The benefits of conversational marketing using AI Assistance

Conversational marketing is the simple act of reaching out to your online customers and engaging with them. It is a dialogue-driven approach to selling that focuses on what the customer wants.

Once you are on talking terms with a potential buyer, you can quickly take him through your marketing and sales funnels and convert him into a buyer. So, conversational marketing is a way of converting leads by interacting with the consumer.

So, it is a way to bring together the sales and marketing teams, enabling them to deliver real-time personalized virtual assistance and build brand advocacy.

Conversational marketing can help eCommerce businesses give that missing ‘personal touch’ to the buyer’s requirements.

Getting the potential customer to reveal his needs, and focusing on helping him succeed that offers a much better buying experience for him than the one where brands keep up a one-way communication about their products and services.

Conversational marketing makes way for building long-term relationships with the customer by building trust right from the moment they are looking for a way to solve the problem at hand.

This helping them have a fabulous buying experience. You can drive customer engagement, build brand loyalty and see revenue growth with this tool.

How can conversational marketing change the way we interact with consumers?

It’s an agreed thing that consumers’ expectations have increased. Today’s tech-savvy consumer has a world of information right in his palm (smartphone).

He is looking for solutions on the go – time is money, and he is obsessed with finding out what value he will get from the purchase. Also, eBusiness is no longer limited to a website alone, but is spread across social channels.

This is where conversational marketing can help you get customers to convert faster, and when buyers are enabled to have a personalized chat with you instead of filling out forms, you have more chance of converting them. This is because it is:

• A customer-driven conversation rather than brand driven
• On the most preferred channels – easy and convenient; instant and 24/7
• Able to capture the user intent at the moments that matter
• Helpful to building customer loyalty and better brand recall
• Talk with them not talking at them because based upon unique user insights and declared data on the chat, the user experience will consistently improve.

So, needless to say, conversational marketing is changing customer buying patterns. The personalized digital marketing approach that helps brands connect with potential clients across channels, is engaging them, converting them.

How does it impact the company’s business?

Let’s see what this can beget eCommerce businesses. The conversational marketing approach can:

• Help revenue generation by converting a potential buyer into a client fast – a one-on-one chat about your company’s offers will be far more assuring for a customer. When conversion rate increases, your ROI will be higher and CAC will come down.
• Get real-time critical information and feedback from a potential client – your potential customer is instantly letting you know what he needs and expects, helping you mould his purchasing journey according to his needs.
• Give visitors to your social messaging channels – Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps, Google ads, etc., – a natural experience of a real shopping outing. New visitors can be converted easily, existing ones will keep coming back for more. So, brand recall and customer loyalty increases.
• Help you with faster client servicing and better service delivery – you can sell more products quickly this way. Conversational marketing gives the much-needed scalability and quality that every brand wishes to deliver to its customers.
• Bring consumers from FB and Insta ads directly to conversational mediums (click to Messenger, click to WhatsApp, Google ads). This means a much better return on ad spends compared to traditional marketing channels.
• Make it much easier and cheaper to re-engage with users compared to social media retargeting. Also retargeting becomes easy due to declared data in the chat.

How it impacts shoppers

Imagine this: You are browsing through an online catalog, looking for a solution to a particular issue. You come across a product that you think can help you fix the issue but have a couple of doubts. What do you do?

You look for a way to reach out to the seller – a phone number, an email? Or maybe a lead generation form.

You fill it out, wait for some response. It may come, may not, a day or two later. If you get the answer you want, you make a decision, buy the product.

If this does not happen quickly, you are frustrated, and begin to look elsewhere for what you want, seeking a better buying experience.

Now imagine you coming across a quick solution (read AI assistance) to those doubts. You’re satisfied, and make the purchase. Level 3 AI chatbot has empowered yet another customer. So, what worked?

