Conversational Marketing Is the New Direct Marketing

Conversational marketing is a new buzzword in the sales, business, and marketing worlds. Not only it can be used as a tool to boost sales, but it’s known to increase customer engagement and retention.

Are you looking for new tools that will help you improve how you communicate with customers? Then keep on reading why conversational marketing is the right method for you.

In this article, we want to share the definitions of conversational marketing and direct marketing, what sets them apart, and their main benefits. Let’s find out how.

What Is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric and dialogue-driven approach to marketing, according to Giosg. It can be used by forward-thinking companies to increase conversions, grow revenue, create loyalty marketing programs, and engage customers.

Firstly, the dialogue-driven marketing model is a new way that brands can adopt in a competitive industry. Companies providing customers with access to community and encouraging open dialogue stay more connected to customers, therefore they increase customer retention and profits over time.

Delivering a seamless communication experience across all channels can be difficult, especially if you are missing a structured omnichannel strategy. But once you invest in these tools, nothing is stopping you from delivering meaningful conversations.

However, we now live in a world where reputation is the new marketing because of how influential social media is. In other words, it’s critical to pay attention to how companies are delivering customer service and support.

How do they communicate with customers? Are they investing in AI and Machine Learning programs to make better customer predictions? Is personalization important in delivering conversational marketing? These are questions that any progressive company should think about when implementing conversational marketing into their strategy.

To succeed, conversational marketing requires that businesses:

• Understand their unique value and how it impacts customers
• Identify key customers and prospective customers
• Develop appropriate messages and methods to engage them
• Implement a plan to reach out and connect with the right customers
• Foster relationships with them

What Is Direct Marketing?

Direct marketing is a form of advertising that targets a specific person, audience segment, or company to drive new business or raise awareness of a product or service.

Some examples of direct marketing are direct mail, telemarketing, email, text messaging.

Direct marketing allows companies to target audience segments with personalized messaging. While conversational marketing focuses on creating meaningful conversations, direct marketing focuses on persuading the customer to act.

Some calls to action that are widely used in direct marketing campaigns are:

• Visit a website
• Call for more information
• Make a purchase
• Book an event
• Enter a competition
• Submit contact details

As you can see, direct marketing communication is one-sided. Customers are not allowed to respond unless they initiate a separate conversation with the brand.

How Is Conversational Marketing Better than Direct Marketing?

While the world of direct marketing is reliant on one-way communication, conversational marketing breaks this rule and allows customers to interact with the brand.

Above all, transparent and open communication empowers customers by making them feel like valued and listened to. This is a strategy that not only instils immediacy in solving customer requests and brand confidence but also drives conversions.

Conversational messaging moves, compels, and persuades customers by allowing them to interact with the brand. Not limiting conversations to a single channel shows company progression. Brands can improve customer experience by meeting their customers where they are, making it easier to get in touch and solve customer queries faster.

For example, in a large-scale text messaging campaign that promotes a new product launch, you can go through all stages of customer interest in single customer interactions.

Similarly, in a single text message, companies can spark interest, provide additional product information, and have live interactions with sales agents or customer support.

A Rich Media Messaging solution drives conversational marketing through text messaging. Imagine a carefully designed mobile landing page sent to customers via SMS. Until recently, SMS was limiting businesses to a certain character number, short codes, and no rich content.

Now, rich messages allow you to go beyond the old-school messaging ways and achieve so much more. With Rich Media Messaging companies can now:

• Create personalized conversations at scale
• Treat customers like individuals
• Design purposeful interactions
• Ask them questions
• Offer incentives, discounts, or promotions
• Allow two-way communication
• Call a live agent
• Automate conversations
• Plan better marketing campaigns

Conversational Marketing Benefits

When done right, conversational marketing can provide businesses with many benefits and advantages.

For instance, engaging in conversations with clients not only helps the brand gain valuable insight on how to improve, but it can virtually connect at a large scale instantly. Here are some of the most important benefits that conversational marketing brings:

1.    Improves customers satisfaction through personalized conversations

Personalization helps create meaningful conversations based on customer preferences and behaviours, improving communication over time.

2.    Deepens customer relationships

Trust takes time, so focus on providing the best customer service in real-time, ask for customer feedback, and listen to customer requirements to improve customer relationships.

3.    Provides businesses opportunity to scale-up

Scale-up communication by answering queries in real life and taking advantage of AI and ML to automate conversations when office hours are limiting.

4.    Offers insights into planning future campaigns and conversations

By capturing data and analysing customer preferences and analytics, businesses can craft individualized customer experiences based on their responses and behaviour.

5.    Improves conversion rates

In addition, by engaging customers in real-time natural dialogues, customers feel more valuable and appreciated. This improves customer retention and sales.

How To Get Started with Conversational Marketing

Firstly, conversational messaging has matured with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We are a mobile-first population and that will only grow with the new generations. Secondly, as marketers, we need to enable mobile-first conversational marketing.

For instance, according to Forbes, mobile commerce is expected to grow 68% in 2022, as more people continue to purchase using their phones.

While consumers are getting more comfortable shopping online, companies should remove all barriers to achieving this. Therefore, conversational marketing is a new approach to ensuring companies:

• Capture and cultivate new customers
• Engage current customers
• Automate customer service
• Embrace multiple customer touchpoints
• Implement personalization techniques
• Invest in chatbots
• Converse with customers in all channels

Lastly, here is how to get started with conversational marketing:

• Choose your channels
• Be clear in your messaging
• Provide help quickly
• Evaluate customer touchpoints
• Improve customer interactions
• Implement conversational marketing software
• Enable two-way communications

Conclusion

Above all, to achieve all of these objectives, brands should seek out trusted partners to assist them in developing a strong conversational marketing strategy. As an industry leader in communication and customer engagement, VoiceSage provides conversational messaging solutions designed to increase customer experience, awareness, and boost sales.

In conclusion, VoiceSage will help you develop custom messaging campaigns utilizing multiple mobile channels and personalization techniques that are known to increase conversions.

Moreover, our solutions are creative and based on positive outcomes leading to meaningful and strong relationships between brands and customers. Book a free demo today and see our platform in action.