Conversational Marketing

Marketing is changing. It's not enough to collect leads using forms on your website. Today's buyer wants a real-time conversation and the companies who get this will win. Facebook messenger, texting and live chat are becoming more and more popular.

Does your marketing look like this?

According to DRIFT, marketers will spend $4.6 billion getting people to come to their websites in 2018.

And instead of greeting them with a conversation, these visitors will get “We’ll get back to you soon.”

DRIFT did research with a secret shopper to test lead response time at 433 B2B software companies. Here's what they found:

• Only 7% of companies responded within the first five minutes.
• 55% of them took more than five days to respond (or didn’t respond at all)

Conversational marketing takes those website visitors and instead of making them fill out a form, engages in a conversation in chat right on your website. Some will be ready to talk to sales, some won't, but the ones that are ready to talk will be able to get qualified and routed to a sales rep automatically.

A well designed and targeted chat bot can engage your website visitors and help push them further down the sales funnel instantly,. Your chat bot can act as a guide, helping users find the content they're looking for quickly instead of leaving them to browse aimlessly through your website. A chat bot can also ask questions and collect information about your visitors, and even  help them seamlessly schedule a call with your sales team.

What Happened When Drift Replaced Forms With Conversations?

• They saw more leads (+15% net new leads)
• More Pipeline (+50% of business now driven by conversations)
• Faster Sales Cycle (3 days on average from first conversation to demo)

We tried conversational marketing with our client, SafetyPro Resources and nearly doubled the number of consultations booked within the first 60 days.

So should you replace every form on your website with a chat bot? Maybe. My recommendation is to test this. Keep the form on your website, but also request the same information using a chat bot, and see what gets the most conversions.

As you start to build out your chat bots, it's important that you ask for information in a friendly, chatty way. You don't want to have your chat bot ask for name and email without starting a conversation with the visitor first. Keep your chat bot friendly, polite, and conversational so your visitors will feel comfortable engaging.

As with any other aspect of inbound marketing, you want to tailor your chat bot to your visitors buyer's journey. If they've already interacted with one of your offers, you should show them a different one the next time they visit.

Some Great Examples of Chat Bots

Wondering what a travel chat bot can do? Check out the one I created for Roux Luxury Travel.

One of my favorites is the chat bot on Seattle BalloonBot. You can chat with them here. It's a pretty sophisticated one.

A chat bot can be as simple or as complex as you like. Have you chatted with my PepperBot yet? If you haven't click here.

If you need more inspiration, check out this link: reallygoodchatbots.com

How do I Know If My Chat Bot Is Working?

Measure how your chat bot is doing by tracking the following metrics:

• Total conversations
• New contacts added
• Session duration
• User engagement rate
• Conversion rate (email captures or meetings scheduled by the bot)
• Error triggers

We like to see the ratio of sent to conversation between 2-5%.

The 5 Best Practices of Conversational Marketing

1. Real Time
2. Scaleable
3. Focused on Engagement
4. Personalized
5. Built in Feedback Loop