Conversational Selling: Take Personalization To the Next Level

Increase customer satisfaction and conversion with conversational marketing

Live chat and messaging apps have become an integral part of any omni-channel customer service strategy.

Customers value the ability to get answers when and where they want and companies are improving customer satisfaction and conversion rate thanks to the capability of providing real-time responses.

One study found that 38% of customers said they have made a purchase due to a good live chat session. Live chat assistance has also been noted for helping to decrease cart abandonment by up to 30%, which in turn lead to an increase in sales.

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The key to getting the most out of live chat or messaging apps is to deliver a personalized experience tailored to each customer with conversational selling.

One-to-one conversations: the most effective way to convert

Remember the good ol’ days, before lead generation forms and email marketing, when people made sales solely by talking to other people!

With the help of advanced marketing technologies, it’s now possible to have one-on-one conversations with a large number of prospects and customers simultaneously and deliver a highly personalized experience in a way that’s most convenient.

This is often called “conversational marketing” – a process of having real-time, one-on-one conversations to capture, qualify, and connect with your best leads anytime and anywhere.

How to optimize conversational marketing

At the heart of conversational selling is a customer-driven approach that focuses on one-on-one interactions.

With the aid of technology, marketers can scale up these personalized interactions such that one employee can manage multiple, concurrent one-to-one conversations.

Here are some characteristics of conversational marketing to leverage:

Real-time interactions and fast responses

Conversational marketing is effective because customers can get the assistance they need right away.

With the combination of chatbot and live agents, you can effectively provide customers with the most relevant information as quickly as possible.

Chatbots can be programmed to respond to specific questions while triaging more complex requests so that a live agent can step in to assist promptly.

Customer-centric engagements

You don’t convert customers only by collecting leads. You make sales when you engage prospects in a dialog to understand what they need and offer a solution.

Conversational selling is effective because it focuses on having a two-way conversation so that you can deliver the most relevant information or solution based on the context of the interactions.

Personalized conversations

These one-to-one conversations are contextual and informed by a customer’s past interactions with your brand.

Even if you’re talking to a lead for the first time, you can add a personal touch by getting insights from their browsing history, the page on which they’re initiating the contact, or their locations based on IP addresses.

Customer insights

You can glean customer insights and collect additional information to enrich existing customer profiles through conversational marketing.

For example, when you ask a customer if he wants to be notified when there’s news about a certain product category, you get information on the kind of items they’re interested in to inform your segmentation and marketing efforts.

The information gathered through these conversations can help you get a more in-depth understanding of your customers so that you can fine-tune your sales and marketing strategies.

The key to seamless customer experience

Conversational marketing helps deliver seamless customer experience and facilitates prospects’ progression down the purchasing path.

A 360-degree customer profile is the key to success for this marketing strategy.

This single customer view allows your team to deliver an outstanding purchasing experience based on all the interactions a customer has had with your brand so you can maximize the use of technologies such as chat and messaging apps to optimize your ROI.

This Week in Omnichannel (November 16, 2015)

Here’s what we’ve been reading this week:

omnichannelfill

Avocados From Mexico Is Turning Guacamole Addiction Into Consumer Data

A new piece from Ad Age explores how NectarOM partner Avocados From Mexico has used a blend of multiple channels, emerging technologies, and personalized marketing techniques to become the first truly omnichannel produce company. We’re extremely proud to work with them and can’t wait to be a part of whatever comes next.

The New Normal: How Native Advertising’s Changed in a Year

DigiDay assembled writers from marketing news outlets like Forbes, Gawker, Mic, and Time to discuss the ongoing evolution of native advertising. Some of the biggest developments they touch on: the actual growth of the industry (which has doubled in the past year), new ways of presenting ads that maximize audience engagement, and, most importantly, the rise of “off-platform” media such as Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat as ways for audiences to consume content.

3 Ways to Evaluate and Engage High-Value Customers

Your high-value customers (HVCs) are responsible for driving a disproportionately large share of your revenue – in some cases, up to 80% of the revenue can come from 20% of your most loyal customers. Given that, it’s in your best interest to keep these people happy. If you haven’t thought much about CRM in the past, this is a great place to start.

Teens spend an average of 9 hours a day with media, survey finds

Researchers report that American teens spend an average of 9 ours a day shifting between TV, browsing the Internet, and using a mobile phone. The sheer amount of screen time that young people are exposed to has huge consequences for omnichannel, and means that moving forward every brand should try to maximize their presence in the virtual media space.

We also enjoyed these pieces:

From teens to adults, everyone’s watching online video as much as TV.

Why one writer thinks you can’t win that Facebook fight.

