Most businesses today would have heard of chat marketing. If they have not implemented these conversational solutions in their marketing processes, then they would not know about chat marketing in its entirety.
Chat marketing simply put is an approach to building and enhancing the relationship between customers and businesses through automated services like chatbots.
While in the past two years, many industries have benefitted from automated services. Chat marketing is one such marvel that they have leveraged to convert leads into sales.
Let us get to the basics of chat marketing to know why and how businesses are reaping from this addition in their marketing plans.
What is Chat Marketing?
Chat marketing is a way of marketing to acquire and engage customers using messaging software like chatbots, live chat and other messaging channels. You can send customized messages to customers about your product or feature launches, discounts, offers, deals, order updates and product recommendations.
Chat Marketing is an efficient approach in building relationships with customers and move them through marketing and sales funnel smoothly. It helps you view the entire customer lifecycle, seeing where and how impactful interactions can be created to gain more customers from acquisition to retention.
A Chat Marketing strategy comprises of all facets of the business and involves everyone from lead generation team to content marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
Benefits of Chat Marketing
- Economical & Time saving: You need not hire any dedicated resources and still can provide round the clock customer service through chatbots. Chatbots helps you tend to more customers thereby saving time.
- Help to Segregate Traffic. Chatbots aids you to streamline the conversation with customers and differentiate users based on the leads and conversion. For instance, a customer who is browsing the pricing details on your site is more likely a warm lead, the chatbot can suggest making an order right in the chat. In case of additional details, the chatbot should be able to provide all the necessary details about your product or service.
- Instant Response. A prompt response will greatly help in building brand identity and establishing credibility. This helps you attend the customers and their queries quickly. Needless to say, this enables your brand to build a long lasting relationship of trust with your customer.
- Quicker Payment Process. The payment process should be smooth for customers. To enable this, you can have an extension in the chatbot where the customers can make payment in the chat window itself. It saves time of customers and beneficial for eCommerce stores as well.
- Suitable for All Businesses. Irrespective of the size or type of your business, you can have chatbots as a universal marketing channel. It could be for Facebook Messenger or Telegram.
- Improves Engagement. You can target wide range of customers who use other social platforms like Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat etc. to enhance engagement.
- Indepth Data Analysis. The data and information you get via chatbots usage helps you in strategizing better and reach out to customers as they wish to see and use.
- Nurturing Lead. Chatbots help you with the smooth movement of sales funnel. Giving options and showing accurate information will convert the warm leads quickly.
Types of Chat Marketing
- Live Chat Marketing refers to selling your products and services to customers in real-time/live. You will know your customer’s preferences based on their previous interaction or search intent and send them personalized messages. This is the best form of marketing when you have to introduce new products and services.
- Chatbot Marketing is a way of marketing that leverages artificial intelligence to generate leads and gain customers. In this approach, chatbots initiate the conversation with potential customers. Hence it is commonly called as conversational marketing. Chatbot marketing can resolve customer issues without human intervention thus restoring cold-selling with intent-based selling.
- WhatsApp Marketing is one of the most uprising marketing tools for many businesses across the globe. This is a very easy way to reach out to customers who have shown interest in your product or services. Apps like this offer a very high engagement rate.
- Facebook Messenger is used to small medium and large businesses owing to its 1.3 billion user base. You can add links in the messenger which aids easy flow of conversations with users in Facebook. With Freshchat-Facebook integration from Freshworks, you can connect and manage multiple Facebook business pages through a single interface. You can send direct messages that can include FAQs and canned responses to customer’s messenger inbox. Moreover, you can track the conversations.
- Apple Business Chat – iMessenger is used to reach out to customers via apple devices. Apple’s integrated tools in the business chat delivers messages through rich media and improved chat experiences with customers. The list and time picker features enables customers to pick the products and schedule appointments. They have an exclusive payment gateway in the chat which makes things easier.
Chat Tools for Marketing
To efficiently sell your products, you need tools that empower marketing and sales. Below mentioned are few key chat tools you should know about.
- Personalized Chat Widget
- Dedicated Triggered Messaging
- Instant Chatbot Builder
- Compatible Omnichannel Capacities
- Flawless App Integrations
The chat widget is the window of your business to the customers. Users can have real-time conversations with the support staff or sales representatives of your company. Chat widgets can engage users with proactive messages. These days many companies are using multimedia messages to give a better quality of service.
What also matters is how does the chat widget appear on the website? It can be an image block, a bubble or a pop-up but it should go with your brand’s image. Freshchat, an exclusive chat-based SaaS product from Freshworks, helps you in customizing your chat widget to match your brand’s identity along with improving engagement, use content that mirrors with all your customers.
Chat triggered messages play a pivotal role in converting window shoppers into customers. These proactive messages help your customers on their purchase journey. You can promote your products and services to potential customers with offers and deals with attention grabbing campaigns.
These platforms give you options to trigger messages centered on metrics like page visits, cart value and customer priorities. You can preview your messages and campaigns before sending it to customers.
The automated bots should be built instantly and customizable according to your marketing requirements. This is where you need to have an instant chatbot builder to enhance the process of your customer journey. The chatbots can be built easily with the help of AI. By generating a no-code Graphical User Interface (GUI) builder, you can build conditional or conversational flows to enable bots to resolve the issues or to let the agents know if the bots cannot resolve the issue.
Customers reach out to you in any form, be it on Facebook or website or messages. You should be able to see their entire journey automatically. Implementing a unified platform will help you to reach out to customers on different apps and view the conversations in a single window. This saves the time of your staff as well.
In case you are looking at options to enhance your chat marketing strategy, then app integrations like bots, CRM and marketing or eCommerce software are one of the best methods to opt for. You will be able to enable customers to schedule meetings with your business reps through chat. They also aid in problem tracking, automating and payment processing etc.
With tools like Freshchat Marketplace, you can manage your integrations from a single interface making the work flows seamless and enhance employee productivity.
Conclusion
Messaging is widely used than social media today. This is also known as viral marketing for a reason. Make the best out of this trend and connect with your customers holistically. Understand their preferences and pain points and deliver the best customer service that will satisfy them and increase your brand loyalty.
Sit down with your team today and check the best possible methods to improve and implement chat marketing in your business.
