Offering a high-quality customer experience can lower the cost of serving customers by up to 33%. 77% of consumers say inefficient customer experiences detract from their quality of life. With the surge of online shopping and digital experiences, consumers are looking for instant answers, and those present at the right time with the right solution gain an advantage. Customers are getting used to such a degree of instant gratification and customization that failure to give them what they’re looking for when looking for it can create an unhealthy dent for an enterprise. Hence, Conversational AI in Marketing is becoming the trend.

What is Conversational AI in Marketing?

Marketing needs a constant inflow of customer behavior intelligence to craft successful campaigns. The Drift 2021 State of Conversational Marketing report found that 58% of B2B professionals adopted a Conversational Marketing solution in response to COVID.

Conversational AI is based on the art and science of customer behavior, allowing a higher level of contextual targeting and eliminating human bias. Conversational AI applied in Marketing effectively results in intelligent automation of repetitive tasks and behavioral-based targeting that helps achieve marketing goals faster and more efficiently—for example, catering to real-time website visitors, responding to a user who downloaded a whitepaper, etc., for lead generation and nurturing. Based on the visitor’s previous interactions, Conversational AI provides personalized customer engagement. It is an instant method of nurturing and converting leads through a smooth and efficient experience.

Conversational AI Marketing Use Cases

In this post, we delve into areas that make the most sense for those who are looking to start adopting Conversational AI for their marketing:

Lead Generation: With customers spending time outside typical business hours looking for solutions to their problems, deploying a Conversational AI tool is reasonable. It can respond and engage a customer any time, any day. Whether it’s an accidental visitor to your website or a curious mind who wants more information, or even a returning visitor, this tool can address and nurture the visitors with a well-tailored response that too in a natural human-like manner.

Conversational AI supports lead generation and the entire customer support journey by creating awareness, educating visitors on different channels, and influencing their decision-making process. It can also gather data while performing these functions to help understand customers better and enhance the customer experience.

Lead qualification: Apart from gathering leads, Conversational AI can also qualify these leads. Faster. It is an efficient way for a business to engage customers from the word go, answering their questions and solving their problems in real-time. It can even hand over a conversation to a human at the right point in a conversation. It understands what stage of the buyer journey a lead is, enabling the business to target them better. Because of its ability to handle enormous amounts of discussions, it can build a healthy pipeline of qualified leads.

Product recommendation: Conversational AI assistance takes the guessing away when suggesting a product or service to a potential customer. These suggestions are driven by deep learning of the customer’s preferences and online behavior. Using the insights from conversations with thousands of customers helps a business keep up with the constant changes in demands and requirements, which can take years if done manually. Tactics like reminders on the last item checked or a discount running on a favorite product can help a business earn that growing need for personalization and quick shopping. And then there are some unobvious advantages such as managing an inventory better with improved accuracy of which products are in demand.

Feedback and survey: The age of feedback forms and calls for surveys is long gone. But the value of ensuring a constant flow of customer feedback remains one of the top priorities for companies. This is why they need Conversational AI to gather crucial product/service inputs and business insights while carrying out a general conversation with a customer. Conversational AI can record customer feedback at every point of the buyer journey without asking customers to fill in forms when dealing with humongous amounts of data every day. It can also learn from subtle areas like empathy, sentiment, voice volume, etc., and help create customized experiences your customers want. Easy breezy!

How to effectively use these ideas in your Marketing Campaigns

Have clear goals set. By identifying areas where you will get the best ROI and laying out KPIs, you can see how beneficial conversational AI in Marketing can be. A critical step that can make or mar your adoption of conversational AI is selecting a tool. Choose one that can fill in the gaps you have identified and scale with your requirements.

According to Martech Series, preference for email as a B2B communications channel fell by 26% between 2020 and 2021. The choice for live chat has increased by 35.5% year-over-year. It suggests that B2B buyers will increasingly expect communication through live digital channels rather than static ones.

There are a bunch of immediate gains from conversational AI in marketing efforts, such as risk reduction, increased speed, greater customer satisfaction, increased revenue, etc. Apart from the ones that can be measured in terms of numbers or quantity, there are plenty more qualitative. For instance, the level of personalization during a conversation with a customer leads to a better relationship. A business can adopt a hybrid model where its conversational AI assistant can address simple requests. At the same time, the human team caters to the more complicated scenarios and gives your customers the best of both worlds.