Chatbots are only a small fry in the wake of the evolution that is expected as a result of technological advancements in the marketing landscape and for good. Conversational marketing made the marketing landscape seem to flame, with chatbots, however, it was set on fire. Marketing has become customer-centric and what better way to harness the goodies inherent in conversational marketing AI than chatbots.
From a technological point of view, chatbots only represent the natural evolution of a Question Answering system leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP). Formulating responses to questions in natural language is one of the most typical Examples of Natural Language Processing applied in various enterprises’ end-use applications.
Chatbots tend to streamline interactions between people and services, thereby enhancing customer experience. At the same time, they offer companies new opportunities to improve the customers’ engagement process and operational efficiency by reducing the typical cost of customer service.
There are a lot of other areas where you will be able to harness the potentials of chatbots for your brand. You can:
- Collect information that lets you build a sales pipeline full of qualified leads
- Offer better customer service and a superior buying experience
- Address a pain point—which would be impossible if visitors were just filling out a form
- Ask qualifying questions so that sales teams can better understand potential customers
- Improve your sales cycle and save sales rep time—while giving a more personal experience that mimics face-to-face marketing
- Catch their attention because you say things they’re already thinking
- Make them feel like you understand them (because you do)
- Enhance their understanding of the value you offer. They know what you can do for them.
The integration of chatbots into live chats in marketing has been so successful to the extent that we can term it a revolution. The marketing landscape is no longer what it used to be especially with conversational marketing taking the forefront.
Apart from the fact that chatbots can give you the same consistent response right round the clock, it’s hugely a cost-saving measure. If for any reason you attempt to have employees working round the clock in order to satisfy your customers, the cost-effectiveness will be astonishingly overwhelming.
Another fact is that humans have frailties, they need to go on holidays, take breaks, eat, and have the potency to be inconsistent. This will outrightly negate the Lean process which works at providing a scientific approach to creating and getting the desired product to the customers’ hands faster having the sole purpose of creating value for customers in your mind since any other thing is waste.
Brands over the years have seen the benefit and importance of chatbots and that is the reason over 100,000 businesses are using them to deliver messages to consumers faster. They utilize chatbots to answer specific service-related questions and collect contact information for customers at the perfect time, all the time.
Chatbots are great for picking out your best leads and directing them where necessary. Through asking a range of questions, chatbots can determine which leads are most valuable and act accordingly.
These can be from fully-converted leads that booked their own meeting through your chatbot, to incomplete leads. Traditional marketing methods where the potential customer is made to fill forms on your website can be boring and irritating, often putting off the customer.
If there is a delay during this time, the lead may have lost interest and therefore, you’ve lost a lead. Conversations are instant and enable you to respond in real-time. Chatbots are also able to direct leads to the most suitable sales rep and schedule demos all in one conversation.
What your sales team is required to do is to follow up on incomplete conversions or partial contact info, in an effort to simply continue a conversation that’s already in progress. When it comes to the time to set up a formal sales meeting, conversational marketing can empower your buyers to set up the meeting themselves.
You are able to save time and other resources as well as being properly positioned to respond to your customers how, when, and where they want it, all in one fell swoop.
For Andrew Racine, who headed up MongoDB’s install of Drift, Conversational Marketing has:
- Increased total messaging responses by 100%
- Increased net new leads by 70%
- Increased opportunities by 170%
- More than doubled messaging-influenced pipeline
And while this is surely impressive, it’s not just about converting already likely customers at higher rates. Chatbots when integrated into conversational marketing help generate conversations with prospects who would have never filled out a traditional lead form.
Andrew puts it this way, “We needed a messaging tool that could scale with our business and increase the volume of our conversations, leading to the increase of our pipeline and Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) — the metrics my Demand Generation team are measured on.”
By giving customers a means of conversation on their own terms when they are on your site, chatbots help generate conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise thereby, tremendously transforming the marketing landscape.
