Updated: May, 2024
Online sales professionals who focus on conversions know the benefits of conversational marketing. It allows them to provide a great customer experience for more leads while boosting their sales at the same time.
Yet not everyone is taking advantage of what conversation marketing has to offer. Lots of companies are not sure how to implement it in their traditional sales activities, such as email, forms, and nurture campaigns. As a result, they feel stuck with average inbound conversions.
Let's explore what conversational marketing is, look at a few conversational marketing approaches, and see how we can follow them to improve customer relationships, maximize conversions, and increase website sales.
Tip: Get everything you need out of conversational marketing in one tool with Lift AI. This real-time buyer intent solution identifies the best website visitors for your BDRs to talk to and connects them directly via online chat. More effective conversations — more sales.
What is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a strategic marketing approach that engages your website visitors with meaningful conversations in real time through chatbots, messaging apps, or live chat.
According to Drift, conversational marketing saw explosive growth in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with 58% of companies surveyed implementing conversational marketing programs during that time. While it may have initially served as a stop-gap solution, companies soon discovered the high returns that a successful conversational marketing strategy could yield.
With website visitors increasingly expecting 24/7 support, conversational marketing can engage potential buyers throughout the sales funnel and beyond. In fact, statistics show that 42% of visitors expect an instant answer from a chatbot while 44% expect an instant answer from live chat.
Benefits of Conversational Marketing
By engaging visitors directly, conversational marketing has more impact on the customer journey than more traditional ways of capturing leads, such as web forms.
Web forms capture only those website visitors who are willing to provide their email, and conversations with them tend to stretch out for days or weeks. And that doesn't even include those who are intrigued by your offering but are not ready to share their email.
In contrast, conversational marketing works throughout the entire customer lifecycle by:
- Increasing visitor engagement and lead generation: Using targeted, real-time conversations captures visitors' attention when their interest is at its peak. By providing personalized content while removing the friction caused by form fills and scheduling wait times, you clear the way for effective interactions and improved conversions.
- Streamlining lead qualification and sales efficiency: Conversational marketing can turn lead qualification from a guessing game into a data-driven process. When you integrate real-time buyer intent data with chatbot and live chat tools, you can easily identify ready-to-buy leads and prioritize them for your sales team. This targeted approach empowers your sales force to close deals faster and with greater efficiency.
- Improving customer satisfaction and retention: By adding real-time messaging channels, your company demonstrates how you value existing customers. Additionally, the ability to tailor conversations based on individual needs builds trust and strengthens customer loyalty, leading to higher retention.
How do Chatbots Create Inbound Marketing Leads?
Chatbots are commonplace on all kinds of websites, from Amazon to two-person startups. They are popular because they remove the need for a salesperson or a customer service representative on the other end. They are cheap, instant, and work 24/7.
Since chatbots use pre-configured responses, it pays off to take the time to craft effective ones. A productive chatbot is able to answer frequently asked questions, direct visitors to appropriate resources, provide basic customer support, and escalate to live sales agents.
A chatbot can become an integral part of your sales process and conversion funnel, serving a large audience with next to no effort.
Conversational AI is an advanced evolution of chatbots that mimics human-like behavior and provides a more tailored customer experience. To be effective, however, conversational AI needs millions of existing customer interactions to train itself on, which can be a challenge for smaller companies. That's why it's more commonly used for support rather than sales.
How Does Live Chat Help Companies Improve Sales?
Live chat for sales complements chatbots and conversational AI. Having BDRs ready to engage with website visitors through a chat window offers an unbeatable opportunity for human interaction.
BDRs are able to convert visitors to leads and sales much better than chatbots. The challenge is keeping enough staff to reply to inquiries in real time. There will inevitably be long periods of inactivity or time wasted on low-quality prospects.
The best live chat strategy would be knowing when your team should engage with potential customers and when it's better to leave the lead qualification process to a chatbot or conversational AI, without losing any sales.
How Salespeople Can Engage in Effective Conversational Marketing
Even with the best web design in place, B2B companies still suffer from site abandonment. If visitors don't see what they are looking for in seconds, they leave to search for it somewhere else.
Conversational marketing is a great way to prevent potential customers from leaving. But don't make the mistake of asking for their email address too early in the conversation. As much as 80% of visitors might leave the conversation prematurely if asked for personal information.
