Dubbed as the future of engagement, conversational marketing has been gaining popularity trajectory in recent years.

In the logistics industry, we have seen modernised courier service providers integrating social messaging capabilities to provide real-time shipping status updates and tracking capabilities.

In the eCommerce sector, we have seen opportunistic eCommerce platforms using conversational and social commerce to shorten the customer path to purchase.

Most recently, we have seen Governments and World Health Organisation collaborated with various social messaging platforms to communicate first-hand advisories to communities/ citizens to combat misinformation during the ongoing global pandemic.

Conversational marketing is defined as a marketing communications approach with the focus of having real-time conversations and to move the customers/prospects through the conversion funnel faster.

Conversational marketing is increasingly popular because of its ability to offer:

• Better contextuality
• Increased relevancy
• Personal touch
• Real-time conversation
• Scenario-based messaging
• Instantaneous feedback (immediacy)
• Shortened  sales cycle/ conversion (customer journey)
• Improved engagement rates
• Improved customer experience
• AI applicability & AI-powered chatbots

B2C/D2C Industries

Logistics – Delivery updates, rescheduling and tracking

eCommerce – Conversational commerce, digital wallet integration and product updates

The detailed use cases for the Logistics & eCommerce industries was covered in the second paragraph of the article earlier. Now, lets's dive into the use conversational marketing cases of B2B and Government sectors.

B2B Industry

Corporate services – Leads data collection & qualification

An intelligent chatbot can help prospect the inbound leads with prequalifying questions and set-off the pre-programmed actions to engage the lead..

Sample chatbot based lead generation and engagement workflow

Prospect lands on website> Converse with chatbot > Prospect ends conversation > Bot parsing of lead data > High priority lead identified > Automated phone call within 9 seconds to company's designated Sales representative for the industry > Auomated phone call dial-back within 15 seconds to Prospect with Sale Rep in the call > Company brochure and industry-specific use cases sent to lead's email inbox automatically during the call)

Generally, AI-powered chatbot can be grouped into these 4 ascending categories:

1. Robotic dialogue (Ability of chatbot to carry out basic QnA)

2. Personal dialogue (Ability of chatbot to converse with the company brand tone)

3. Human experience (Ability of chatbot to carry out contextual conversations, backed with robust CRM data)

4. The genuine personal assistant (Ability of chatbot to anticipate and perform personalised recommendations to the unique customer)

Government

In the thick of COVID-19 pandemic, Government authorities are combating the pandemic on many fronts, including fake news . The ability to deliver critical information at speed to communities at large from reputable sources are essential. Here are some of the examples how social media messaging has been deployed.

National bodies & media - First-hand news dissemination via various social messaging channels

World Health Organisation - Health advisory and knowledge via WhatsApp with programmed QnA options

Government (e.g. Singapore) – Daily updates of Government directives and patient counts via WhatsApp

Media (e.g. Channel News Asia) - Real-time polling on the bite-sized news shared to their telegram channel subscribers

Fundamentally, conversational marketing is a form of conversation. Content is king, context is queen.

A good conversation is one where multiple viewpoint are exchanged, questions are been addressed, relevant and contextual information is been shared during the discussion.

Here are some tips to better provision for relevancy and contextual during conversational marketing

• Segmentation
• CRM data integration
• Concise messaging, timing and frequency
• Compelling messaging hooks and CTAs
• Humanised automated messaging copy for repetitive conversations
• Reduce friction for prospect/customers to join the conversations (QR code, website contact icons, email signature embedding your messaging channels etc)
• Leverage on readily available social messaging API platforms (For those getting started, some of these platforms have lifetime free plans)

Partner a consulting partner like Republic Asia to implement an effective end-to-end bespoke solution. Drop us a note at our telegram or [email protected] to find out more.

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