Why One-to-One Messaging is the Future of Conversational Marketing

Author: Max Koziolek, CEO and Co-Founder of Spectrm

The famous marketing quote declares that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The reality is that many marketers cast their dollars and efforts far and wide without knowing what results they’re going to reel in. Even though it’s possible to generally determine which ads or pieces of content are resulting in which conversions, marketers are still at a loss when it comes to engaging with their customers one-on-one.

If only marketers could ask each customer “What are you looking for today?” and have a conversation that puts the perfect product in the customer’s hands and know that their marketing dollars are being spent wisely on personalized, engaging interactions that convert.

They can through conversational marketing, the approach that allows brands to interact one-on-one with their customers. Brands engage with customers on the social media apps and platforms where they spend most of their time, hooking them in through non-traditional ads and search entry points, and starting up automated conversations using the in-app messaging features.

If you’ve been thinking about branching into conversational marketing, or have tried it and aren’t yet convinced, here are the reasons why one-to-one messaging is not just the future of marketing, but of better customer engagement at scale, better tracking, and richer customer data — and an end to wasted marketing efforts.

Why One-to-One Messaging is the Future of Conversational Marketing

Why not increase one-to-one engagement, personalize your interactions, be able to track your conversations, and utilize all that data to better inform your marketing efforts? Here’s why one-to-one messaging will form the basis for the future of marketing.

Also Read: Digital Marketing Narrowing the Gap Between Performance and Spending

Personalized Conversation at Scale, Across Platforms

Having a real person behind the chat is a nice-to-have, but it doesn’t scale. Not only will you break the bank with hiring, you’ll lose out on the instantaneous nature of conversation. Customers won’t wait for your handful of operators to free up, or for a ticket response a day or two later.

Automated chatbots do scale, and will be the basis for your conversational marketing strategy. They’re also instantaneous, responding to customers who want solutions immediately and conveniently. They enable you to use product carousels, video, images, and GIFs to make conversations highly engaging. This gives you the ability to capitalize on a warm customer ready to buy, and messaging can get them connected to personalized products and services within seconds.

According to Google, 90% of marketers who implement personalization in their efforts say that it “significantly contributes” to their business’ profitability. As we found in our recent report on “State of Social Conversational Commerce,” of those who clicked on an ad and communicated via messaging with a brand, 52.6% made a purchase.

With the ability to scale, don’t just limit chatbots to your website, waiting for customers to come to you to engage them. Scale your messaging across the social media apps and platforms where your customers are every day. Proactively engage them with guided conversational experiences that make you stand out of the crowd.

More Personal Insights into Your Customers

As your customers converse with your chatbots, they’re giving you an incredible amount of personal data which you can leverage to improve your messaging exchanges and ultimately your customers’ experience. Marketers collect data from ad campaign dashboards and website analytics to inform their decisions, and you can gather data from the conversations you have with customers, too.

Use automation to structure your data in conversational marketing channels, which can then be acted upon immediately, as these insights can be used to personalize your chatbot’s interactions with your customer in real-time. You can also use this data to segment your customers to re-engage them with chat messages after the initial interaction, and to build stronger customer profiles as well. Live chat can never achieve this.

Marketing chatbots enable you to structure conversational data, optimize experiences using analytics, and drive more valuable actions for your business. When it comes to conversational marketing at scale, automation fuels both short-term impact by driving your customers to action, and long-term impact by helping you harness conversational data to connect more effectively with future customers.

Artificial Intelligence Can Speak Their Language

Automation for your one-on-one messaging only works when you leverage context-specific and brand-specific responses. These allow your customers to feel truly heard and know that they can ask your chatbot nearly anything and will be understood. Additionally, brands should give their chatbot a name and a personality, and give them their brand voice. Customers should know that they’re speaking with a virtual bot, certainly, but they should have a pleasant interaction while doing so.

However, the messaging data you capture from customers is meaningless without a layer of conversational intelligence. The use of general Natural Language Processing (NLP) will actually create a negative customer experience because it will remain sterile and unresponsive to questions that don’t “follow the script.” Brands who adopt conversational AI built for their brand from the start will create messaging that will actually be helpful to the customers and enjoyable.

Leveraging AI can also be a boon for your business as well, as 85% of business leaders believe that adopting AI will give their company a competitive advantage, according to a report from BCG and MIT. Conversational AI allows you to respond in real-time to your customer’s needs and intentions. But this competitive advantage will only go to those who leverage no-code platforms that make it easy for anyone on the marketing team to train and improve their AI.

Also Read: What Chatbot Marketing Is and the Top 5 Benefits It Brings to Your Brand

More Accurate Attribution Tracking

Finally, marketers always need to know which marketing efforts are paying off. You’re often able to track the customer journey through ad campaigns, newsletter clicks, and website behavior, but how often are you able to directly attribute customer interactions to sales? Automated one-to-one messaging has the benefit of not only being able to offer up product selections to a customer interested and ready to purchase, but can provide better attribution tracking as well.

To optimize your conversational marketing funnel at scale, you need to guide customers to action, and you need to track and optimize every step in your conversational funnel. To track conversions in chat and on-site, you need to ensure that you have a clear UTM structure and connections to your analytics and conversion pixels. All this is only possible at scale with automation.

Take the Guesswork Out of Marketing

Conversations at scale, personalization, leveraging AI, and better attribution tracking. One-on-one messaging is the conversational marketing approach that will actually leave you knowing how your budget is being spent, how your customers are interacting with your brand, and how you can better serve them in the future — without having to guess at your efforts.