Communication channels that customers use with businesses are always changing. Over the past 20 years, customer support has gone from primarily being in person, to phone, to email.
Today, having retail locations for many B2B companies is no longer necessary, and a customer phoning often means endlessly waiting on hold, and the response time for emails can span days.
As a result, we have seen an explosion of conversational marketing. In this article, we’ll discuss the conversational marketing ecosystem, how it can create new sales opportunities, and how you can implement it in your digital marketing strategy right now.
What Is Conversational Marketing and Live Chat?
Conversational marketing uses real-time chat-based dialogue to capture leads and move them through the sales funnel as well as help existing customers.
The two most common tools and types of conversational marketing are:
- Live chat with your sales team who can use it to increase their conversion rates by quickly detecting qualified leads
- Chatbots that are able to field simple questions instantly, at any time, and are becoming even more capable with further development in AI and machine learning
How Customers Benefit From Conversational Marketing
Thanks to conversational marketing chatbots and live chat, customers don’t have to spend their time on the phone or filling out contact forms — they can get the answer they need when they need it while communicating naturally through messages.
Most customers are already used to the natural feel of chat messages, and it allows businesses to build trust quickly as well as create tailored and engaging experiences.
Since communicating through chat is easier than calling and faster than emailing, website visitors and potential customers are likely to be more willing to engage with your business, which, if done right, translates into a significant revenue growth opportunity.
Not convinced that conversational marketing is for you? Take a look at these astonishing statistics sourced from various conversational marketing surveys conducted over the past few years.
Top Statistics for Your Conversational Marketing Strategy
Reviewing conversational marketing trends, it’s clear that customers are increasingly willing and, in fact, happy to use live chat and chatbots to get the information they need.
Over a third of website visitors can’t find answers to basic questions, which pushes them to the easiest way to contact the company.
42% of visitors expect an instant answer from a chatbot. 44% expect an instant answer from live chat.
As more and more companies go remote and spread across different time zones, the expectation of the 24/7 customer service is growing too. Accordingly, the usage of chatbots nearly doubled between 2019 and 2020.
Chatbots are so ubiquitous now that 67% of consumers globally have used them in the past year.
A lot of companies have reservations about installing chatbots because they think customers want live support. In reality, 40% of customers don’t care whether it’s a chatbot or not as long as they solve their problem. 87% of customers said they had positive or neutral experience with chatbots.
At the same time, relying on chatbots can save your sales team up to 30% of their day — an incredible productivity boost.
In some industries, like healthcare and banking, chatbots are soon predicted to be responsible for up to 90% of all customer inquiries. According to IBM, 80% of routine questions in any sector can be handled by chatbots.
But businesses shouldn’t leave out live chat just yet. 50% of visitors use chatbots because they believe it’s the easiest way to communicate with a business, and 34% explicitly use chatbots to reach live customer support.
How Businesses & Consumers Can Use Conversational Marketing
Customer statistics show that having a live chat and chatbot combo on your website (besides traditional forms of customer service) can bring tangible benefits — from freeing up your sales team to increasing conversions and revenue.
But where do you start? Most off-the-shelf chatbots are decision-tree-based or have fairly basic AI and can only respond to simple queries, which means your live chat will get overloaded with questions — most of which from visitors who have no intention to buy your product or service.
What you need to do in choosing conversational marketing components is integrate a system that can categorize your website visitors based on their buyer intent, such as Lift AI.
Lift AI is a powerful buyer intent solution that works with any chat platform you already use. Its machine-learning model is powered by billions of data points and millions of live sales engagements.
What Lift AI excels at is qualifying potential customers as soon as they land on your website. The process works even for visitors who are completely anonymous (up to 98% of your traffic) and haven’t engaged with your content marketing or been recorded in your CRM.
Right away, Lift AI is able to detect visitors with the highest buyer intent (around 9% of the overall traffic) and connect them to your BDRs through live chat. At the same time, visitors who have lower buyer intent can be greeted by a chatbot.
Lift AI works for customers of any scale. Within the first 90 days, it can improve your chat conversions by up to 10 times. PointClickCare, for example, grew its chat conversions by 400%.
Start using Lift AI free for 30 days. No credit card or IT help required. Just paste a small JavaScript snippet on your website, and Lift AI will automatically configure itself.
This is how adding just one intelligent solution can transform your chat-based sales process, free up more time for your sales team, and increase your revenue as a result.
