7 Technologies To Boost Conversational Sales

Businesses and marketers want to communicate effectively with their target audience and existing customers. To do this, they launch email marketing campaigns; they run ads on Facebook and Instagram, and submit their businesses for professional reviews on writing service review sites like Best Online Writer. And while all these are essential marketing steps, marketers and enterprises forget one thing: communication is more than just talking, it’s listening.

This realization is the fundamental principle behind the way Conversational Marketing works. This method of marketing is a feedback-oriented system. It focuses on listening to the customer. Conversational marketing encourages and demands insightful correspondence between brand, marketer, and customers.

Conversational marketing creates one-on-one messages with engaged users to collect data. This not only saves you a ton of time but it also means you’re talking to leads who are already interested. It’s no surprise that brands with automated lead management like this see a 10% increase in revenue according to MobileMonkey.

Little wonder it is as effective as it is in boosting engagement, customer loyalty, customer base, and, consequently, brand revenue. This marketing channel is the reason why 79% of customers are open to leveraging messenger apps for customer service, and 82% consider an immediate response from brands crucial whenever they ask a question.

But incorporating conversational marketing channels into your overall marketing blueprint is easier said than done. There are so many moving parts and elements that a marketer should always keep an eye on. We’ve rounded up 7 of the best marketing technologies that can help you boost sales and revenue through this emerging marketing channel. Bear in mind that many of these technologies can combine for better results from a conversational marketing campaign.

Chatbots

This tech is an obvious addition. No list of conversational marketing technologies will be complete without mentioning chatbots. The uses and benefits of chatbots in any marketing strategy are immense.

You want to make sure that your customers have round-the-clock service whenever they need to inquire about anything. Consider creating an FAQ chatbot sequence for your messaging platforms and your website. This tactic will help to satisfy and filter out customers that have problems that can be addressed by the FAQs, leaving only those who need to talk to an actual customer service agent.

Chatbots are useful in sales processes too for qualifying customers and helping with the actual sales process. Your sales, marketing, and customer service staff typically work 8-hour days, so chatbots will help to significantly lessen the burden on them so that they have time to deal with more complex responsibilities. Just make sure to make sure your chatbot content feels human. Do not make it evident to your customers that they are talking to a bot. So use GIFs, humor, and more elements of human interaction where necessary.

Live chat

This feature contributes hugely to customer retention and sales. When visitors on your website encounter an issue while browsing your site, they need to have access to be able to contact your brand in real-time to solve the problem. Having a chatbox present and visible on your website gives visitors access to your customer service representatives in real-time.

The idea is to be with them from the moment they interact with an ad or land on your website via search. Statistics show that companies lose about $62 billion annually because of poor customer service, and 7 out of 10 customers will abandon a purchase if they have a terrible user experience. Simply put, visitors who click away from a website after experiencing an unaddressed problem are nearly impossible to get back, not to mention 13% of them will spread the word about their bad experience on your site.

Live video broadcasts

What’s the point of telling customers about your product or service when you can show them. Video has become a crucial component of the ideal digital marketing strategy. But there’s one thing that is better than video, and that’s live video chat.

A live video broadcast is way more effective for communicating your thoughts to a customer than text-based live chat. A live video chat is also much faster because it significantly reduces the time taken to read a customer’s query and formulate a comprehensive answer.

With this feature, you can also do live video assistance for a customer who may be having issues with your product or service. Additionally, you can use these live video broadcasts to do product or service demonstrations for prospective customers.

Virtual showrooms/stores

Many businesses have products that appeal to a demographic scattered all over the country, continent, or globe. Virtual showrooms are the perfect way for them to experience your product without physically visiting your store. With a virtual showroom, current and prospective customers can interact with your products via a mobile device, a computer, or even VR/AR headset. This tech helps to cut down the time needed to make purchasing decisions significantly.

All types of businesses can leverage virtual showrooms: real estate agencies for house showings, SaaS companies for demonstrating their software solution, physical stores for showing customers around a new warehouse, and so on. Either way, you can use these virtual showrooms to keep your customers engaged and updated.

Conversational landing pages

Landing pages are still as relevant to the lead generation as they used to be, just in a different way. Traditional landing pages aimed to use the page copy to convince visitors that your product or service is the ideal solution. Then it will use an on-page call to action element to collect their emails or mobile numbers, hence birthing a lead.

But things have changed a lot. There are quite many steps in the process of lead generation, and with each step, more people drop off the funnel. Customers today do not want to spend too much time reading some boring and long sales copy or doing mounds of research before deciding for or against a brand. They prefer immediate engagement and conversation.

To keep these people’s attention and elevate engagement, use a conversational landing page. This kind of landing page leverages a live chat agent, a chatbot sequence, or both to further classify and qualify visitors on the way to lead generation. Turning your landing page forms into conversations will undoubtedly lead to more conversions.

Bot-powered SMS campaigns

It’s weird how many marketers think SMS marketing is nothing more than a complementary advertising channel. The fact is that everybody texts and texts have an incredibly higher open rate than emails — they get opened about 98% of the time. Not to mention that in our mobile-focused world, you want to be using marketing strategies that focus on reaching them on their mobile devices, regardless of whether they are online or offline.

The problem with traditional SMS marketing is that why it does have an excellent open rate; the engagement is often not that amazing. SMS blasts are typically for promoting offers, reminding customers of important updates, or inviting them to special events. With a bot-powered SMS campaign, like the one Whisbi provides, you can turn your SMS outreach into a full-blown and engaging conversation.

Create a series of question sequences that will prompt a response from the customer and open up a new path of the conversation each time they give any of the predetermined replies. Thankfully, the impact of your bot-powered SMS marketing campaign can be measured and analyzed. You’ll be able to classify customers and qualify them based on their responses, so you know what to do next with each customer category.

Analysis, Reporting, and Automation

A marketing campaign is worth nothing if you can’t measure and analyze all your efforts. Tools like Salesforce and Google Analytics will do two things for you in this regard: it will help to automate your workflow for efficiency and round-the-clock customer service and support. You will also be able to measure and analyze all the customer data from your CRM, from their point of entry into your marketing campaign, to their interaction with your brand, and to the completion of the sale.

Effective analysis and reporting will help you understand your customers’ behavior better through the collection of critical insights throughout the marketing process. These insights will help you further fine-tune your conversational marketing campaigns to boost sales and maximize ROI.

Final Words

Conversational marketing has grown into a behemoth marketing strategy and should not be ignored by any serious marketer or brand. Each of the technologies mentioned in this post is powerful on its own. Still, if you want to maximize your conversational marketing, you should combine as many of them that make sense for your marketing end goal.

For instance, you could use a chatbot sequence to classify and qualify leads and then move them to a live chat with a sales rep. Here you will also be able to switch them over to a live video broadcast to do a product demonstration for a prospective customer and more.

To fit all these into one marketing campaign, you’ll need a conversational marketing tool like Whisbi, a conversational marketing software that encompasses all of the tech and features in this article.

Now go and have a conversation with your customers!

About the Author:

Aaron Swain is a writing specialist. He is passionate about marketing and SEO. He expands and improves his skills throughout the writing process to help and inspire people.