The first course I took during quarantine was the Conversational Marketing certification from Drift. Ever since I travelled to San Francisco with one of my good friends back in 2015, Drift has been on my radar. As an end user, you’ll recognize it as the Chat Bot that pops up on a lot of the websites that you visit. However, there’s so much more to the tool than what meets the eye.
Below summarizes my learnings and the bones of the course:
Class #1: The Old vs. New Way of Buying
- 7000+ options for marketing software (vs. 150 10 years ago)
- Messaging = quick messaging vs. hoops (i.e. forms, email)
- Video = learn, teach, communicate
- Viewers retain 95% of a message of a video (vs. 10% through plain text)
- 59% of execs want video messages
- Conversations and chat bots
Class #2: Building a Bot – The 5 Ws
- Who: Who are you engaging? → Anonymous, return visitor, target account, customer
- What: What page are they on? → Start conversations on more specific pages (blog, pricing, product)
- When: When do we engage them? → Design conversation on engage, understand, recommend framework
- Where: Where did they come from? → Direct traffic, ad/retargeting
- Why: Why are they here? → Question or evaluating product, learn more about product, in need of support
Class #3: Conversational Framework
Introduction
- Prospects and customers at centre of marketing and sales
- Enhances how you push people through current funnel
- Engage, understand, recommend (3 core elements of conversation)
Engage
- Asking and acknowledging
- Info quick, less patience and tolerance for mistakes (buyers today)
- Engage on their terms
- Pull them in with human-to-human connection to build trust
Understand
- Buyers likely to be already educated
- Want to be treated like a human
- Three main considerations: qualify, route, disqualify
- Qualify → think about questions that are 100% necessary for sales team to know, and make it painless for prospect
- Route → connect with right person on team (company size, location, page)
- Disqualify → save time for sales and conversations
- Be empathetic throughout to up chance for conversion
Recommend
- People looking for reviews/recommendations
- 5 main recs: chat now, meet now, schedule, guide, nurture
- Chat now → Route in BDR
- Meet now → Drop calendar
- Schedule → Send calendar for them to choose time later
- Guide → Ask them what would be useful (e.g. blog, ebook)
- Nurture → Capture email and enrol them in sequence
- Combo of who they are, where in journey, what desired outcome is
Class #4: Designing a Conversation
Anatomy of a Healthy Bot
- Opener → hits on pain point you solve, help visitor, show empathy, show value
- Value prop → show you can solve problem you hit on in your book to bring visitor further into conversation
- No easy way out → nurture visitors and continue conversation
- Don’t ask too many qualifying questions → only stick to what you 100% need answer questions to (2-3 questions)
- Clear brand voice → look through videos, blog, emails
- Clear CTA → have back-ups also for those who aren’t quite ready
Implementing Conversational Marketing
- Put chat on all webpages and take off delays
- Have different chats on different pages → pricing is most important
- Train SDRs/BDRs in chat best practices → don’t sell or send PDFs
Conversational Marketing Templates
- Place power in hands of viewers, leaving them more engaged and easier to market to
Class #5: How to Analyze and Improve Conversations
Engagement rate
- # of people that start conversations using bots
- Be engaging and on brand with opener → “How can I help?” removes thought around support
Email capture rate
- Let them know why you want their email
- Ensure you’ve proven value of offer
- Don’t ask for email right up front
Meeting booked
- Offer up meeting right up front
- Make it easy for prospects to schedule
- Meeting should not be only offering due to need to disqualify
Analyzing conversations
- Engage – get buyer’s attention
- Understand – use case, how it fits
- Recommend – what’s best for them vs. action you want them to take
- Make self available when people are showing intent
Key takeaway: This course reaffirmed something I’ve always known; sales and marketing need to work in tandem. This relationship is different in every organization, but it really needs to be prioritized to ensure that demand is generated, and revenue is driven. With a lot of the points listed above, marketing can support sales. On the other hand, sales is responsible for providing information for the marketing team to produce the needed collateral.
Khadijah Plummer Consulting 