• Guided buying experience and personalised recommendation
• Saves time and convenient to them
• Solves their pre-purchase queries instantly
• User declared data will help in better personalisation
• The journey is now controlled by the buyer. Start any time, leave anytime, comeback and finish any time as per their convenience

Marketing tools brands relied on till now

Typically, sales leaders tend to focus on social media marketing and other automated digital solutions for conversational marketing, apart from customer loyalty programs. But then, typically, these are not scalable and don’t drive results.

Email marketing, for instance, has an open rate as low as 2%. Such forms of live customer support cost the company a lot, and yet, only manage to answer repetitive queries which could have been easily automated saving time, money and effort.

Some companies may already be using some of these marketing tools:

• Email Marketing – products, upsells, offers, discounts… you can send all of this to all your existing customers and the new ones via email. But you risk bombarding inboxes at inappropriate times
• Live customer support – many companies have 24-hour helplines, in-app chat options and Twitter accounts that connect with customers almost immediately. But these are high-maintenance options, and satisfying your customer this way is not always feasible.
• Employing customer success managers – no adoption struggles, no onboarding issues, your new customers are handheld right throughout their journeys from the point of sale.  

How an advanced AI chatbot can change the game

Level 3 AI Chatbots are among that bunch of unique technological marvels that have changed the way we live, or in this case, the way we do business. According to a report by Gartner, by 2022, 70% of white-collar workers will be using conversational platforms every day.

So, what makes chatbots such an integral tool to conversational marketing?

A chatbot is that benign presence on your website that uses artificial intelligence to help a customer have a better buying experience, and at the same time, help you by giving you loads of growth-laden inside data by the way of customer preferences and requirements.

A smart conversational AI-led chatbot, such as LimeChat, has the power to revolutionize conversational marketing and make a deep impression on buyer patterns.

• LimeChat’s Level 3 AI uses the most advanced NLP mechanism to understand customer intent at precision to deliver a human-like experience on chat. The better you understand the user intent you are in a better position to assist buyers and answer their needs/queries in various stages of buying journey
• Help understand the user concern in finding the right product (solution), thereby addressing a personalized user concern
• Resolve pre-purchase queries about the products like side effects, ingredients, usage, etc.
• Build buyer confidence and trust in the brand
• Re-engage – Using declared data and unique conversational insights, LimeChat dashboard helps brand segregate users based upon their drop off stage and allows retargeting through hyper personalised campaigns across social messaging channels.

Key takeaways and best practices

Led by technological advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing is the future of ecommerce personalisation and enhanced customer experience.

The results are already here – LimeChat has attained a conversion rate of up to 20%, highest in the industry with numerous leading D2C Ecommerce brands.

This is the future of eCommerce personalization and customer satisfaction. And that is because customer satisfaction from conversational marketing is at an all-time high for eCommerce businesses.

Eighty-one percent of those who made a purchase using a chatbot said they’d do it again because while it was fun, easy, and quick, it was also informative and satisfactory.

Happy customer feedback shows that these smart bots are quite effective when it comes to selling to and satisfying customers.

In short, if you are in the eCommerce business, you market-tune your selling strategies and reach more conversions using conversational marketing tools, specifically, retail chatbots, for live assistance. The pluses are:

• Conversational marketing reduces CAC, increase ROI, personalizes buying experience to customers at scale
• This happens because of better conversion rate due to tailor made buying journey
• Conversational marketing captures the user intent at the moment that matters the most. By assisting and guiding potential customers to checkout
• Use of social messaging channels gives added convenience to the end user which not only helps in building brand loyalty but also brand recall

To realize the above goals, using a smart AI-powered chatbot like LimeChat, which uses the most advanced level 3 AI mechanism to better understand the user intent and personalised buying journey at scale is the best thing you can do to double the impact of your conversational marketing strategies for your eBusiness.

This will lead to:

• Creating a more human-like, personalized buying experience across channels
• Help you learn a lot about your buyers – almost think like them!
• Increasing your sales pipeline, and shortening your sales cycle