The 5 Benefits of Chat Marketing

Let’s be honest. Brands often inadvertently neglect their consumer base. Dealing with different campaigns and initiatives can slow down crucial one-on-one communication that helps customers feel like they matter. So, what’s the alternative? Personalized phone, SMS, and email campaigns—for every single person who has ever shown interest in or purchased one of your products—could be […]

Let’s be honest. Brands often inadvertently neglect their consumer base. Dealing with different campaigns and initiatives can slow down crucial one-on-one communication that helps customers feel like they matter.

So, what’s the alternative? Personalized phone, SMS, and email campaigns—for every single person who has ever shown interest in or purchased one of your products—could be an option, but these are enormous undertakings that can overwhelm even the very best marketing and sales teams.

Luckily, there’s another option. If you want to boost brand engagement, your business needs to utilize chat marketing for a faster and more accurate portrait of your overall consumer base.

Connect with consumers where they are

These days, it’s no longer safe to assume that your entire audience will be regularly opening emails or fielding phone calls. With more people using messaging apps on their smartphones, brands should leverage chat marketing on these platforms.

Consider this: The average open rate for email sits at around 21 percent. By comparison, direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand The Beard Club was able to get 30,000 new subscribers with a 92 percent open rate using its Facebook Messenger chatbot—in just four weeks.

To get these efforts underway, start by using messaging apps—like Facebook Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, and Google Messages—to communicate with consumers.

That said, every brand’s target audience won’t necessarily be using the same platforms. Conduct a thorough audience analysis to gauge which platforms you should be using. Consider the lifestyle and demographics of your target buyer personas to understand which platforms they use the most.

You might find that your ideal buyer personas don’t use Facebook at all and instead prefer WhatsApp. Whatever the case, it’s up to you to find the most effective messaging app to align with your efforts.

lululemon, for example, has a dedicated chatbot on its Facebook page that’s easy for Messenger users to interact with.

The chatbot even connects users with a live rep if it’s unable to answer a specific question with the amount of detail a user needs.

Provide faster communication

When it comes to brand engagement, time is of the essence. The faster you respond to a potential customer, the more favorably they’ll look upon your brand—and the more likely they’ll be to continue a conversation.

Chat marketing empowers brands to deliver speedy responses. If you’re using a chatbot, make sure it responds to users as quickly as possible. Adding FAQs to your chatbot script can be an effective way to get answers to users quickly and to save your business time.

But don’t sacrifice transparency for speed. Provide clarity about how quickly users can get responses to build brand trust. Even if your chatbot can’t provide an answer on the spot, program it to tell users how they can get the answers they’re looking for, whether that’s by connecting them to a live rep when available or directing them to an email address that they can use. If you follow through on your promise, customers will see that your brand takes their inquiries seriously.

Using a chat marketing solution, D2C brand WizardPins has seen a significant reduction in the time it takes for the company to deliver consumer responses. In just a few seconds, this conversation between a user and the WizardPins chatbot gets to the core of what the user needs.

The WizardPins average email response time is 39 minutes, but the average response time via the company’s chatbot is only 16 seconds. This speedy communication has helped people stay more engaged with the WizardPins brand, especially with the number of D2C competitors on the market.

Offer a personalized experience

A chat marketing solution helps you tailor your brand experience to specific user needs.

After a chatbot connects with consumers, you can gain insights by analyzing the interactions. Customers may share chat responses that help you refine your product experience or solve a common issue that other buyers have.

You can also use chatbots to ask customers for instant feedback. Sending out polls and surveys via email can give you a wider audience scope, but putting the data from those polls and surveys together can take a lot of time. A chatbot can individually determine what a consumer is looking for—on the spot.

A one-on-one conversation can also connect a consumer more quickly to a product they want. For example, take the Levi’s Virtual Stylist chatbot. The denim brand uses Facebook Messenger to help consumers find the right size and fit for their needs.

By directly asking the user about their size and fit preferences, the chatbot automatically generates different product suggestions. It’s like having a conversation with an experienced retail expert—in the comfort of your own home.

Repackage existing content in new ways

Many brands have tons of content that’s been dormant for a long time. Chat marketing is a great way to infuse some new life into that content and to present it to users who will find it helpful.

One of the most straightforward methods of repackaging your existing content is by simply linking to content resources in a live chat. You likely have blog posts or e-books that are useful for consumers who are looking to dive deep into a particular product or industry topic. Make those resources available through chat so customers don’t have to exit the conversation and search on their own.

If you want to add even more value for users, try offering a product tour via chat. Instead of forcing a user to click through different pages of your website by themselves, set your chatbot to show your product’s key features using short video clips and images.

Another option is to offer to connect users to a live representative or a content resource that provides a breakdown of your product. This method requires a little more action on the user’s part, but it can be highly effective in getting them the information they need.

Make your brand more accessible

Many consumers see brands as faceless organizations that don’t necessarily care about them. This type of marketing can turn that around because it helps to humanize your brand and make it feel more relatable to consumers on an individual level.

Kick things off by creating a chatbot script that reflects your brand’s tone. If live reps are communicating via chat, train them to adopt your brand voice. A consistent, friendly style across all chats will help customers feel more connected to your brand.

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has a chatbot named Rose. This chatbot is completely in line with the hotel’s playful brand. Rose has a fun and sassy tone and style that reflects the youthful audience that the hotel primarily targets.

Make your chats more personal by giving your chatbot a human name. To make the conversational experience more enjoyable, add fun or insightful references to include while it interacts with consumers. The goal is to make the interaction feel as close to a human conversation as possible.

Set up a chat marketing solution today

Whether you’re using bots or live reps—or both—investing in chat marketing is a great way to keep consumers engaged with your brand. Start by investigating the channels where your primary audience spends most of its time and then deploy a chatbot or live reps to the platform(s) where you’re seeing the most overall engagement.