Explore Conversational Marketing

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define conversational marketing.
  
• List the benefits of conversational marketing.
  
• Name potential use cases for conversational marketing.
  
• Explain inverted funnel logic with WhatsApp.
  

What Is Conversational Marketing?

These days, customers expect personalized experiences. But how can a company quickly and authentically create individualized moments for each of its hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers? With conversational marketing.Put simply, conversational marketing is an approach to customer service that offers personalized experiences at scale. By using targeted messages and intelligent chatbots, it builds easy and familiar customer interactions based on intuitive, humanized conversations.

While conversational marketing is one of the best actions a company can take to boost customer engagement, it requires a bit of strategizing around customer segmentation and marketing channel rules. What’s more, a strategy is only as good as its tools, so a company also has to find the right mix of platforms for communication, marketing, and CRM.

Luckily, that’s where we come in. Keep reading to explore the tools and strategies you can use to establish and maintain your conversational marketing flow. Learn how to build trust with your customers, and ensure that they have easy, fast, and flexible access to your services and products.

Conversational Marketing + WhatsApp = A Perfect Match

While conversational marketing can be employed in several marketing channels, we focus here on its usage with WhatsApp. With a 70 percent engagement rate, WhatsApp represents one of the most popular over-the-top (OTT) messaging platforms, making it a perfect chat app for businesses to connect with their customers.

With WhatsApp, companies can implement conversational marketing through two-way conversations with customers. Instead of spending hours or days communicating through email, WhatsApp lets you chat with customers in real time. Quicker communication helps you efficiently solve problems and build customer trust, which drives sales and strengthens customer loyalty.

For the customer, WhatsApp is a convenient, interactive, and asynchronous experience that keeps them coming back for more. For the marketer, WhatsApp is a way to build customer loyalty and focus on long-term relationships rather than single transactions. To learn more about how to engage with customers on WhatsApp by using Marketing Cloud, see Conversations Using WhatsApp in Journey Builder.

Key Benefits of Conversational Marketing and WhatsApp

While conversational marketing offers several advantages, we focus on three main benefits.

1. High Engagement Rates

Conversational marketing makes it possible to meet customers exactly where they are. By establishing relationship strategies in popular mobile apps like WhatsApp, you’re likely to experience higher customer engagement than you’d see in more traditional channels. Higher engagement means higher open and interaction rates, and those boosted KPIs mean you’re ready for success.

2. Broader Reach

WhatsApp is a free, simple, accessible, and intuitive conversational app. WhatsApp has the potential to offer you a new group of customers to engage, such as those who don’t convert via more traditional channels like email. By adopting WhatsApp as one of your communication channels, you widen your potential reach and therefore increase your potential success when using conversational marketing.

3. Hyper-Personalization

It’s hard to create individualized moments for a large customer base. WhatsApp enables marketers to trigger conversations based on unique moments in a customer’s journey. These conversations can be further informed by previous customer interactions, responses, and preferences, making for a personalized experience that scales as you grow.

Conversational Marketing Use Cases

Now that you know more about the benefits of adopting a conversational marketing strategy for your brand, when and how should you start implementing it? While specific uses can vary depending on your industry, we’ve created a list of potential use cases for you to explore. Hopefully, they jumpstart your strategy!

What’s Your WhatsApp Strategy?

Your perfect strategy is the one that works best for you. But to make the most of your WhatsApp channels and conversations, we recommend following these tips.

1. Figure out what your customers want to hear.

No one wants to receive spam. To make sure your messages are welcome when received, send only messages that are relevant to each customer’s unique moment in their journey. Relevant messages respond to the customer’s specific needs, account for where they are in your customer lifecycle, and meet their expectations.

2. Plan your campaigns with the inverted funnel mindset.

With traditional marketing channels, marketers tend to follow the logic funnel approach: Interact with a high volume of users with a particular campaign in order to get a few conversions in the end.

With WhatsApp, the logic funnel is inverted. By sending only relevant and expected messages, marketers interact with a lower volume of users in a single campaign while achieving a higher conversion rate. Because this inverted funnel introduces a new approach to marketing, it makes WhatsApp a perfect companion to more traditional channels such as email marketing, SMS, and push notifications. By using both the original and inverted funnels, you increase your chances of success without adding to your workload.

With WhatsApp by your side, conversational marketing just got better. Now, let's explore how the type of business account you use can further enhance your conversational marketing strategy.

Resources

• Trailhead: Conversations Using WhatsApp in Journey Builder
  
• Salesforce: Marketing Cloud WhatsApp Messaging