More conversions through better conversations

In this blog post, we discuss all you need to know about conversational marketing. Conversations are the basis for relationships. Because through real conversations, you get to know your (potential) customers and the challenges they face. This way, you can help them further in the buying process.

To help your customers further, you need to be able to answer questions from your buyers at the time of asking, in real-time. Their intention and urgency are often highest when they are on your website.

According to a well-known study published by Harvard Business Review, you are 400% more likely to qualify a lead if you respond to a question within 5 minutes.

When a website visitor fills out a form or sends an email to get an answer to a question, the average response time is five hours. In the meantime, they could find your competitor’s website. The chances are that you will lose this potential customer and that is a shame of course.

How can you communicate in real-time with your website visitors? Welcome to the world of conversational marketing and intelligent chatbots.

Learn more about:

What is conversational marketing?
The advantages of conversational marketing
The ROI of conversational marketing
How does conversational marketing work?
Starting with conversational marketing
5 examples of conversational marketing
Conversational marketing platforms
Conversational marketing and marketing automation
Continuing with conversational marketing

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is a pleasant way to help B2B buyers online in the purchasing process. In conversational marketing, you get started with real-time conversations, both from person to person and from person to chatbot. Certainly, the power of real-time creates an optimal experience for everyone who visits your website.

The major drawback of email is the sometimes-lengthy response time, which can make a conversation last a few days (or longer). By using automated intelligent chatbots, you can answer questions from potential customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Indeed a great advantage of chat.

Do you want to convert website visitors, schedule appointments, speak to live agents or refer to content? Then a chatbot can facilitate it all.

The advantages of conversational marketing

What are the most significant advantages of starting a conversation with intelligent chatbots? When it comes to consumer products, customers are used to having a question answered right away, why is this not possible in B2B? Benefits for Sales and Marketing in B2B are evident:

1. Responding directly to lead questions – 24 x 7
2. Welcoming strategic accounts to your website
3. Scheduling more qualified meetings for Sales
4. Converting leads faster by eliminating the need to fill out forms

The ROI of conversational marketing

Don’t let your website get in the way of generating more sales. According to a study by Lead Connect, it appears that 81% of B2B buyers no longer fill out forms.

Additionally, millennials are increasingly taking the position of B2B buyer. In the B2B Millennial Buyer Survey Report, 69% of millennials surveyed indicated that they prefer interaction (69%) via social media and/or messenger apps with someone from sales.

If you only offer your customers the opportunity to get in touch with you in traditional ways (forms, telephone, email), then there is a chance that you will lose sales. In addition to generating more revenue with chat, you can qualify website visitors faster and you can shorten the purchasing process. And you can also save on operational costs.

Chatbots can reduce costs for sales and customer service. Specifically, by having the chatbot asking qualifying questions first, you can separate customer service and sales-related contact requests. So that customer service time is not wasted on sales-related contact requests and vice versa.

Also, by asking the right questions, you can filter interesting leads from uninteresting website visitors. And sales efforts will be focussed on leads that deserve attention.

How does conversational marketing work?

You’ve probably seen websites where a pop-up window appeared at the bottom right, asking, “Hello, my name is …, how can I help you?“. It is the starting point of a conversation. Instead of shouting “Buy now!” a chatbot tries to engage with each visitor individually and help them find an answer to a question.

An intelligent chatbot is ideal for this situation, because the bot can have a 1-to-1 conversation with all visitors. Fully automated. Of course, someone is communicating with a bot, however often questions are answered better and faster by a bot. Take e.g. frequently asked questions.

Also, a bot can make an initial qualification or selection by asking the right questions. This way, you only transfer the valuable leads to a live agent.

There is a so-called playbook behind each chatbot. This playbook is a detailed script which the chatbot uses to talk to website visitors. Specifically, by asking the right questions and analyzing the answers given, a chatbot helps visitors find the appropriate information or recommends the best next step. The chatbot, therefore, helps visitors in real-time in the purchasing process.

Starting with conversational marketing in 2 steps

With conversational marketing, you focus on starting the right conversation, at the right time in the buying process. Escpecially since you want to create a consistent and personalized experience for your buyers. Every website visitor has a different need and purpose, but they have one thing in common: they want to have an experience that is valuable to them.

You can start by following two steps: Step 1. Map your buyer and website visits and step 2. Implement the conversational framework.

Step 1. Mapping your buyer and website

To provide your target customer with the right experience and the right message, you map your buyer to your website. You do this by asking yourself the following questions:

• What? What is your website visitor looking at now? Which page or content piece are they looking at? Are they reading a blog article, or are they looking at your product page?
• Who? Who visits your website? What do we know about that person? Is it someone who is visiting your site for the first time? Or is it a returning visitor who, for example, has already received several nurture emails?
• Where? Where do they come from? Did they click on an ad or a link from a nurture campaign? Do they come to your website via Google or via a social media post?

You create a suitable conversation for every type of visitor. Not to sell them something, but to help them with what they need at the time. But also, a conversation with which you want to achieve your goal. Consider, for example, obtaining an email address, requesting a free trial period for your product or scheduling an appointment.

