoming lead capture and conversion rate.

Before diving deep into how conversational marketing works, let’s look at the types of chatbots you can implement for your business.

Types of Conversation Marketing Chatbots

Intent-based Chatbots

The goal of these chatbots is to solve user queries on a one on one basis. With each question answered the chatbot can adapt to user behavior and deliver a more personalized experience every next time. This means that the more data the bots receive, the more intelligent they become.

Siri Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are all examples of intent-based chatbots. These bots can extract contextual information such as location, chat history, and suggest appropriate solutions in every specific situation.

Flow-based chatbots

The main goal of a flow-based chatbot is to solve user queries and take them to a solution. These chatbots follow a series of messages, so that manually entered text means little to nothing to these chatbots.

They guide users through a predefined flow where things can become dull if the flow pattern is very limited.

Most eCommerce chatbots that we see today our flow-based.

Next, let’s explore the functions of a website chatbot.

Leveraging a Website Chatbot

As a Conversational Agent

Voice-activated systems such as Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana are all examples of conversational agents. This chatbots imitate human conversation using text or spoken language.

As a Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistant comprehends natural language, processes commands and carries out tasks for the users. Virtual assistants are cloud-based programs, so they need a strong internet connection and integrated applications in order to work.

They can carry out tasks like adding calendar appointments, checking the status of a smart home, sending text messages, and getting directions.

As an AI-powered Chatbot

These Chatbots use natural language processing and machine learning to get a better understanding of human intent. They provide near human-level communication as much as possible.

Chatbots can completely transform the way you interact with your customers. Let’s see how you can put them to use.

The ‘Why’ of Conversational Marketing

This is how you stand to gain from conversational marketing using chatbots.

• With conversational marketing, your website no longer feels like a hollow store or a generic catalog. Fire up conversations to create a more human experience for visitors.
• Learn about your buyers and customers with the information your chatbots collect. Studies [Source] have shown that people like to have conversations with chatbots and more proactively submit data and information to bots.
• Convert better and more leads with conversational Marketing as your chatbot filters out leads that are not serious buyers.
• Close sales faster and shorten your sales cycle with conversational marketing.
• Grow your sales pipeline your revenue and profit.

Conversational marketing with chatbots can create all the difference to your business. It can help you differentiate your brand in an overcrowded market and help you attract the right leads- in a seamless fashion.

When done right, chatbots can be as useful to your business as they have been for these big names:

1. Sephora – One of the first in the retail sector to use chatbots, this brand allows its users to schedule appointments, select product colors, and so on. The Facebook Messenger-based bot vastly enhances the customer experience, enabling them to have quick and easy conversations.
2. Duolingo – The language learning app’s chatbot attempts to eliminate the feeling of embarrassment users feel when they pronounce a word differently. Over 150 Mn users of the chatbot practice speaking through conversations without the fear of judgment.
3. Starbucks – Even for a standout brand such as Starbucks, it was important to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Starbucks introduced a chatbot operated via its MyBarista app to make easy ordering possible for its customers. The chatbot allows users to stay in the comfort of their homes and order their beverage through by messaging or voice through Amazon Alexa. When your beverage is ready, the bot will let you know!
4. Domino’s – Dom, Domino’s chatbot takes customer service a level up by allowing customers to place orders directly through Facebook Messenger. They capitalized on this new employee and launched Dom in anticipation of a Super Bowl weekend, keeping their website up and freeing up phone lines during the busiest days of the year.

Five Take-Care-Of’s for Your Chatbot Strategy

1. To Voice or Not to Voice

Tech experts have been trying to perfect speech recognition software for many years. IBM says that it has reached a 5.5 percent word error rate, implying its success milestone, which further ensures there can be improvements in voice assistants like Alexa and Siri.

The main advantage of a voice-enabled chatbot is that users can command any task hands-free. Just like Amazon Echo can be controlled to perform simple tasks such as reading the day’s news or Google Home can be used to make a call to your friend.

A messenger chatbot can exist on multiple messaging platforms, that, in turn, can be synchronized across various devices. Overall, the main difference is how the user is interacting with a software. It helps to have a clear idea about your audience and how they would better relate to a chatbot, which becomes a decisive factor in choosing either voice or text-based chatbots.

2. Chatbot Platform

The plastic intelligence of chatbots is revolutionizing customer experience for various businesses. It is all about making customer conversations easy and quick. When it comes to chatbot platforms, you can use from an ample amount of platforms like:

1. Aivo: This is one of the best AI chatbot platforms where your customer support is empowered since you can respond in real-time through voice or text. Through this, your resources can be optimized, and conversations can be increased. All-in-all, the Aivo’s AgentBot can be integrated with other third-party platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Live, Zapier, and much more.
2. Landbot.io: Do you want to create a personalized conversation to your customers through chatbots? Landbot gives you just about it. Its interface of drag-and-drop can help you create the chatbot with ease. The chatbot can also be published in various formats like website embed, landing page, pop-up, and many more.

There are also other platforms available like SnatchBot, Botsify, MobileMonkey, Chatfuel, etc.

Or, you can get a customized chatbot developed for your unique requirements from a development partner.

3. Personality

One of the most attractive qualities of a chatbot is its personality. The way a chatbot greets, the kind of voice and tone it uses and its selection of words says everything about your brand. A chatbot is a robot, but it does not have to act like one.

According to a survey, 37 percent of people would use a chatbot to receive a quick answer during an emergency situation. Additionally, 35% of people say they might use a chatbot for either resolving a complaint or receiving detailed information through answers or explanations. So while programming the personality of your chatbot, you should not only make the conversation informative but also interesting.

For instance, Swelly is a Social Voting app which uses a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. It uses the below greeting,

“Hi [name]! I’m Swelly your new Decision-Buddy.”

Even the renowned Siri uses a personality which is peculiar and not boring.

It is all about synonymizing with your customer’s persona where you can follow a personality trait for your chatbot like sweet or funny or outgoing or geeky or goofy or helpful. You get to decide.

4. Contextual and Relevant Conversations

A chatbot is all about the underlying technology which can solve the most pressing problems effectively. A contextual chatbot is more like an advanced chatbot where it aims to predict what the user intends to do. The chatbot then responds according to the requirements of the user. When it takes necessary information like location and preferences, it does not ask the same fundamental question in the next conversation.

Contextual chatbots are the future where chatbots study the intent of the user and then perform actions based on what the user is looking for.

5. Personalization and Empathy

The hype of Artificial Intelligence gives more reasons to consider emotional intelligence as a necessity instead of an add-on. So, your bost should aim to respond with emotions that appeal to the user. Your chatbot should be inclusive of content that encourages users to express their interest and personality. Not every response needs to lead up to another option or an in-depth conversation; it is just all about building up or strengthening the entire nature of the conversation.

Empathy is another factor essential in a conversation. For instance, Kinneret Yifrah, the Microcopy expert says that a chatbot should have an interaction that imparts the idea that you want the best for the user even when they say no.

Hence, the above five strategies should be on your checklist when you are trying to perfect your chatbot.

Chatbots have become an integral part of the market strategy for most businesses. Not only that, but they are also helping companies carry out HR, recruitment, event management, and several other functions that are worthy of automation.

Replacing monotonous conversations and tasks with chatbot capabilities might be the ‘in’ thing for improving customer experiences and driving conversations that engage, inspire, and convert visitors.