What if you were to walk into a store and be instantly greeted by a sales rep that already knew your interests, what products you were researching and what you were even in the store to look at? Wouldn’t that make the buying experience more enjoyable, faster and personal (in a good way)? Well, in this digital age and through digital store fronts, conversational marketing automation (i.e. chatbots) allow just that – and it’s becoming not only a norm but an expectation among B2B buyers.
What is conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing automation (chat) is the ability to identify site visitors in real time and instantly engage them in a meaningful conversation either through a live person or artificial intelligence (i.e. chatbot).
The pandemic accelerated the digitization of many processes for B2B companies, especially within buyer engagement. Thus, conversational chat has been growing rapidly, and according to Chief Martech, chat was the fastest growing sub-category (+70% year over year) in 2020. Customer needs are further fueling this demand as expectations for quick, personalized responses have grown by 26% since 2020, according to Katie Foote, CMO of Drift.
Why conversational marketing?
Studies show that buyers prefer to research and interact with companies on their terms. So, when they are ready to talk to you, they want you there instantly – with fast, accurate and relevant answers. And if given the option, B2B buyers do not want to go through complex websites, form-fills, and generic services and messages to find them. Chat automation can address all of that. You can engage the moment that prospects and customers are ready to, with the information they need and in a data-driven way to know them before they come to you (like that store greeter we were talking about earlier). Adding data-driven logic in an automated way to surface relevant content and complement the information buyers already have is the secret sauce to help them move along the buyer journey – some marketers call this tactic conversational ABM!
Personalize chat outreach with RollWorks and Drift
RollWorks is excited to announce our first integration in the conversational marketing category with chat automation leader Drift. Through this integration, RollWorks and Drift customers can power another account-based channel – chat – on top of their other engagement strategies such as display ads, landing pages, email signature, and more.
Even though Drift can be used stand-alone, there are key advantages to coupling it with RollWorks:
1. More data, more personalization
Provide more account level data (based on fit, intent and engagement signals), in addition to firmographics, to build and target Drift Playbooks with; this additional intel helps qualify and convert leads faster, serve the right content and messaging to accounts, and automatically connect them to the right sales teams.So…what does this mean for you? This integration gives you more data to personalize your chat automation to respond at the right time AND with the relevant information your prospects need. You’ll also have the power to predict what would be useful in their buying journey.The personalization possibilities are immense, but some examples include creating chatbots to:
- Send high priority (high fit, intent and engagement) accounts to specific sales teams and more!
- Display whitepapers proactively on specific topics accounts are researching.
- Provide competitive talking points to accounts researching competitors.
2. Save time
Ensure the right accounts are being targeted through dynamic list syncing. Since RollWorks passes account-level data into Drift, you can build chat playbooks faster and ensure the right accounts are always being targeted as Drift automatically recognizes changes in RollWorks audience lists. This means that you don’t need to build separate audience lists in their CRM / MAP and upload them into Drift nor do you need to ensure that those lists reflect the latest account information and changes.
3. Omnichannel approach
Using RollWorks as the account-based hub for engagement channels, customers can ensure they are serving accounts with the same omnichannel experience. This means that you can be confident that you are engaging accounts with consistent and personalized messaging across other account-based channels such as display ads and landing pages.
So how does it all work?
The RollWorks pixel (i.e. a small piece of code) is placed on website pages you want to track site visitors on and engage with chat automation. Then, whenever a site visitor lands on the page, RollWorks does its work to recognize who is visiting based on its firmographic and account-level data. Then, you can build Drift playbooks using all the data that RollWorks provides to customize chat flows and sales routing rules. (Obviously this is the abridged version, but you can go here for all the details.)
According to a 2021 Forrester survey, 58% of demand and account-based marketers are leveraging conversation automation technologies, and 43% plan to increase or significantly increase budget for online chat’. So over time, more buyers will be expecting this treatment, moving this from a nice to have to a must have in buyer engagement tactics.
Learn more on how you can create more personalized chat experiences.
About the Author
More Content by Eric Chavez, Senior Brand Marketing Manager
