Customers are bombarded with numerous marketing and sales messages every single day. But not all messages grab the attention of the audience nor do they have a good success rate. This is where contextual marketing becomes important. Contextual marketing refers to offering potential leads or customers the opportunity to interact with you when they are engaging with your service or products on your website or mobile platforms. What is Chat Marketing and the Tools to Help You Get Started With. Chat marketing is one of the best examples of contextual marketing and is one of the quickest ways to engage with customers and convert potential leads into loyal customers.
What is Chat Marketing?
Chat marketing is an approach to acquiring and engaging customers using messaging software such as live chat, chatbots, and other messaging channels. What is Chat Marketing Tools. To put simply, it is the use of chat for brand communications with the customers. Chat marketing can take place in real-time on websites, messaging apps like Whatsapp/Apple Business Chat, and mobile apps. It helps you send personalized messages to your customers including product launches, discount offers, order updates, and product recommendations.
A recent study by Facebook revealed that customers are more likely to transact with a business that offers chat functionality on its website. Now, let’s dive deeper into chat marketing, its different types. and tools that help empower chat marketing.
Why Chat Marketing?
Real-time lead capturing and qualification
Live chat lets customers connect instantly with business representatives to gain access to information regarding its products or services. Responding faster to customers increases leads and also speeds up the sales cycle. The longer you make your customers wait, the closer you are to losing out on potential leads. Moreover, with Freshchat’s lead generation features, you can initiate conversations with window shoppers, through proactive messaging, bot flows, and automatic qualification to bring in new customers.
Resolves doubts and grievances instantly
Live chat enables customers to get connected with a support agent within seconds and gets their issues solved easily and quickly rather than having to wait on hold on phone support. Good live chat software provides you with customer data which prevents the customers from having to repeat their issues every time they reach out for support. What is Chat Marketing Tools?
Moreover, with chatbots, customers don’t have to search through your entire knowledge base to solve their queries.
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Marketing at the comfort of the customer
In a live chat, the customers are the ones in control of a chat conversation and it happens at their time and convenience. Customers can choose to engage extensively before buying, which means, you are likely to have a clear and informed customer when using chat. Also, live chat provides you with the opportunity to interact with your customers at the right moment leading to a higher chance of a conversion. What is Chat Marketing Tools? For example, if a customer goes through your website and is stuck on your pricing plan page, you can proactively reach out to them and offer the information they are looking for. Thus you don’t lose out on a potential sale.
Enables highly personalized conversations
With personalization, you reach your customer’s chat inbox with the right messages and product recommendations tailored exclusively for them. This helps build long-term relationships with your customers. You can constantly learn from your customer data and keep improving your chats and messages. At the same time, you will also be able to maintain customer context due to previous chat history.
Types of Chat Marketing
1. Live chat marketing
Live chat marketing is marketing products and services to a customer in real-time. With live chat marketing, you can send tailored or personalized messages to your customers based on their previous interactions or search intent. What is Chat Marketing Tools? Personalized live chat messages can be triggered to pop up when a customer visits a certain page to hook their attention. This opens up opportunities to upsell and also introduce new products or services.
2. Chatbot Marketing
Chatbot marketing makes use of artificial intelligence to generate leads and engage customers. This method is commonly referred to as conversational marketing, as the chatbot initiates the conversation with prospective customers who are visiting websites. Powered with the right conversational bot flows, they can resolve customer issues without human intervention. Chatbot marketing can be highly segmented to target particular groups of customers who engage in similar activities on a website. This is easily done with chatbot which segments and sends targeted and personalized messages to the customers thus replacing cold-selling with intent-based selling.
3. WhatsApp Marketing
Mobile WhatsApp with over 1.5 billion active users across the world, is evolving to be one of the best marketing tools for many businesses. Marketing with WhatsApp takes place on the app on mobile devices and it makes it very easy to reach out to customers. Businesses use Whatsapp Business as a way to communicate with those interested in their brands to share updates and engaging content. Since people use messaging apps like WhatsApp for everyday communications, they boast a very high engagement rate. You can use your social media or websites as an entry point for Whatsapp Conversation and boost your response rates by 50%.
