One of the biggest pain points of small to medium businesses is the ability to nurture potential customers the moment they land on their website.

But how do you ensure that your potential “leads” have gotten all the information they wanted from your landing page?

Even some of the best-designed landing page will cause questions in some cases. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you have the answers ready.

There is actually a way to answer those questions on the spot, without going back and forth with email communication that will most likely get dropped or lost in their cluttered inbox.

Here is where technology meets the sales world with Conversational Marketing Platforms (aka CMPs).

Let’s take a look at what a CMP is and what are the benefits of using one for your business.

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What is a Conversational Marketing Platform?

A conversational marketing platform is a suite of tools primarily in the form of a chatbot. This appears in a non-invasive box that’s embedded in your website.

It helps your company to nurture leads by providing a one-to-one customer experience.

Besides that, you can also use it as an embedded customer service tool where your current customers can ask questions and receive answers to their issues in real-time.

As a small business, you surely understand the importance of providing pristine customer service.

Bonus: You can include your use of a CMP as a bullet point in your next email outreach.

What are the Benefits of Using a Conversational App on Your Website?

The benefits that your business will harvest from using a conversational marketing platform are immense.

This is especially true if you are a small to medium enterprise that strives to grow.

After all, growing a small business is every business owners dream, right?

And by investing in such a marketing platform, you should expect to see a rise in qualified leads coming your way.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the benefits:

1. Real-time Communicative Experience

CMPs (Conversational Marketing Platforms) allows you to deliver a more pleasant experience to your potential customers.

As well as interacting with them in real-time, this will allow you to amplify the experience your potential customers receive from your end.

To sum up, the one-on-one aspect accompanied by real-time replies will help you to learn more about your customers and eventually close more deals!

2. Provide a Personalised Touch To Your Conversation

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You will be able to provide a custom-tailored experience to your customer.

This will allow you to communicate personalised messages to potential customers while they are browsing specific web pages on your website.

For example, a customer is browsing through a list of products. With the aid of your chatbot, you will be able to send him or her information regarding those products.

It will also provide your potential customers with alternative options similar to an upsell email.

Bonus: Providing alternative options will enhance your odds of your customers making a purchase!

While the bot runs on auto-pilot, your customer might have some questions regarding your products.

And if they ask a specific question that you have not pre-answered in the chat app, your sales representatives can quickly be notified and join the chat to answer that particular question.

3. Organising Your Calls

With the use of a conversational marketing platform, organising your calls with potential customers will feel like a breeze.

Most conversational marketing platforms allow you to integrate them with various calendars like Google Calendar, where your prospects can book a meeting directly through the live chat.

This is particularly helpful when you are offline!

Which makes it a great choice for a small business that is starting to receive a lot of traction.

Opting in for a chatbot will allow you to focus on booking more calls with your prospects as well as providing the best customer experience to your existing ones.

4. The Ultimate Customer Support Tool

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That leads us to the fourth benefit conversational marketing platforms are not only used to nurture potential customer but also can be used to serve your current customer with real-time support.

That’s something your customer will definitely appreciate and can be one of your strongest USPs (Unique Selling Points) when pitching to new prospects as well!

5. Partner Your CMP With An Email Service Provider (ESP)

Additionally, with the use of a CMP, you can automatically send customer or lead email addresses to an email marketing software like Moosend.

This will allow you to keep track of your potential leads much easier and also sent them various promotional drip campaigns to engage with them even further.

Some technical knowledge might be required to integrate your CMP with the ESP of your choice.

Bonus: A great practice is to look through the app integrations the CMP you are researching currently has.

A common integration most SaaS products have is Zapier, which allows you to send data from one application to another.

Zapier allows you to connect your ESP with the CMP of your choice even if they do not have a direct integration.

Let’s take a look at some of the most established CMPs and all-in-one customer service software services to kickstart your research.

3 Conversational Marketing Platforms To Look For

1. Drift

Price: Standard Plan: $50/month, Pro Plan: $500/month, Company Plan: $1,500/month and Enterprise Plan: $5,000/month. See all pricing detail here.

Free trial: FREE forever plan with limited features.

Description: Drift is a newcomer to the industry although it has managed to quickly accumulate a huge market share, according to Datanyze.

It is a messaging software application that assists marketing and sales teams to turn inbound leads into paying customers. It also provides support to existing customers.

Let’s take a look at what features Drift offers:

• Instantly book meetings through the chat
• Use chatbots to answer common questions and engage with more customers
• Uncover intel from anonymous traffic (using Clearbit)

2. Intercom

Price: Essential Plan: $136/month, Pro Plan: $202/month, Premium Plan: You need to contact them for a quote. See all pricing detail here.

Free trial: Yes, a 14-day trial where you can test all their platform features.

Description: Intercom is one of the most popular platforms. Some of the large enterprises that use Intercom’s solutions are  Sotheby’s and Shopify Plus.

Intercom offers a diverse range of features depending on what your company is looking for.

Their features are built around the pillars of Marketing, Sales and Support.

Let’s take a quick look at the features provided:

• Highly customised Business Messenger with integrated apps
• Easily manage your sales funnel by assigning leads to specific sales reps all in one place
• Send highly customisable messages to new and returning customers
• Create a dedicated Help Center for your users

3. LiveAgent by SalesForce 

Price: Ticket Plan: $9/agent/month does not include live chat, Ticket+Chat Plan: $29/agent/month and All-Inclusive Plan: $39/agent/month. See all pricing detail here.

Free trial: Yes, a 14-day trial period with all features available.

Description: LiveAgent is a multifaceted customer service software that allows you to organise the success and issues of your customers with ease through a variety of channels.

Not only through live chat but also through email and social media.

Overall, LiveAgent cannot be described as a dedicated conversation marketing platform, although it offers the LiveChat aspect.

Features:

• Ticket Management System
• Live Chat
• Social Media Brand Monitoring
• Call Center Functionality

In addition to the above, LiveAgent offers a diverse range of features for larger enterprises. A complete list of features and how they can be applied to your business can be found here.

Conclusion

It is evident that due to the technologically advanced era that we are currently living, businesses strive to find ways to create a more personalised experience for their current and new customers.

That allows your business to build and increase the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each customer. This plays a major role in the success and growth of your business.

That’s it from me. Happy chatting with your new customers!

 

Nick is a Growth Marketer working for Moosend, an email marketing software company. When he is not writing articles, you’ll find him running his SEO magic site-wide, or making friends from blogs and companies discussing the expert power of Email Marketing. You can tweet him @nikos_di

 

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