The real measure of any marketing form is interaction. In conventional forms of marketing, these interactions included faxes, phone calls, sales meetings, and more.
Source: Marketo
Today, with content marketing headlining online interactions, marketers have turned to measure user reviews, feedback, and more. This is not surprising considering a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) where 86% of CMO(s) and senior marketers pledged to own these interactions by mastering the end-to-end customer journey.
The obvious incentive behind this endeavor is improved engagement in a fiercely competitive marketplace where product superiority is simply not enough. For this reason, marketers are emphasizing on personalized experiences through contextual marketing to promote customer satisfaction and consequently prompt brand loyalty.
The importance of contextual marketing through personalization
Source: Groove
The leading cause to personalize your interactions with customers is simple: they want it. Time and again, a host of studies have proved that customers desire individual support and attention. Providing that can augment customer retention and, subsequently, boost their lifetime value as well.
However, up until recently, this experience was lost to customers who achingly longed for interpersonal experiences in the age of online shopping and pickup. Fortunately, contemporary advancements in technology have allowed retailers to manifest these experiences digitally.
At the foremost of these latest innovations that promote personalized marketing lies live chat. The prime example of contextual marketing, live chat, makes bi-directional or two-way personalization possible. Its appeal is conspicuous, as is its potential; customers get the chance to chat with you directly while they are thinking about purchasing from you, leading to 82% of them being more likely to convert than those who don’t.
There are a few reasons why two-way personalization is the future of marketing. Here, we will take a look at the top five reasons why your marketing strategy should revolve around it.
1. Provide proactive customer support
Interactive marketing through two-way conversations allows you to reach out to prospects at the right moment in their customer journey with the right context. For instance, consider a scenario where a prospect is ready to purchase a product/service but is confused over which one to buy after looking at your pricing page.
It is here that providing proactive support by initiating a conversation with the prospect can help you capitalize on their readiness to buy. With a tool like live chat, you can reach out to prospects through your website based on behavioral triggers such as:
- Whenever someone visits the “Pricing” page
- Whenever the duration spent on the “Pricing” page exceeds a certain duration
- Whenever there have been repeated visits to the “Pricing” page
Thinking about these situations beforehand can allow you to understand which pages intrigue prospects the most and tailor your chat replies accordingly. This can not only enable you to provide a satisfactory customer experience but also increase your conversions on these pages by 45%.
2. Improve lead generation
Personalized conversations with prospects can help you score them better and make the process of qualifying leads much easier. By conversing with prospects, you can gauge their interest levels and weed out cold prospects early on.
For instance, you can create an engaging quiz for visitors that contains lead qualifying questions and release it through live chat. The more lead qualifying questions there are, the more you can be assured that disinterested people will drop off, leaving you with a concentrated pool of hot prospects to focus your attention on.
Making the entire experience interactive ensures that you get the information you require without prospects getting disengaged. The key to this is to ask prospects for tiny snippets of data along their journey so that they don’t feel the urge to drop off even if they wish to purchase your product.
3. Speed up the customer journey
Interactive marketing through two-way conversations allows prospective buyers to instantaneously connect with support representatives when they are ready to purchase or whenever they are lacking information and need it. This dissemination of knowledge and ushering of the prospect throughout their journey considerably shortens the sales cycle and effectively promotes higher engagement.
Evidence of this phenomenon has been provided by a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review who found that firms that reached out to prospects within the first hour of their initial contact with the brand were 700% more likely to convert their leads. This practice also keeps leads from going cold by conversing with them continually.
An example of this is a visitor subscribing to your marketing newsletter by filling out an online form. With live chat, you can instantly initiate conversations with prospects once they complete the subscription form and have shown some degree of interest in a product.
4. Offer pertinent support through contextual data
Personalized conversations through a live chat with customers allow you to pull historical customer data from other channels to profile them and send them more targeted messages. Contextual data lets you read the pulse of the customer, along with their preferences, allowing you to provide more pertinent support as well.
Moreover, with the help of live chat, you can also gain insights from past live chat campaigns to understand lead behavior and tailor your response accordingly. This data can provide information about the most downloaded resources, the most successful types of conversations, among others so that you can utilize it to enhance the efficiency of future messaging and chats.
5. Promote sharing and virality
The biggest trump card of interactive marketing is its inherent affinity for social media virality. Think about it, prospects are already on a high because of the personalized attention they have been receiving, and asking them to share their experience can increase the number of people who hear about it, thus allowing you to generate more leads and enhance your RoI.
For instance, you can create a giveaway or a contest where participants have to share it to earn maximum points and then deploy it through live chat. This incentivization not only allows you to enhance the experience of your prospects but also gets you in front of thousands of potential customers just like that.
Conclusion
Over the better part of the last decade, customers have been lost to interpersonal experiences and the feeling of being treated individually. With interactive marketing, you can set yourself apart by offering customers the personal attention they so desire without spending a fortune on comprehensive marketing campaigns or sophisticated lead routing tools.