The key insight to internalize is that people don't want to be sold to, they want to be helped. That's what the best conversational marketing strategies are positioned to deliver.
Your goal with conversational marketing should be to foster meaningful conversations, build trust, and establish relationships. To do that:
- Evaluate the buyer intent of each website visitor
- Understand their goals
- Answer their questions related to your product
- Help them navigate through your website
- Gather feedback
Once you've provided enough value to earn customers' trust, you can:
- Offer customized deals
- Upsell interested visitors
- Ask for email addresses and other personal information
- Book demos
Some of these things can be done with a chatbot, and some require assistance from salespeople — that's why the most successful conversational marketing platforms engage both.
How to Get Started With Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is a powerful strategy, but the right tools are essential for success. While various platforms offer features like chatbots and live chat, a strategic approach goes beyond automation. This section explores essential conversational marketing tools, highlighting their functionalities and guiding you on how to integrate them for targeted engagement and measurable results.
Drift
Drift is a revenue acceleration platform that lets you specify customer engagement points throughout your website. You can write custom prompts for various target audiences and offer them predetermined options, from downloading reports to subscribing for updates, to booking demos.
You can also let visitors skip contact forms and initiate a real-time conversation with your sales team via chat, which could move from text to audio to video later on.
LivePerson
LivePerson is another great conversational marketing platform that features both chatbots and live chat for sales to automate and scale visitor interactions. It allows companies to automate and personalize their customer interactions, making it easier to provide quick and effective support and sales assistance.
Intercom
Intercom is a customer communication platform that features both chatbots and live chat to automate and scale visitor interactions. It enables companies to automate and personalize their customer interactions, making it easier to provide quick and effective support and sales assistance.
The Ideal Conversational Marketing Journey (With a Catch)
The image below illustrates what a company with a mature conversational marketing strategy might implement using page-based playbooks, account-based marketing (ABM) tools, qualifying playbooks, and chatbots.
The problem is that up to 98% of potential customers on your website are completely anonymous. This means you don't have enough information about them to decide how to proceed. In practice, conversational marketing platforms are at the risk of flying blind — hoping that BDRs are spending time with the right visitors while chatbots are handling the rest. There is, however, no certainty.
Chatbots are not a one-in-all solution. At best, they are engagement channels for improving customer relationships. But like all channels, they need to be aligned with your visitors right from the start. The last thing you want is for high-potential visitors to be greeted in a way that doesn't meet their needs.
You need clear goals and a process for measuring your progress against them. That means your chatbot and live sales chat experiences should be integrated into your CRM and marketing automation tools to be effective.
The key is knowing how to properly allocate your sales resources to boost conversion rates and drive your sales volumes.
Lift AI
Lift AI is a unique buyer-intent solution that applies the power of artificial intelligence to excel at one thing — accurately identifying the buyer intent of every single person on your website in real time.
What makes Lift AI valuable is eliminating manual guesswork from visitor targeting. This is made possible by Lift AI's proprietary machine-learning model, which processes an unprecedented amount of real-life data — more than 15 years of sales engagement insights, 14 million conversations, and billions of website visitors.
To enable real-time engagement based on visitors' buying intent, Lift AI works with Drift, LivePerson, and other conversational marketing apps.
Lift AI identifies high conversion intent visitors, which is on average 9% of your website traffic.
As a result, you can connect high-scoring visitors with your sales team directly, use a qualification bot with mid-intent visitors, and leverage more automation with low-scorers for nurturing and answering simple questions.
Successful Conversational Marketing Examples
By engaging visitors with the right resources based on their conversion potential, Lift AI customers have experienced unprecedented growth.
PointClickCare
PointClickCare increased conversions by 400%, adding over $1M of incremental revenue in the first year. The company saw a 4x increase in conversion rates by integrating Lift AI with Drift to optimize their chat interactions. Lift AI's machine learning model analyzed visitor behavior in real time, allowing PointClickCare to differentiate new prospects from existing customers and direct high-intent visitors to live agents. This approach not only reduced abandonment rates and improved conversion rates but also led to an increase in qualified leads from chat by 168% within the first month.
