Chatbots may not sound like an obvious asset for a marketing operation at first blush. When most people think of chatbots, they tend to think of the clumsy chat feature that pops up on a website sometimes when they have a question.
Sure, these kinds of tools may be useful for answering simple questions, but are they sophisticated enough to meaningfully support marketing operations that often require carefully crafted messages and polished presentations?
Of course! When it comes to conversational AI more broadly, there are several ways in which this suite of technologies can be a great asset to any marketing operation.
Freeing Up Resources
As with virtually any corporate function, conversational AI is a great asset to marketing operations as it allows computers to perform some of the low skill but traditionally time-consuming work that previously required a human’s involvement.
Any department in any company can benefit from freeing up resources, particularly in the current labor market. Allowing tools like conversational AI to tackle time-consuming low-hanging, repetitive tasks lets the humans focus on more mission-critical and complex analytical work.
Supporting Client and Prospect Communication
Just as conversational AI has been extremely useful in the customer service space, this technology can similarly be used to field questions and feedback from a company’s target market. Rather than having human marketing team members spending their days fielding calls (or answering text chats, etc.) in response to advertising campaigns or direct marketing efforts, conversational AI programs can take on that workload. Conversational AI can even be interfaced with other applications to efficiently and accurately record and save customer insights.
In addition to passively fielding outreach from potential customers, conversational AI can be very effective at initiating those conversations. This can involve automated push notifications letting prospective customers know about upcoming sales or new product features, for example. Active customer engagement is often key to customer retention, and it often simply isn’t economical in situations where individual customers don’t contribute sufficient revenue to support human employees maintaining active outreach.
Fighting Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment—when prospective customers abandon a planned online purchase at the last stage—is understandably frustrating to businesses. It’s hard to move prospects through each level of a sales funnel, with each stage of the marketing and sales process seeing increased consumer attrition. When a potential customer makes it to the very end of this funnel and then fails to follow through to the actual purchase, it can be maddening.
But conversational AI can help fight shopping cart abandonment by doing something as simple as a pop- up chat message asking the prospect if they’re having any issues in the event they don’t complete a purchase within a certain amount of time or offering additional discounts for seemingly reluctant buyers.
Market Analysis
We as humans can learn a lot from talking to a potential customer. We might even be able to learn a bit about the broader market if we talk to enough of those potential customers. Now imagine how much data and how many insights a conversational AI program can generate based on thousands and thousands (potentially far more) with customers, potential customers, former customers, and others!
This information can be used to gauge current customer sentiment as well as shifts in that sentiment. It can also be used to learn about common questions and issues customers may be having, information the humans on the team can use to strategize on improvements to the customer experience.
Personalization
The ability to learn about those who interact with it and the capacity to communicate with those people makes conversational AI a powerful tool for personalization in marketing efforts. This could involve event-based email marketing that triggers targeted ads when potential customers make certain online purchases or download certain content, for example, or it could involve social media interaction in real- time as consumers interact with the brand.
Conversational AI can be a great asset to marketing departments for a variety of reasons. The potential to scale up the ability to communicate with and learn from potential and current customers can be extraordinarily powerful when used effectively.
Ready to learn more? Get in touch to learn more about NITCO’s offerings to boost your marketing efforts through conversational AI.