If you’re an e-commerce business owner, then you may have come across a lot of challenges in the industry. Not only is it hard to make yourself stand out amongst the numerous other e-commerce businesses vying for your target market’s attention, but it can be a challenge to market your business.

With that said, there are many marketing techniques that you can try for your own e-commerce business that can help you generate leads. However, the only problem is that you have to sift through a lot of them to find out which one will work for your business.

On that note, if you’re looking for a new marketing trick or principle that you want to try out that is sure to help you generate more leads, then why not try conversational marketing?

Before we move on, let’s first find out what conversational marketing actually is.

What is conversational marketing?

With the continuing rise of platforms, such as social media, that enable people to communicate with friends and family all over the world, it has become easier to create conversations between businesses and their customers without it being one-sided.

Due to this reason, there has been a growth in a particular kind of marketing style that has made it easier to connect with your target audience directly. Its name is conversational marketing.

With conversational marketing, you can converse with customers and figure out straight from them what they want from your brand. There are many means with which you can do this and many channels to choose from. No matter what, though, it helps develop customer loyalty and can even influence revenue.

Why implement a conversational marketing strategy?

Back in the day, when brands wanted to market themselves, often it’s a one-sided deal, or they hear feedback from their customer base after a long while.

It can be inefficient, especially in a fast-paced world where we live in today.

With that said, if you implement a conversational marketing strategy, it ensures that you get your needed responses as soon as possible. This efficiency also goes back to the clients who want to receive an answer just as fast as you would want to. Aside from that, it also makes the marketing effort much more personal for your customer base, which a lot will appreciate.

Nowadays, people don’t want to feel the commercialized way that businesses used to communicate. Now, they want everything to feel personal and much more human.

Another reason why you should implement conversational marketing is because of all the results that it can give you and your e-commerce business. Not only can it create a strong relationship with your customers, but it can also have a positive influence on your e-commerce business’s conversion rates.

Steps to generate leads using conversational marketing

Now that you know the how’s and the why’s behind conversational marketing, it’s time to find out how you can do this yourself for your e-commerce business.

The steps to generate leads using conversational marketing can be summarized into three: Capture, Qualify and Connect.

Capture

The first step you need to take is to Capture the leads first to start off.

There are many ways you can capture leads. That first email you send in your email marketing campaign is a great example. You can create a set of template for your first emails and then personalize it the further down the sales funnel you go.

Another way to automate the process of capturing your new leads is by setting up a chatbot on your social media platforms or even on your website. It is a best practice that you set up a chatbot in the areas of your website that have high-traffic so that you can reach more people.

Not only will you have the ability to capture leads, but you’ll also be able to do it at an efficient way without having to spend a majority of your time just crafting the first message for each potential lead.

Qualify

Once you’ve got your new leads, it is essential to qualify them to know if they’re genuinely the right customer for your business. Not only is this step necessary for your business, but it is also crucial for your customer to know if you can provide the service or product that they need.

Chatbots can help you reduce a significant amount of time and effort from having to identify whether or not a lead indeed is qualified. You need only to craft the right script and response for your chatbot so that it can do its job smoothly.

If you’re able to qualify your leads, then you are more able to service them right, and you’ll be able to get them to move forward in the sales funnel faster than you would with an unqualified lead.

Connect

Finally, once you’ve got your leads and narrowed them down to the right people, it’s now time for you to start to connect with them.

Automated responses aren’t as good as a real person sitting on the other end of the line, so this is the time to get your conversational marketing skills going.

Make sure that your sales representative is trained in customer service if you have one so that you can create the best experience for your customers. Moreover, this is to ensure that your sales rep can skillfully handle the conversation.

Wrap up

As an e-commerce business, you will rely a lot on your marketing to get you the right customers from the wide, wide world of the Internet. With conversational marketing, you will make it much easier and faster for yourself to get leads that end up transacting with your business in the end.