Nowadays... who has not yet communicated with someone through a chat? Probably no one. And the fact is that communicating is an essential part of knowing how to understand each other and doing it through a chat is simple and direct. But chats do not have to be an exclusive tool for people to communicate with each other, it can also be a good way to allow companies to communicate with users in a much closer and direct way. What do you think if we see in this post how we can do it?
what is conversational marketing?
"Markets are conversations" stated Fredrick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger in 1999 with the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto. This book is a work that gathers 95 conclusions about markets and how they work. However, although this statement was made more than 20 years ago, it is only now that companies are beginning to realise the truth of this statement and are getting down to work.
With theadvent of digitalisation, websites, social networks... we have forgotten to take care of the relationship with users and especially the conversations with them. Many companies believe that by having a website they are already "there" and nothing more is needed. However, this is not the case. Conversations with customers are still relevant today, the only thing that has acquired a different approach than what we have been used to.
Conversational marketing is mainly based on focusing a large part of our marketing strategy on real-time conversations .
To maintain these conversations we can use different methods: personalised emails with the client, conversations on social networks where our brand has a profile and allows communication with the user via message and intelligent chatbots incorporated into our company's web pages.
Chatbots are a tool that allows communication with the user to be more efficient, interactive and humanises our brand in the customer relationship process.
In short and in a simple way, we can define chatbots as an assistant that communicates with users instantly when they want to communicate with our brand. This chat is integrated into web pages, applications, etc. For example, when you enter a web page you have probably received a message asking you if you had any questions and the option to establish a conversation, right? Well, that is a chatbot.
But in addition to being installed on web pages, chatbots are configured by a technology that allows the user to maintain a conversation through software that is integrated into a certain messaging system, such as Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Whatsapp, etc.
This system is programmed so that there is always a person answering messages without the need for a physical person behind them. They have the advantage that they are available to resolve the doubts of users who want to contact your company at any time of the day.
how does the WhatsApp chatbot help?
As we have just mentioned, chatbots can also be developed in social networks such as Whatsapp. Many online businesses have included the option of chatting via Whatsapp: the user asks questions through the chat of this social network and a bot responds automatically. On many occasions, it is difficult not to believe that the person answering is a person as they are very well designed to respond to all the doubts that the user may have.
Whatsapp is one of the best options we can choose to implement our chatbot as it is a mobile messaging application that is available to all audiences. For example, on Twitter or Facebook we may not find all types of audiences to whom we want to direct our commercial action but we will do it on Whatsapp. Moreover, in Spain it is the messaging service most used by the population to communicate and it is preferred over phone calls by 42% of users. Are you also one of them?
Let's now cite the five main benefits of having our chatbot installed on Whatsapp
- Immediacy: It allows the user to communicate immediately with our brand. They will simply have to send a message through this application with the doubts that arise and the bot that we have installed in it will respond immediately. This generates a good relationship with customers as immediacy is synonymous with quality.
- It reinforces the brand image: When a user receives immediate answers to their queries, it makes them value the brand as a quality brand and this will therefore reinforce our image in the eyes of the rest of the public and improve our reputation.
- Your sales will increase: At least 80% of users ask for assistance before making a purchase. If we have an assistant to answer their questions, they will decide sooner in the buying process.
- Improved loyalty: When a customer feels happy with a brand and with the treatment offered by it, there is a much greater likelihood that they will repeat another purchase with us and will not go to look for an opinion in other competing brands.
- After-sales service support: One of the things that customers value most is that the after-sales service is of high quality and in the event of any incident they can communicate quickly with the company. The Whatsapp chatbot allows this as it will be available at any time of the day.
How conversational marketing helps your company
Whether we do it through Whatsapp, our website or any other application, chatbots are a good tool to implement conversational marketing in our company. And this is very important because conversational marketing will bring many benefits to our business, such as:
- Creating closeness with customers
- Offering immediate responses
- Complementing our marketing strategy
- Allows communication at any time, depending on the availability of the customer to contact us
- Offer customers personalised attention in their after-sales service
In short, we can say that conversational marketing and chatbots will help our company to improve communication with our customers, and this will be fundamental because, at the end of the day, what does not communicate does not exist.