Formstack
Formstack experienced an impressive 18x return on investment (ROI) and a 420% increase in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by using Lift AI's buyer intent scoring to identify and engage high-intent visitors. By integrating Lift AI's advanced buyer intent scoring system, Formstack was able to prioritize its sales efforts on visitors most likely to convert, thereby significantly improving its sales efficiency.
This targeted approach not only streamlined their sales process but also ensured that high-potential leads received the personalized attention needed to drive conversions, leading to substantial revenue growth.
Truckstop
In just five months, Truckstop achieved a remarkable 27x ROI, highlighting the powerful impact of Lift AI on conversion efficiency. By using Lift AI to analyze visitor behavior and determine buying intent, Truckstop could focus its resources on the most promising leads. This strategy enabled them to maximize their sales efforts and achieve higher conversion rates without increasing their marketing spend.
The ability to quickly and accurately identify high-intent visitors allowed Truckstop to optimize its sales funnel and significantly boost its return on investment.
Loopio
Loopio saw a staggering 733% increase in booked meetings, showcasing the effectiveness of personalized engagement strategies. By employing Lift AI's real-time visitor insights, Loopio was able to tailor their interactions based on individual visitor behavior and intent.
List of Lift AI intent-based playbooks set up in Drift
This personalized approach not only made potential customers feel more valued but also dramatically improved the efficiency of Loopio's sales team. The result was a significant uptick in meaningful sales conversations and booked meetings, demonstrating the power of engaging with visitors on a more personalized level.
Chronus
Chronus, a leading data management platform provider, integrated Lift AI to identify high-intent anonymous visitors and accelerate them into sales conversations using Drift, effectively bypassing the traditional form-filling process. This innovative approach led to remarkable results: just 0.05% of all website visitors, identified by Lift AI as high-intent, generated more pipeline than the combined efforts of the remaining 27% who were identified.
These high-intent anonymous visitors converted to Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs) at an impressive 23% conversion rate, highlighting the significant sales potential within anonymous traffic. By fast-tracking high-intent visitors to live sales interactions, Chronus was able to maximize its sales efficiency and capitalize on previously untapped revenue opportunities.
Conversational Marketing Can Finally Deliver on the Promise
Conversational marketing has proven to be a powerful strategy for engaging website visitors in real time through personalized interactions. Tools like Drift, LivePerson, and Intercom help automate and scale these interactions, enhancing customer support and sales assistance. By integrating Lift AI, businesses can further optimize their conversational marketing efforts by identifying high-intent visitors and directing them to the appropriate channels, maximizing conversions and driving revenue.
Try Lift AI free for 30 days by signing up and including a simple JavaScript snippet on your website. No credit card is required. Today is the perfect day to find out who your anonymous website visitors actually are.
FAQ
What are the best tools for conversational marketing?
In the article, we covered popular chat tools like Drift, LivePerson, and Intercom, which are excellent for automating and personalizing customer interactions. While these are some of the top options available, there are many other tools out there, so it's a good idea to do your own research to find the best fit for your needs.
Lift AI is a unique solution that can enhance any conversational marketing tool in your tech stack by identifying high-intent visitors and directing them to the most appropriate sales or support channels, further optimizing your customer engagement and conversion rates.
How do I measure the success of my conversational marketing campaigns?
To measure the success of your conversational marketing campaigns, consider tracking the following metrics:
- Return on Investment (ROI): Calculate the financial return relative to the cost of your conversational marketing efforts to determine overall profitability.
- Increase in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Monitor changes in MRR to assess how effective your campaigns are at driving sustained revenue growth.
- Conversion Rates: Track the percentage of website visitors who become leads or customers through your conversational marketing channels, such as chatbots and live chat.
- Qualified Leads: Measure the number of high-quality leads generated through your campaigns, which are likely to convert into sales.
- Booked Meetings: Count the number of meetings or demos scheduled as a result of interactions with chatbots or live agents, indicating successful engagement.
- Incremental Revenue: Evaluate the additional revenue generated specifically from your conversational marketing efforts to see their direct financial impact.
- Customer Satisfaction Scores: Use surveys and feedback tools to gauge customer satisfaction with their chat experiences.
- Response Times: Monitor how quickly your chatbots and live agents respond to customer inquiries, as faster responses can lead to higher satisfaction and conversion rates.
By tracking these metrics, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of your conversational marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.
