In an exclusive article for MediaBrief, Chandan Bagwe, Founder and Director of C Com Digital, writes about how Conversational Marketing opens up opportunities for brands to grow, build meaningful relationships, and provide quick and efficient assistance to customers.
Bagwe underscores the advantages of leveraging Conversational Marketing and highlights how it can benefit brands. He also points out how conversational marketing with WhatsApp has become a vital channel of preference among businesses and charts the future of conversational marketing.
Read on.
Chandan Bagwe, the Founder and Managing Director of C Com Digital, was one of the earliest Indian entrepreneurs to recognize the potential and scalability of online businesses and digital marketing. He established the company in 1998, and it has since grown into a successful enterprise.
Chandan holds a degree in engineering and went on to pursue a Master’s in Computer Science in the USA. He later completed an MBA in Marketing from the prestigious Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai.
Chandan’s diverse interests also extend to teaching, and he serves as a visiting faculty member at the renowned Welingkar’s Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai.
The sudden burst of new businesses, especially online versions, is causing people to be suspicious of their potentially unfair business practices. And unfortunately, in a majority of instances, they are being proven right.
As convenient as it is to trust a brick-and-mortar store down the street, equally challenging is building a relationship with a brand with no physical presence. As a result, when end-users like us see a YouTube commercial, Facebook ad, or website banner, our primary impulse is to switch tabs and ignore them. This is the pain point that conversational marketing solves.
Though comparatively new, conversational marketing has managed to cement its position among many brands’ communication and marketing strategies. Besides website chatbots, Facebook Messenger, Instagram messenger chatbot, mobile text alerts, and Google business messages, brands are leveraging a platform that is used more actively by the audiences – WhatsApp.
As India’s most popular messaging app, WhatsApp is used by over 74 percent of users at least once a day. This platform, which was so far being used for personal communication and to broadcast promotions by businesses to bulk users, now unveils new capabilities that can redirect conversations to this app.
So, from leveraging it to offer shopping assistance to driving engagement and encouraging buyers to make purchases to striking communication on post-purchase actions like order alerts – conversational marketing with WhatsApp has become an important channel of preference among businesses.
How is Conversational Marketing different from Offline Marketing
At its core, conversational marketing – a relatively new brainchild of modern-day marketing – aims to create new customer relationships and engage them using conversations. It is a form of interactive marketing that leaves behind the conventional marketing approach and adopts digital strategies to leverage conversational AI and interact with customers.
Simply put, this strategy enhances customer experiences. It improves their brand perception, helping businesses gain customer insights, hit targets, and generate sales in a way that feels authentic without seeming high-handed.
How are digital agencies leveraging Conversational Marketing for brands
Whether it is the BFSI sector, Education, or Healthcare and Pharma, they are believed to be key contributors to India’s becoming a $5 trillion economy. With so much potential, competition among businesses operating in these markets has intensified.
But only those that can engage customers effectively and make interactions more meaningful will gain an edge over others. Here’s where conversational marketing plays a key role.
Realizing this, digital agencies are implementing visual engagement tools, WhatsApp chats, co-browsing, and text messaging apps to build a stronger connection between their brand clients and their customers with a more significant intent to garner trust and loyalty.
Breakdown of how Conversational Marketing can benefit brands
Strengthens customer relations
If executed suitably, conversational marketing helps brands create a personal relationship and gain the customer’s trust through real-time responsive conversation. Whether you use a text message, website live chat, or social media messenger, once a conversation is initiated, the brand can seamlessly guide a prospect or existing customer through the marketing funnel using interactive responses, leading to contact with a real person.
This conversational passage reinforces the overall customer experience. It makes it personalized, thereby improving their buying journey and enhancing loyalty, which helps brands get closer to their audience, encourage information sharing, cross-sell, and solicit inputs. As a result of these benefits, there has been an increased need for offering personalized solutions, as well as tailored content and experiences.
Clinique, a skincare and makeup brand, is an excellent example of how brands can leverage conversational marketing tools to offer personalized solutions.
