Conversational Marketing – Definition, Benefits and KPIs

After the digital era, marketing has advanced to what some industry experts refer to as the "era of infinite experiences." Today’s customers want personalized, one-on-one experiences with brands on their phones. And as businesses embrace this paradigm shift, they are turning to CRM-enabled texting apps such as a Salesforce SMS app for delivering next-level conversational marketing experiences to customers.

What Is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is the latest messaging approach designed to meet the growing needs of prospects and customers for quick, short, personalized interactions. Its marketing driven by one-on-one conversations. It's likely that you're already utilizing some of its potent capabilities.

With conversational marketing, you can:

• Send out material that encourages leads and customers to engage with your brand.
• Focus on using indirect marketing strategies to address incoming leads and customer inquiries.
• Give the lead experience top priority by making it easy to connect and by offering insightful content.
• Have genuine conversations (or route them to sales teams).

Conversational marketing works best when paired with messaging. Text messaging gives you immediate access to leads and prospects and gives them the ability to reply straight away. Leads find email to be convenient as well because they may respond to your material at any time. However, email lacks the high read and response rates of text messages as well as the personal touch: Ninety seconds is the average response time for a text message, and 98% of SMS messages are read. Conversely, the open rate of emails is only 18%.

Through the use of the aforementioned strategies, messaging-powered conversational marketing helps you promote your offerings in a way that allows you to establish enduring relationships with your customers.

The difference between Conversational Marketing, Sales and Support

Conversational marketing is part of a larger framework of marketing strategies called conversational customer engagement.

An inbound messaging technique, the goal of conversational sales is to assist prospects and customers in making the best purchases by responding to their inquiries about a brand's offerings. Additionally, it emphasizes following up with them individually after initial interactions.

Another inbound messaging technique is conversational support. By giving customers easy access to one-on-one support, it helps them get the most out of their purchase. Additionally, it motivates support teams to follow up consistently to make sure customers are satisfied with their purchases.

Authenticity and establishing human connections are given top priority by all three of these conversational strategies. The development of enduring consumer relationships is their shared ultimate objective.

Conversational marketing has more of an emphasis on sending outgoing messages that encourage prospects to interact, whereas conversational sales and support are almost completely inbound methods. Having said that, its ultimate objective is to drive conversations and action inbound.

How Can You Embed Conversational Marketing in Your Messaging Strategy

Any communication strategy is enhanced by conversational marketing, which is also simple to use. A little creative thinking will suffice.

You should:

• Launch unique messaging programs tailored to the interests of leads and customers to entice them to get in touch (e.g., personalized movie recommendations, concert suggestions, dine-out recommendations).
• Provide product advice and real-world examples.
• Launch surveys, conduct polls, and share results.
• Nudge leads and customers for a response by incentivizing them.

Remind yourself to come across as human, not robotic, while responding to leads and consumers. Speak informally and politely, as though you were chatting with a new neighbor. Use animated gifs and emojis to give communications a unique flavor. Incorporate the names of your leads and customers, along with any relevant loyalty scores, to let them know that you are focusing on them particularly.

The benefits of conversational marketing

Marketers can increase customer acquisition, send conversion rates skyrocketing, deepen loyalty, and ramp up engagement across the customer lifecycle by enabling customers to respond to marketing communications, ask questions, and communicate with brands in real-time. Let's examine the advantages of a conversational marketing approach in more detail.

Higher customer engagement and conversions

Did you know that the brand that answers to customers first receives almost 50% of the sales? Make sure you're first at all times by having prompt, tailored conversations on the channels that work for your customers.

Improved customer experience and customer satisfaction

Through conversational marketing platforms, businesses can provide customers with prompt assistance and answers throughout the entire buying journey

Valuable customer data collection

Brands can augment the customer experience and future interactions by using zero-party data from conversations to enhance customer profiles and make intelligent recommendations and offers.