Google and Amazon account for 57% of all online revenue.

Tech is eating media. Now what?

Snapchat Reaches 6 Billion Daily Videos Views, Tripling From 2 Billion In May

Check back next time for the latest developments in omnichannel! We’ll bring you news, facts, opinions, and infographics that will help you gain a broad perspective of the industry. Drop in, stick around, and subscribe to our newsletter – and who knows? You just might learn something.

3 Marketing Trends of 2014

Mobile Personalization

Marketing is just like any other tradition here in the United States: as time progresses it begins to change and adapt to new trends that emerge. In 2014, the marketing world has had a lot of new developments thanks to the innovations such as mobile apps, social media, big data breakthroughs, and other discoveries. As a result, there has been a noticeable shift in how marketers create their strategies to promote products and services. Today, we will discuss 3 of these new marketing trends that have emerged in 2014.

1. Don’t Just Personalize, Hyper-Personalize In 2013, personalization was the name of the marketing game. How was this accomplished exactly? By tracking spending habits and recording clicks while signed in to their website. Then the companies would take that information and use it to send personalized offers via email, text or through the website. Hyperpersonalization takes this one step further. By integrating various existing data sets such as personal information and social media data, companies are able to know more about their customers than just their spending data. For example, utilizing information from Susan’s Facebook page, a company might be able to learn that Susan is expecting a baby in a few months and to send her offers for baby clothes. Hyperpersonalization is like knowing what the customer wants before they actually want it

2. Measure Social Media ROI Accurately Measuring ROI from social media in the past has been anything but exact. Every company that has invested in social media has had a different method of measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts with varied results. In the past, companies measured their social media success by how much revenue it directly generated for them. While this may work for other marketing avenues, it may not necessarily work for social media. In 2014, measuring social media ROI has evolved from looking at revenue generated to the buzz that is created from the efforts put in. Creating buzz around a company will increase a company’s audience and engagement by increasing word of mouth; hence the word “viral”. Understanding how to optimize content to go viral is key in the success of social media implementation.

Mobile Personalization

3. Real Time Geographic Marketing Geographic marketing is not a new innovation. It has been around since the early days albeit in a more primitive fashion; for example, a large billboard perched above a building has an arrow which points down, indicating it is a restaurant to stop at while driving. Over the past few years email has been the primary source of geographic marketing by sending offers to customers within certain distances from companies. In 2014 this will be taken one step further. With the rise in mobile device usage, real-time geographic marketing will be employed by sending SMS messages or emails to customers’ mobile devices when they are certain distance from a company. So if I am in a mall looking for a gift, I might get an SMS on my phone alerting me that a clothing store in the same mall has a sale. That is the power and convenience or geographic marketing.

Marketing will always have a place in any business strategy because it is the most basic form of communicating with potential customers. The best way to look at is summed up in the expression: “The players haven’t changed, but the game has.” By staying on top of the newest developments one can expect to enjoy the benefits of being top of mind.

 

 

How to make Big Data personal with Segmentation

marketing personalizationWho says Big Data can’t be personalized?

Within the realms of marketing campaigns, generalization is not a word you want to embrace. Sending identical, generic mass emails to your entire customer base across the board  isn’t the route you want to take. This only leads to poor customer retention, customer dissatisfaction and your emails ending up in the virtual trash bin…unopened.

When you’ve got data, you need to leverage it in order to communicate relevant and targeted messages. The content within these emails need to be useful, have purpose and address the needs of your customers in real time.

In order to efficiently segment your data, you need to conduct an analysis based on existing data and decide the target groups you want to approach. Applying segmentation to  your data allows you to create email marketing campaigns that are relevant for each group.  Segmenting is also a key process that disperses information, products and offers to designated groups that’s specific to their needs and interests.

Segmentation can be based on many factors according to demographics, behavioral, lifecycle, occasions, social data, past purchase history, spending habits, age, gender, website activity, etc.  By segmenting all of this data, you’re identifying the various levels of your database and sending out cost-effecting email campaigns that are tailored to each group. Without segmenting data efficiently, it’s difficult to produce targeted information. Not to mention, it’s a waste of time when you’re sending out products & offers that are of no use to your customers.

Segmentation is typically based on the amount of data you have on individual customers and making the most of it. This can be obtained through social data, CRM, past purchase history, website activity, demographic, etc. It’s the process of dividing your customers into logical groups and tailoring emails targeting their interests, triggers, lifecycles, website behavior, and purchase history.  Nectar suite automatically segments customers based on lifetime value and engagement.

Nectar’s products allows your brand to hyper-personalize communications with the right offers and products in real time that’ll drive revenue.

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