Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables you to easily shape your online marketing campaigns to your wishes. Until recently it has been very difficult to include “social messaging platforms” in the customer journey, but this is starting to change as the market is catching up to demand. If you haven’t incorporated social messaging platforms into your business strategy yet, let me explain why you should definitely take advantage of this feature, and how you can do this in the best way possible.
Benefits
With the on-demand and on-the-go convenience provided by mobile devices nowadays, the use of online messenger marketing is booming! The interaction between companies and customers is now carried out through messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp more than ever. With the developments in technology, it is now fairly easy to automate these conversations.
Conversation has been a key aspect to boost sales and to keep customer satisfaction high. In current society, where technology becomes a continuously increasing part of everyday life, a shift has emerged from offline towards online communication.
Statistics point out that social messaging had become the new standard for communication. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the most used Messenger apps with over 3.3 billion monthly active users worldwide, followed by WeChat with 1.2 billion monthly users. The reach through these platforms is enormous!
The majority of people worldwide say that the possibility of chatting with a company increases the feelings of trust that they have for the brand. By including conversational commerce in your marketing strategy, you will enhance the quality of the customer experience. By empowering the customer to make informed decisions the role of the customer changes from ignorant to informed, from isolated to connected, and from passive to active.
If you are still not convinced that conversational commerce will be a great addition in your marketing strategy, the click-through rates will definitely do the trick.
- The click-through rates for messenger social messaging marketing surpass the click-through rates for email marketing by miles!
- In email marketing, a small percentage of 3.7% of the emails sent by businesses persuade the receivers to click through.
- In messenger marketing, the average click-through rate amounts to 35%.
Conversational Commerce in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The benefits of conversational commerce are obviously something that you want to take advantage of. The Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the perfect place to integrate social messaging platforms. This Salesforce feature already enables you to add channels such as email and SMS. By means of a social messenger add-on with a chatbot functionality, you will be able to take the quality of the customer experience to the next level! You can add this function at any stage in the journey to power 1-to-1 relationships: before, during, or after the purchase. The use of a chatbot functionality is both time-efficient for the customer and for the company, and its 24/7 availability makes it very approachable.
Use Cases
Let’s look at two examples of how you can include such a functionality in the Marketing Cloud Journey Builder:
- Imagine you will soon open up a brand new store and you wish to promote the grand opening. An automated message will be sent via Facebook Messenger to potential customers. This message provides them with the possibility to participate in a quiz and win two tickets for the opening party! If the receiver wishes to participate, he/she responds with the ‘Start quiz’. The chatbot then responds with a quiz question. The customer can answer the question in the Messenger App and will know if he/she receives the free tickets right away!
- Imagine a customer at a furniture store that would like to order a couch which sadly happens to be out of stock. The customer, therefore, pre-orders the couch and by the time he/she gets home, a personalized WhatsApp message has been sent with the order information. As soon as the couch is back in stock, the customer gets a WhatsApp notification with delivery options. With a simple WhatsApp response, the customer can pick a delivery date. If anything is unclear, the customer can use the same WhatsApp conversation to ask away!
Integrate Social Messengers in Marketing Cloud
Very convenient. In order for you to create amazing customer experiences just like this one, a great social messenger add-on for Marketing Cloud that includes a chatbot function is available: Direct Messenger. This add-on is designed to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and works in the same straight forward drag-and-drop manner as native journey builder activities. Very easy, and very useful! Check out all the features of Direct Messenger on this page.
If you understand the benefits of conversational commerce and you are not making use of it yet, you can request a demo of Direct Messenger and experience the possibilities!
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