Step 2. Implementing the Conversational Framework

Now that you have mapped your customer behaviour, you can build various conversations based on the Conversational Framework:

• Engage – It is essential to draw a visitor into a conversation. This can be done by responding to a pain point or by simply asking the question “Hi, how can I help you today?”
• Understand – Ask the right questions to find out what the visitor needs help with and whether it is an attractive buyer for you.
• Recommend – Recommend a next step based on where the website visitor is in the buyer journey. Not every visitor wants or even need a demo at the time. Recommending a proper next step tailored to the needs of the visitor, provides a personalized and well-oiled experience.

5 examples of conversational marketing

1 Altbot – Conversational webpage

Everyone is used to interaction via WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. So why not take this as a starting point, reckons AltBot, an online comparator of energy providers. The necessary information is requested through a conversation with a chatbot. The bot processes and analyzes the data and passes it on to a live agent who enters the conversation and discusses the most suitable supplier. When thinking of a chatbot, most people think of a widget in the right bottom corner on the website; however, this is not always the case. See it in action here: https://www.altbot.energy/quote

2 SPOTONVISION – Conversational content

Your website is not the only place where you can apply the power of chat. The intent of your buyers is highest when they interact with your content. This can be on your website, but also, for example, when they are reading an e-book. By adding a chat function to your PDF, you can automatically continue the conversation when they are interacting with your content. Also, you can automatically send a notification to a responsible sales employee when the PDF is opened. The sales rep can immediately take over the automated conversation and speak to the customer in real-time.

3 Segment – Account-based marketing

Have you been using IP tracking and recognized a company that visits your website and whom you would like to do business with? You can automatically start a conversation with a chatbot, entirely focused on this company. You can also have the bot send a notification directly to the responsible sales rep, so that he or she can take over the chat conversation live. This way strategic accounts, maybe part of your account-based marketing plan, are given the personal attention they deserve.

4 SPOTONVISION – Convert readers of your blog articles

The goal of many websites is to convert unknown visitors into known leads, by asking an email address in return for a piece of content. It is especially a commonly used practice by placing a call to action in a blog article with a link to a landing page with a form. However, having potential buyers filling in forms is becoming more difficult. Chat allows you to start a conversation relevant to the blog article. This way, you can offer a piece of content to download directly in the chat.

5 Drift – ROI calculator

The goal of conversational marketing is helping your buyers buy. Precisely this is what the ROI calculator does on the Pricing Page of Drift: https://www.drift.com/pricing/#roi. It is smart to emphasize what it will yield, rather than what it will cost.

Conversational marketing platforms

Drift

Drift is a conversational marketing platform, for both live chat and intelligent, automated chatbots. It contains many unique features for marketing and sales, like conversational content, integrated agendas, account-based marketing functionalities, lead distribution, video, email and automation.

Drift is the market leader in conversational marketing. While HubSpot has made the term inbound marketing big, Drift is doing this with conversational marketing.

From $ 40 a month.

SPOTONVISION is an official partner of Drift. Their slogan is “Connect Your Sales Teams With Your Future Customers NOW”, which perfectly matches what we stand for

Intercom

Intercom started as a messaging platform that went in the same direction as Drift. It consists of several messaging-first products for companies, including chatbot.

From $ 99 a month.

Landbot.io

Landbot.io is a conversational chatbot builder, with live chat functionalities. A bare-bones version of the three products above, with a focus on lead generation and out-of-the-box WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger integrations.

From $ 30 a month.

Conversational marketing and marketing automation

Are you using a marketing automation platform? That is good news! Conversational marketing is most effective when it is integrated with your marketing automation platform.

Possibilities are:

• Add website visitors who leave an email address in a chat conversation to a relevant email nurture program.
• Add chat to the emails of your nurture programs, which will allow leads to start a conversation directly with a representative from your company while they are reading their email.
• Provide the chatbot with relevant data from your marketing automation platform to qualify website visitors. For example, you can start a specific chat conversation for leads with a particular lead score, which suits their phase in the purchase process
• Make data that the chatbot collects available in your marketing automation platform. Think of interaction characteristics (digital body language), but also of specific data that has been passed on by the lead via chat. This way, you maintain a uniform customer view and the data is not spread across different systems.
• And much more!

Integration of conversational marketing platforms and marketing automation

Drift integrations marketing automation

Drift has out-of-the-box integrations with HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua and Salesforce Pardot. Data can be communicated in two directions, from Drift to the marketing automation platform and vice versa. Available for HubSpot from Pro plan and other platforms from the Premium plan. For the other marketing automation platforms, you can use tools such as Zapier to transfer data from Drift to your marketing automation platform and data from your marketing automation platform to Drift. See Drift Integrations: Connect Drift to everything for more information.

Intercom integrations marketing automation

Intercom has out-of-the-box integration with HubSpot, Marketo and AutoPilot. Data can be communicated in two directions. For other marketing automation platforms, you can use Zapier to transfer data from Intercom to your marketing automation platform and vice versa. Check Intercom for more information.

Landbot.io integrations marketing automation

Landbot has an out-of-the-box integration with MailChimp. You can use Zapier to transfer data to other marketing automation platforms. However, data transfer from your marketing automation platform to Landbot is not possible. See Landbot Integrations: Connect Landbot to everything for more information.

Working together

Whether you are working with account-based marketing or lead generation in the broadest sense, meaningful interactions with your buyers is always at the top of the list of Sales and Marketing. Together we’ll set up a pilot, integrate the right technology and add real-time conversations to your way of working. Interested in working together? We would love to show you how you can boost your ROI.