5 Conversational Marketing Best Practices To Convert Your Target Audience

In a nutshell: Learn the 5 conversational marketing best practices to convert your target audience faster. Avoid messaging fatigue and increase your return on ad spend.

Use conversational marketing best practices to avoid messaging fatigue and improve conversion rates.

Our last article explained why conversational marketing helps you beat ad fatigue and convert more customers and showed that B2C messaging is quickly emerging as the next big marketing channel. As messaging matures, it’s important to heed the lessons of previous channels.

Irrelevant display ad marketing led to banner blindness. Excessive email marketing led to inboxes filled with unread spam. Paid social marketing led to feeds crowded with ads. When marketing channels are abused, ad fatigue develops, customers ignore you and your campaign performance plummets.

The uniquely personal nature of messaging compared to other marketing channels makes it crucial to focus on quality over quantity. Your brand now lives alongside your customer’s most intimate relationships.

Engaging your target audience in direct 1:1 conversations offers you the opportunity to collect declared data and personalize your customer journey at scale. Do it right and you’ll push customers through your funnel faster than any other channel. Do it wrong and you’ll push your customers straight out the door.

Follow these 5 conversational marketing best practices to avoid messaging fatigue, improve your conversion rates and offer your customers an experience they love.

1. Engage your customers creatively.

Conversational marketing offers you a rich and interactive media canvas. Use that richness to delight your customers with fun and engaging conversations right from the start.

Don’t use language that’s overly formal. Speak like a friend, not a business. Be emotional and invite your customer to respond. Always mix up your media formats.

Quick tips for creatively engaging customers on messaging apps.

• Emojis and GIFs are a key part of your conversational toolkit.
• Carousels are visually appealing ways to navigate product categories or information.
• Quick replies engage your customer and help you funnel them to relevant content.
• CTAs should be both fun and clear.

Together all these media types build your brand personality and give your customer the interactive, immersive experience that drives them to action. Watch how Browns generated 5x conversions at 45% higher AOV vs on-site using creative messaging.

2. Respond to your customers personally.

Conversational marketing builds a personal relationship between your brand and your customers. You just grabbed their attention. Don’t abuse it. Use it to give them a personalized brand experience they love.

Call them by their name. Invite them to respond to your questions with quick replies. Respond with engaging content that acknowledges their particular choice. People want to be understood. Not talked at.

Quick tips for personalizing customer journeys at scale.

• Use every opportunity to collect declared data about who they are to build your customer profile.
• Recommend products your customer actually wants based on those preferences.
• Follow up with highly personalized messages that speak to them as an individual.
• Your customer will respond to your brand taking the time to understand who they are by engaging with you more and more.

See how easily you can personalize conversations at scale with Spectrm’s conversational marketing platform.

3. Manage your customer’s expectations.

Conversational marketing automates messaging with your customers to streamline your funnel into a conversation. Manage expectations of what your bot is offering. Don’t trick them into thinking it’s human.

Humans can be judgmental. You’ll be amazed at how willing your customer is to answer your questions compared with talking to a human. That’s a huge asset if you make clear what each interaction will bring.

Quick tips for managing the expectations of your chatbot.

• Make it clear in your CTA or ad campaign that it will start a conversation with your bot.
• Use every part of message formats to communicate.
• Carousel images should be appealing, the CTA funny, the title clear and the description informative.
• Don’t present multiple choices and then respond with the same content.
• Check your conversation flow map.
• Confused by a customer query? React in a fun way and offer options in response to keep them engaged. Use multiple fallbacks to make it feel natural.

See tools our customers use to better manage expectations of their bot and drive results.

4. Optimize your customer journey.

Conversational marketing fuels increasing returns on ad spend as you learn more about your customer journey. Your conversion rates will improve over time if you optimize your conversation flow.

Don’t set it and forget it. Let your conversations evolve as you drive more traffic through your bot and see what your customers respond to. Analyze engagement at the audience, conversation and campaign level.

Track every step in your customer journey. Monitor engagement and drop-off rates. Change the order of your preference collection questions and compare the impact on conversions by checking your conversation version history.

Train your conversational AI to respond more and more accurately to customer queries. Every minor tweak you make helps optimize the entire experience to drive more conversions.

5. Leverage your customer’s input.

Conversational marketing empowers you to collect declared data from your customers. Leverage that data in conversations and across every touchpoint you have to improve your overall marketing strategy.

How much actionable customer data are you getting from your display and social campaigns? Unlock your expensive black box of Google and Facebook audience data into your new engine for growth.

All the declared data you collect from customers in conversations is yours to keep. Turn anonymous website visitors into real people. Turn those real people into detailed customer profiles. Then use that customer profile to recommend products that convert and improve your targeting.

Use your 1:1 relationship with customers to collect feedback and improve your messaging, your products and your marketing strategy.

Gather rich customer insights to improve your marketing strategy.

All the declared data you collect from customers in conversations is yours to keep. Turn anonymous website visitors into real people. Turn those real people into detailed customer profiles. Then use that customer profile to recommend products that convert and improve your targeting. Use your 1:1 relationship with customers to collect feedback and improve your messaging, your products and your marketing strategy.

Conversational marketing best practices are easy with the right tools and support.

Follow these 5 conversational marketing best practices and you’ll improve your conversion rates and avoid messaging fatigue. Always focus on the quality of the experience, not the quantity of messages you send. Sending too many irrelevant re-engagement messages is the fastest way to ruining the relationship you have an opportunity to build with your customers.

Does implementing these best practices feel daunting? It shouldn’t.

You don’t need in-house expertise. You don’t need to develop any technology yourself. You don’t even need to integrate a complex marketing stack.

Want to convert more of your target audience now? Here’s all you need:

1. The right conversational marketing platform to drive results.
2. An experienced customer success team to support your launch.
3. Desire to be a marketing trailblazer and scale your growth fast.

Start letting conversations drive your conversions. Your customers will get an experience they love. You’ll get the increasing returns on ad spend you’re looking for.