Check out our Whatsapp marketing guide to know more about how you can market on this platform.
4. Facebook Messenger
Messenger of Facebook is another popular messaging app with over 1.3 billion users. This facebook Messenger lets small and big businesses alike engage with over a billion users. Facebook also allows advertisers to add links to their messenger to ease the flow of conversations. You can connect and manage multiple Facebook business pages from a single interface. It also lets you send FAQs and canned messages straight to the customer’s messenger inbox. Furthermore, you can track conversations that happen through Facebook messenger.
5. Apple Business Chat
Apple’s iMessenger enables businesses to reach out to billions of Apple users through text and rich media. Apple has also integrated tools in its business chat to deliver more enhanced branded experiences through iMessage. With interactive messages, you can deliver a rich chat experience to your customers. The list and time picker lets customers choose the products and also schedule appointments respectively right from iMessage. Customers can also easily and securely pay with Apple Pay and place their orders and get their updates.
Chat Tools for Marketing
To effectively market your products and services on chat, it’s important to have features that can enable your reps to sell. Here are the key features to have on hand for chat marketing.
#1. Customizable chat widget
Firstly, the chat widget is the window into your business. It allows visitors on your website to have real-time conversations with the support or sales representatives. Chat widgets also allow businesses to reach out to customers with proactive messages. You can also share multimedia messages to enhance the customer experience.
Though the chat button looks like an image block or a bubble, its appearance has to match your style of branding to attract customers. Chat Marketing Tools, you can personalize your chat widget to match your brand’s image. Also, to get the best out of customizable chat widgets, and to increase customer engagement, use language that would resonate with your customers.
#2. Proactive triggered messaging
Secondly, chat triggers are crucial to turning online window shoppers into paying customers. With proactive messages, you can help your customers on their purchase customer journey. You can run impactful campaigns to reach out to highly qualified prospects with offers and deals that are guaranteed to grab their attention. The right use of proactive messages increases engagement with customers and sending relevant messages will help build long-term relationships with your customers. Freshchat lets you define rules that trigger messages based on conditions like page visits, cart value and user priorities. You can also preview your message before you hit send to get a glimpse of how your message would look.
#3. Intuitive chatbot builder
Thirdly, the bot you build is critical to your chat marketing strategy. Look for customizable bots that automate routine conversations with the help of AI. With Freddy chatbot builder, you can easily build a bot and get it up and running within seconds. Chat Marketing Tools. It is capable of resolving customer issues without agent intervention, executing actions based on triggers, and can also update customer data automatically. Powered with a no-code GUI builder, you can also set up conditional or conversational flows to equip your bots to send the right resolution to the customers or even transfer to agents in case the bot can’t resolve.
#4. Frictionless omnichannel capabilities
Fourthly, no matter where a customer reaches out to you, be it on Facebook or your website, you need to be able to see their entire history automatically. Chat Marketing Tools. You can reach out to customers on the different apps they use from a single and unified platform. Right from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp to Line and mobile messaging, it lets you engage with your customers on the platform they love while operating a single window. Also, it lets you view all your customer messages from a single window. It saves you from having to switch tabs for different tabs and lets you handle multiple conversations at the same time.
#5. Seamless app integrations
Fifly, you can make your chat marketing even more powerful with the right app integrations. For example, if you want to enable visitors to schedule meetings with your business through chat, use a chat provider that integrates with a tool like Calendly. These make the process very smooth and hassle-free. With Freshchat Marketplace, you can easily integrate various third-party apps including bots, CRM and marketing software, e-commerce, issue tracking, automation and payment apps and much more. Chat Marketing Tools. So the ability to manage your integrations from a single interface will make your workflow seamless and also increase employee productivity thus saving their effort and time working on different software.