Higher brand loyalty translates to deeper customer relationships

In addition to being a fantastic means of promptly and efficiently responding to consumer questions, conversational marketing platforms are also incredibly personal. Getting to know your customers using the same channels they use to talk to their friends and family gives your business the chance to forge deeper connections with them, which will increase their loyalty.

Cost savings

Businesses can automate over 80% of customer interactions with conversational AI and automation; this results in more cost-effective and efficient use of human resources.

24/7 availability

Businesses can assist and serve consumers whenever and wherever they need it with conversational AI chatbots, which not only improves customer satisfaction but also lowers the rate at which purchases are abandoned.

Marketing KPIs

Conversational marketing is already proving to be quite an effective messaging strategy for a variety of businesses. Prospects seem to enjoy having one-on-one conversations, and interactive messaging content seems to increase response rates. However, how can you be certain that the plan is effective? Key performance indicators (KPIs) for conversational marketing must be monitored to ensure you are on the right path.

This new-age approach of conversational marketing emphasizes marketing via genuine, one-on-one interactions. It focuses on developing messaging copy that encourages prospects and customers to engage with your business and, when they do, indirectly markets to them through informal conversations. The ultimate objective is to develop enduring customer relationships.

Why Measure KPIs in Conversational Marketing?

Digital KPIs are a valuable compass for any business. They enable you to determine how customers are connecting with your brand through various media.

You can measure the effectiveness of your messaging material with the use of conversational marketing KPIs. Every KPI assists you in identifying the areas where your approach is working and those that require improvement.

You can utilize the baseline performance you've established by tracking your conversational marketing KPIs for a few weeks to estimate future success. After that, you may compare your conversational marketing KPIs with those of conversational sales and support. To allocate the marketing budget to the most productive channels, you can even compare the KPIs for conversational marketing to those of other marketing channels.

Top 5 KPIs for Conversational Marketing

An omnichannel messaging platform, which facilitates the sending, receiving, and organizing of lead and customer messages, is the ideal tool for executing a conversational marketing plan. Important message metrics should be automatically tracked by your platform and presented to you in clear, easy-to-read reports. When it comes to conversational marketing, monitor these five metrics closely:

Outbound Message Volume

You can determine how many messages you are sending out by looking at your outgoing message volume. Monthly consistency of this figure is important, particularly if your other conversational marketing KPIs are doing well. To ensure that you are not launching excessive outbound messages, this metric is very helpful. You may consider reducing the amount of your outbound messages if your other indicators, such as response rates, are declining.

Lead/Customer Response Rate

Divide the volume of incoming messages by the volume of outgoing messages to find your lead/customer response rate. You can determine the effectiveness of your outbound messaging by looking at this response rate. You'll have a high response rate if your conversational marketing plan is working well. Your response rate will be low if the leads don't find your messages appealing enough or if you send too many of them. If so, think about changing your content to focus more on leads and maybe cutting back on the amount of outbound messages you send.

Unsubscribed Contacts

Conversational marketing material should be engaging for both leads and customers. Customers should discover that it improves their interaction with your company and helps them get the most out of their purchases. If this isn't the case, they'll cancel their subscription or not buy from you again. Verify the amount of unsubscribes you receive to ensure that the messaging you are delivering is relevant. Should this figure be elevated, modify the content or the frequency of your messages.

Total List Volume

Establishing a connection with focused lists of leads and customers is crucial. Having said that, you shouldn't keep getting in touch with the same list. To find your most used lists, review the overall list volume, which is the total number of messages delivered to each list. Spread the love to other lists if some are contacted considerably more often than others.

Average Response Time

Chats that mimic real-world conversations are at the heart of conversational marketing. It's imperative that you reply to prospects and customers who engage with your SMS marketing messages as soon as possible. You should respond correctly and quickly. You should always aim to improve your average response time.

GirikSMS is a 100% native Salesforce texting app that empowers businesses to nurture lasting relationships with their customers at scale by leveraging personalized conversational messaging. It combines the power of the world's leading CRM platform, customer data, and automation to deliver rich compelling conversational experiences to your audience.

Why don't you test-drive our platform today to learn more? Book a demo now.