By providing the option of accessing Facebook messenger, video chat, or text messaging, users are fed with brand information, such as the products they sell, the right shades to choose as per skin tone, and makeup tips. The video chat option, especially, is hyper-personal and has proven ideal for seeking skincare and makeup-related advice.
Improves conversion rate
Constantly engaging in conversations with prospects can move them through the sales funnel while fetching valuable information. Let us assume 1000 people initiate a chat with your business on WhatsApp or Facebook. Your current conversion rate is 1 percent, and every one in ten people visiting your site makes a purchase. This conversion rate can increase if the brand provides a positive and faster live chat experience. In fact, a study by Kayako found that every 8 out of 10 businesses witnessed a boost in repeat purchases and revenue soon after implementing a well-strategized conversational marketing plan. Mass-targeted messages to leads on platforms like WhatsApp further help drive the conversion, thereby helping acquire more customers.
Saves time by optimizing query performance
In today’s fast-moving times, patience is scarce, which has forced brands to remain active and provide real-time resolutions to their customers. Traditionally, brands relied on emailing and form-filling techniques to address customer queries, which increased the wait time and led to significant customer loss.
Conversational marketing tools, WhatsApp messaging, have enabled 24X7 support sources that instantly handle incoming queries. In fact, AI-powered chat flows help to cater to a large volume of user queries without any human intervention.
This has eliminated the need for seasonal staff allotment to deal with business highs and lows and dramatically improved the efficiency of the customer support department, causing a considerable reduction in query turnaround time and free time for employees to focus on complex issues.
HubSpot leveraged conversational marketing and reported that 80 percent of conversations were addressed in less than 20 seconds compared to 8 percent in 2019. This boosted customer satisfaction outcomes by more than 50 percent.
Another successful example of conversational marketing done well is that of HDFC Bank’s EVA. Backed by advanced NLP techniques and AI technology, EVA addressed more than 2.7 million customer queries within six months of its launch. Besides this, the chatbot recorded an accuracy of 85 percent, which was exceptional and rightfully served the purpose.
Create omnipresence for the target market
Thanks to technological advancement, it is possible to integrate AI-based communication with all channels, whether voice messaging, website, mobile application, or social media. This makes it possible to track, analyze, streamline, and address the information gathered from the user and customer interaction.
For example, a customer raises an issue with an order on Instagram and follows up a week later via WhatsApp chats. In this case, it is imperative for the brand to have a record of the order query. Where one interaction pauses, another starts if the brand is omnipresent and updated on the progress.
Domino’s AnyWare initiative is an excellent example of doing everything to meet customer preferences and maintaining different channels of communication. In 2015, the company encouraged its customers to text or tweet a pizza emoticon to have a pizza delivered their way.
After the concept gained popularity, customers could order their favorite items from the menu through Google Home, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Alexa, or Twitter. This helped Domino’s build customer loyalty and improved its brand perception.
Reap the benefits of Word of Mouth
Most brands strive to be recommended for their products or services through positive word of mouth. But getting the opportunity to be known among your customers’ circle solely depends on the quality of support you provide through chats within a given time span. When customers are faced with quick solutions, they are highly likely to spread the word about your brand online and offline.
This consequently results in increased visibility and reach, better image, improved sales, and free-of-cost advertising. This outcome is nothing new. A study by Neilson on brand communication reported that more than 90 percent of people trust recommendations from their friends and family members. This way, the brand can acquire new customers.
Hilton’s Double Tree Hotels have been distributing freshly-made chocolate chip cookies to each of their guests during check-in for the past three decades or more. Every day, they give away 75000+ cookies. A study based on Double Tree customers reported that 34 percent of customers spread positive word of mouth for this service, leading to increased brand-related conversations and awareness.
Both agencies and brands have been quick to embrace technological advancements and garner all the benefits they can from modern methods like conversational marketing. The audience is already interacting with brands; the only difference remains to communicate faster and better than before and in the way they prefer.
It may be high time to join the discussion, so if you are ready to take the big leap, join the future of conversational marketing!