To skyrocket the results that you get from conversational marketing, you need the right tools.

Else, you’ll spend time and resources with nothing to show for it.

In this post, I’ll share with you the best conversational marketing software and platforms you need to kickstart your journey the right way.

Let’s get started.

Best Conversational Marketing Software and Platforms

Here are the conversational marketing software you should consider using to get the best results for your business.

1. Facebook Messenger Bot

This is the official tool by Facebook for developers who want to build a personalized experience for their audience on the platform.

The upside of using the messenger bot for conversational marketing is that it’s free to use and gives you access to a huge and engaged audience.

However, if you’re not a developer, it’d be a herculean task for you to build a chatbot using this tool.

2. Drift

If you’re looking for a conversational marketing tool that helps you to create a chatbot in seconds without any need for coding, then you should consider using Drift.

This tool helps business owners to communicate with their prospects in real-time and also set up meetings with their sales team.

Features:

• Welcome message
• Knowledge base integration
• Zapier connection
• Calendar integration
• Sales enablement integrations
• 24/7 chat support

You can get started with a basic chat capability for free. The standard pricing plan starts at $50 per month.

3. BotMyWork Chatbot Builder

BotMyWork chatbot builder is a lead generation chatbot builder on Facebook messenger. With this tool, you can create a chatbot on your website that is linked to your company’s Facebook page.

Interestingly, using this chatbot builder doesn’t require you to have any knowledge of coding or set up any configuration on your website.

Features: 

• Multi-language support
• Great for retargeting Facebook users via other platforms
• Connects with live customer support representatives
• Broadcast messaging
• In-built bot analytics

You can get started with its free plan if you’re looking for basic chatbot capabilities. The pro plan starts at $9 per month for each bot.

4. Intercom

If you’re in need of a conversational marketing tool that helps you to handle customer relationships in real-time, then this one comes really handy.

With thi tool, you can drive growth for your business at every stage of the customer lifecycle and also convert prospects to leads faster through your funnel.

Features: 

• Personalized customer messaging
• Allows you to create customizable bots for your business
• Self-service resolution bot
• Integration with other useful tools and apps
• Ability to track, segment, and gather customer data

The basic live chat plan starts at $39 per month. 

5. Collect.chat

Collect.chat helps you to collect vital and relevant information for your business from your customers through chat.

It’s a great conversational marketing tool to delight your customers, boost your online presence, and get higher conversions.

Features: 

• Easy creation of a chatbot with no coding knowledge required
• Great for lead generation
• Helps in booking meetings faster
• Integrates with other apps
• Customizable templates for different industries

The free plan starts at $0 per month. To access more features, you can upgrade to the paid plans which start at $24 per month.

Conversational Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

To excel at conversational marketing, you need to do it the right way. This will help to convert website visitors to business prospects and finally qualified leads. 

Here is a step-by-step guide that is highly recommended to help you get the best out of this strategy.

Step #1: Personalize Your Conversation With Customers

Conversational marketing is usually a work in progress. However, one of the first steps towards a successful campaign is to personalize how you relate with each customer.

Since conversations happen in real-time, then showing your customers that you know them will create a lasting impression on them. Else, you’d most likely force them to leave the chat almost immediately.

To do this, you can set up your chatbot in a way that asks them some personal questions as soon as they engage with it.

Some personalized questions you may ask, include:

• What’s your name?
• What’s your email address?
•  How may I help you, today?

Having personalized details of your customers such as this creates room for a more natural conversation and helps you respond to them quickly.

Step #2: Engage With Your Prospects 24/7

After personalizing your chatbot, the next thing you need to do is engage with your prospects on an ongoing basis. The reason is simple. What’s the essence of conversational marketing, if there’s no ongoing communication.

To make this happen, you need intelligent chatbots. This helps you to engage with anyone that stumbles on your website as soon as they do. After all, you can’t have someone on your team responding to website prospects 24/7. 

Before creating an engaging chatbot, you need to understand your customers’ pain points and put an appropriate response mechanism in place for each of them. 

Also, you can engage with regular website visitors to know if they’re interested in your products and services. 

Not only that, you might also want to target those who visit some buyer intent pages on your website and initiate a conversation with them.

Step #3: Understand the Value of Each Prospect

One of the disadvantages of conversational marketing is its low barrier to entry. Since it doesn’t take much to engage with a chatbot, chances are that you’ll come across those who engage with you with no intention of buying.

This is why you need to understand the value of each prospect that you come across. When you do, you’ll know those ready for a sales conversation and those who aren’t. That way, you can manage the number of people who get in touch with your sales reps.

To do this, you should set up some qualifying questions that your bots ask visitors. Afterward, they can engage with them to know them better.

Step #4: Show Your Prospects What to Do Next

After engaging with the valuable leads, the next step your bots should take is to show them what to do next.

Say you operate a SaaS business, and a prospect who stumbled on your website and has been engaged by the bots is interested in taking the conversation forward.

So, what happens?

Do you set up the bot in such a way that it closes sales with these types of leads too?

Truth is, while you can configure your bots to engage and qualify your leads, most people still prefer human interaction to make a purchase.

In this case, you can connect your bots and sales reps.

After confirming that a prospect is ready to make a purchase, they can intelligently ask them to book a meeting with your sales team automatically.

That way, your sales team won’t have to spend much time convincing people to buy from you. Rather, they’d be focused on closing sales for your online business.

Step #5: Optimize Your Conversational Marketing Campaigns For Optimal Performance

The final step to take in excelling at conversational marketing is to optimize your campaigns for optimal performance.

To do this, you need to periodically check your campaigns to know exactly what works and what doesn’t.

If a particular step isn’t working well for your prospects, then you should test other variations of that step to see what happens.

Similarly, if there’s a particular step that converts greatly for your prospects, then you might want to A/B test it to see if you can get better performance.

By optimizing your campaigns, you’ll learn from them and improve on them too.

Conclusion

In this post, I’ve shared with you the best conversational marketing software and platforms out there.

Also, I’ve shown you a step-by-step guide on what you can do to get the best results from implementing conversational marketing for your business.

Truth is…

For conversational marketing to work, integrate it with a powerful educational content marketing strategy.

That way, as you engage your prospects and customers via chat, you’ll be able to convert them faster with your content too.