CEO and cofounder of conversational marketing automation platform Spectrm.
Marketers need a new strategy for success because the old ways are no longer working.
The challenges to truly knowing, engaging with and retaining customers today are many. Changing customer preferences means channels that once produced results a few years ago are no longer doing so. Constant privacy regulations and updates make it harder to collect data on customers in traditional third-party ways. Not truly knowing your customers also makes it difficult to create personalized experiences for them.
Our March 2023 report found that 78% of customers are already messaging with brands on Facebook Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp—and they love it because today’s consumers value quick, direct communication.
Here’s more about the rise of direct communication tools in consumer engagement and how you can grow your one-to-one marketing efforts.
Modern Consumers Prefer Modern Engagement Channels
Brands that engage consumers on platforms they’re already comfortable with such as SMS, social media, voice assistants, video tools and direct messaging apps often see increased loyalty and satisfaction. According to a Podium report, 90% of consumers prefer to interact with a brand via text message, and our report found that 86% of respondents felt more positive about that brand after the messaging experience. I believe this is because they get a fast, flexible and personalized experience that leads them to the products and services they’re really looking for.
Best Practices For Direct Communication With Consumers
If you’re looking to get started engaging and retaining customers where they are, here are a few places to start.
1. Grow Your Contact List By Adding More Entry Points
Too often, brands limit themselves by only having a chatbot on their website or a “send message” button on their social media profile—meaning customers have to come to them to engage. Instead, embrace more proactive ways to meet customers and invite them into a conversation.
Because a customer’s reaction is sent as a message, connect a chatbot that can reply to your Instagram Stories. Offer a discount in order to incentivize using direct messaging to connect. Use paid advertising, but add “click to message” prompts that invite customers into a chat. You can even print a QR code on your products, inviting consumers to “scan to message.”
2. Automate For Quicker Responses That Make Better Experiences
Customers like messaging with a brand because it’s fast and convenient. In order to truly make messaging fast and responsive at scale, look to automation. Not only can chatbots reply immediately and guide customers through a conversation, but automation also allows brands to scale conversations without needing humans, allowing them to always be on.
With today’s conversational AI innovations, automated chatbots can have responsive conversations with customers and guide them to take actions that are valuable to your business. Marketers can also use chatbots to test different conversations, learn how they all flow and then feed those conversations back into the chatbot to better serve customers.
3. Ask For Data And Use It To Personalize
As challenges to data collection limits and regulations grow, one-to-one messaging can allow customers and brands to interact directly so that any information you gather from them is yours to keep. We found that 88% of consumers said they would communicate their preferences in a privacy-safe way directly to a brand in order to receive a more personalized experience.
Use that zero- and first-party data to create personalized and relevant experiences, and then retarget them with offers that fit their interests. An Infosys report found that 78% of customers would be more likely to make purchases with a brand if their offers were targeted to their interests. Providing personalization can increase customer affinity, loyalty and the willingness to purchase.
4. Build Ongoing Relationships With Customers
Don’t just stop at one interaction. By interacting with your customers on various platforms, your brand can appear alongside messages from their friends and family—which also appear in their notifications and on their lock screen.
Because you’ve learned about their preferences through previous chats, you can send personalized offers, products you think they’d like and other information that might be interesting to them. You can even automate notification campaigns to drive repeat purchases or to upsell or cross-sell to them. It’s like email marketing or SMS, but it’s more powerful because of the interactive two-way format it offers.
New Direct Communication For A New Day
Marketers need a new strategy for success, and they can find that success—as well as increased brand affinity, more purchases and great retention—in modern engagement channels with customers.
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