The ideal customer lifecycle consists of six key stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Activation
- Retention
- Referral
Your goal is to inspire as many customers as possible to reach the final two stages, and to keep them coming back for more.
But as you know, this can be a pretty tall order.
Without proper support from your team at each stage of the lifecycle, your customers’ progress will likely stagnate. In turn, their lifespan with your company will come to an abrupt and premature ending.
To be sure, there are many ways to onboard and retain your customers (and keep them from churning). Today, we’ll focus on one method that has proven to be incredibly effective over time—and has recently become a hot topic throughout the marketing world:
Conversational marketing.
What is Conversational Marketing, and Why is it So Effective?
Conversational marketing refers to the process of engaging with and marketing to your customers via one-to-one conversations in real time (or near real time).
Though the term “conversational marketing” is relatively new, the concept certainly isn’t. Chances are, your marketing, sales, service, and support teams already engage conversationally with individual customers for a variety of reasons.
Traditionally, these conversations have taken place via a number of channels:
- In-person meetings
- Phone calls
- Text messages
In recent years, technology has paved the way for conversational marketing to play out via live chat and automated chatbot, as well.
But regardless of the medium, conversational marketing is about reaching your individual customers at various moments in their lifecycle to learn more about their needs—and to deliver value based on those needs.
Which is exactly what the modern consumer looks for in the brands they do business with. In fact, 82% of consumers expect an immediate response to their questions, comments, and concerns. Moreover, 66% of consumers cite personable, one-to-one engagements as a key factor when describing a positive brand experience.
In using conversational marketing to cater to your customers’ needs and expectations at each stage of their lifecycle, your team will experience a number of benefits:
- A potential 50% reduction in customer acquisition costs
- A 10-30% improvement in marketing campaign effectiveness
- An increase in overall revenues of up to 15%
With that in mind, let’s now take a look at how you can implement conversational marketing at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Conversational Marketing at the Awareness Stage
At the Awareness stage of the customer lifecycle, an individual recognizes that they have a problem in need of fixing—and begins searching for a solution.
Your first order of business here is to get your brand on their radar and give them a sneak peek at the value you can offer them.
In many cases, this means joining a conversation that your target audience has already started. For example, you might decide to reply to a potential customer’s question on Reddit, Quora, or a more niche forum or message board.
You could also start multiple conversations by posting about your brand’s products or services on such a forum—and then keep the conversation going with people who reply.
Once an interested prospect has been made aware of your brand, they’ll likely check out your own online hubs, such as your website and social media pages. Here, you’ll want to use conversational marketing to get them more actively engaged in their initial experience with your brand—and keep them moving forward in their buyer’s journey.
This is where on-site and social media live chat and chatbots come into play.
For example, you can trigger your chatbot to reach out to those who like or engage with your Facebook page to gather more information about their needs and provide more information about your services:
Or, you might simply offer some initial assistance to newcomers as needed:
By jumping into a conversation with your new leads as they check out your site and other channels, you’ll focus their attention on the solutions you can offer right from the get-go.
Conversational Marketing Leading Up to Conversion
Once a new prospect has been made aware of and actively engaged with your brand, your next goal will be to get them to make the relationship “official.”
This could mean:
- Signing up for your mailing list
- Providing you with more specific information regarding their needs
- Registering for a free demo/trial version of your product or service
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in brands using conversational landing pages for these purposes. This technology melds landing pages and chatbots into a single website feature—allowing prospects to take the above steps in a more customer-friendly way than, say, filling out templated forms.
Similarly, you can use your on-site chatbot to prequalify prospects and schedule appointments for person-to-person meetings and demos.
This more personable and user-friendly way of generating conversions is incredibly effective: Using the above approach, SalesRabbit saw a 40% increase in the number of demos booked.
In using chatbots to automatically generate conversions, you’ll also equip your sales team to dive into a more focused conversation with those who move on to the next stage of the customer lifecycle.
Conversational Marketing Leading Up to a Purchase
From a bird’s-eye view, your sales team’s prime goal is pretty simple:
Convert prospective customers into paying customers.
More specifically, their goal is to get potential customers to spend as much money as they’re comfortable spending—while providing them with as much value as possible.
Here too, conversational marketing is a highly effective way to accomplish each of these goals.
For starters, you can use your chatbot or live chat tools to deliver information to your prospective customers based on their specific needs. You might simply answer their quick questions directly within the conversation, or you can use the conversation to point them toward more in-depth content relating to their issues. In either case, it will help your prospect further qualify your solution as the one for them.
Note that in the above example, the chatbot is programmed to connect the potential customer to Peloton’s sales team to make the sale. While a chatbot can effectively help consumers begin the purchasing process, 55% of consumers prefer to speak with a human sales rep when sealing the deal.
Of course, once the sales team gets involved, it’s a matter of diving even deeper into the individual’s needs to deliver the most appropriate products and offers possible. This may involve upselling, cross-selling, or even down-selling in order to provide exactly what the prospect is looking for.
When it comes to conversational marketing and sales, authenticity is key. Though it is important to have a basic structure in place for how these conversations will go, it’s essential that they don’t feel scripted.
Focus on having a mutually beneficial conversation with your prospects, and they’ll likely be more than happy to trust your company with their hard-earned cash.
Conversational Marketing at the Activation and Retention Stages
Once a customer has made a purchase, you’ll need to ensure they derive value from the products or services you’re providing.
You’ll also need to help them build good habits surrounding your products or services, and your overall brand. This may mean getting them to use your products consistently, or it may mean inspiring them to make regular repeat purchases from your company.
Achieving (and keeping) new customer activation is all about reaching out at just the right time with pertinent content, tips, and offers.
This may mean reaching out:
- After a certain period of time has elapsed post-purchase
- After the customer takes a specific action
- Once they’ve reached a defined milestone
- If they’ve been inactive for an extended period of time
In each of these cases, engaging in conversation with your newly converted customers is key to keeping them active.
Since you’ll likely have a number of ways to get in touch with your customers at this point, you have just as many options for engaging with them.
you might even decide to text your customers with upcoming deals, product recommendations, and more:
Note the difference between these examples and a more templated email drip campaign. While the latter is clearly more promotional and somewhat salesy in nature, the former are all about the conversation—and delivering value to the customer in order to keep them engaged.
Conversational Marketing to Generate Referrals
Referral marketing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to generate new leads.
As you can probably guess by now, you absolutely can—and should—be using conversational marketing to generate referrals from your satisfied customers.
There are a number of ways to approach this.
You might, for example, use triggered chatbot messages to solicit referrals right after your customer’s first purchase: