Conversational messaging: Your guide to success

Conversational messaging is two-way communication that works to build strong customer relationships and boost customer engagement. Businesses can use conversational messaging to provide quality customer service, answer customer questions, and collect customer feedback. 

With conversational messages, you talk to your customers instead of at them. It also means you talk to customers individually rather than all at once. 

In this blog, you’ll learn more about conversational messaging and how it can benefit both your business and your customers. 

Jump to:

• What is conversational messaging?
• Benefits of conversational messaging
• Top uses of conversational messaging
• 5 conversational messaging channels to know
• Conversational messaging best practices
• The growing importance of conversational messaging

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<h2 id="What">What is conversational messaging?</h2>

Conversational messaging is a two-way form of communication for businesses to communicate one-on-one with clients on preferred messaging channels. In other words, it’s a true back-and-forth conversation that takes place. The main goals of conversational messaging are to enhance customer service, drive sales, and build relationships. 

<h2 id="Benefits">Benefits of conversational messaging</h2>

Let’s take a look at the main benefits of conversational messaging:

• Increased sales opportunities. Conversational texting allows businesses to answer customer questions and collect more customer information quickly. This helps brands qualify more leads and drive more sales. In fact, over 50 percent of businesses saw more sales productivity after implementing a conversational messaging strategy.
  
  
• Improved customer engagement. Conversational messaging is a real-time conversation between a customer and a business representative. With this two-way communication, customers engage more and reach out with questions or issues.
  
  
• Personalized messaging. Conversational messaging is a one-on-one conversation. This means each text conversation is personal to each individual. Plus, it allows businesses to learn more about an individual customer’s needs and preferences.
  
  
• Strengthened customer relationships. When customers get one-on-one attention and messages, it helps them feel valued. This can improve their perception of your brand and make them more likely to continue working with a business.
  
  
• Cost-effective. Utilizing conversational messaging to communicate with customers can save your business money. Research shows that conversational messaging bots can reduce customer service costs by 30 percent. 

<h2 id="Top">Top uses of conversational messaging</h2>

Conversational messaging provides quality customer service and valuable content to leads and customers. The following categories showcase the top uses for conversational messaging with examples. 

Marketing

Marketing teams can use conversational texting to answer questions potential buyers have about your products or services. This strategy focuses on turning leads into customers through valuable content.

Marketers can use conversational messaging to:

• Share tips and tricks about products
• Answer product-related questions through live chat
• Send product recommendations
• Run interactive marketing campaigns 

Here is an example of a ticket company running an interactive marketing campaign that offers concert ticket suggestions. 

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Feedback collection

Conversational messaging is an efficient way to collect feedback quickly from customers. By collecting feedback through two-way messaging, businesses receive high-quality feedback and develop stronger customer relationships.

Here is an example of a chocolate company collecting customer insights to help them decide on new flavor offerings. 

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Sales

Sales teams can use conversational messaging to respond to leads and close sales. By answering your leads’ questions quickly, you close deals faster. Through one-on-one conversations, your sales team can:

• Answer questions from leads about products or services
• Remind leads to complete purchases
• Follow up with leads

This example shows a sales representative responding to a customer's concern and directing them to complete their purchase. 

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Customer Support

Conversational messaging lets businesses handle customer support inquiries through real-time, one-on-one communication. Use conversational messaging support to:

• Respond to customer inquiries
• Troubleshoot issues
• Handle customer complaints

The following example shows a customer service representative fixing a customer’s missing email issue. 

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<h2 id="Five">5 conversational messaging channels to know</h2>

There are multiple conversational messaging channels available for businesses to use. Each channel has unique features and is best suited for different types of messaging. Here are the five most used conversational messaging channels. 

SMS and MMS

Short Message Service and Multimedia Messaging Service are great conversational messaging tools. These are your standard text messages and photo messages. 

Text messages have a 98 percent open rate and are accessible on all mobile devices. Both SMS and MMS don’t require internet or data to send. 97 percent of the population owns a mobile device, meaning SMS and MMS are the messaging tools that are most accessible to your audience. 

In addition to their high open rates and accessibility, SMS and MMS platforms like Textline include automation features that streamline communication and save employees manual work and time. With this free time, employees can focus more on deepening customer connections. 

SMS lets businesses and customers communicate quickly, even when someone is on the go. Conversational SMS is great for:

• Customer support
• Sales lead follow-ups
• Welcome campaigns
• Reminder texts
• Product recommendations
• Transaction follow-ups

SMS messages are limited to 160 characters and text-only. In the instances where you want to send a photo or video, you can use MMS. MMS is great for businesses that want to promote their products or services visually. 

RCS

Rich Communication Service (RCS) is a powerful messaging technology that aims to replace traditional SMS in the future. RCS offers more robust features than SMS. These features include:

• Unlimited characters
• Verified senders
• Interactive tools
• High-resolution media
• Read receipts
• Group chats

Unlike SMS and MMS, RCS requires data or an internet connection to send messages. However, RCS lets you send higher-quality media messages than SMS or MMS. 

Popular use cases for RCS conversational texting include:

• Time-sensitive promotions
• Real-time updates
• Account safety alerts
• Location-specific announcements
• Personalized recommendations 

Live web chat

Live web chat allows business representatives to communicate directly with website visitors in real-time. With a live web chat, customers can initiate conversations with businesses directly from a web page.

Live chat is best used for:

• Troubleshooting errors
• Building customer relationships
• Quick product recommendations
• Answering customer questions
  

Instant Messaging

WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the two most popular instant messaging applications. These messaging apps use the internet or data to send and receive messages. Research shows that 84 percent of customers expect businesses to use instant messaging applications. The pros of instant messaging are:

• No character limit
• Ability to send media like images, GIFs, videos, and files
• Global communication

However, there are some challenges with instant messaging:

• Both the sender and receiver must use the same application
• Cell phones without internet or data don’t support instant messaging

Businesses can use instant messaging applications to:

• Send personalized loyalty campaigns
• Answer customer questions
• Communicate with customers across the globe
• Provide individual customer support

Mobile app messages

It seems like every business these days is creating their own app. This means that another conversational messaging channel is growing in popularity: in-app messaging. With in-app messaging, businesses can engage with customers to provide support or personalized product recommendations. 

In-app messages are best for:

• Product recommendations
• Improving software onboarding
• Specific customer support
• Collecting feedback

Each conversational messaging channel includes pros and cons, so it’s best to create an omnichannel approach that uses multiple channels. Your customers should be at the forefront of your multichannel approach, so be sure to choose channels based on their preferences. 

<h2 id="Best">Conversational messaging best practices</h2>

Here are the best tips to enhance your conversational messaging strategy.

• Personalize your communication. Conversational messaging lets you engage in real time with your customers. Ensure they feel like this is a real two-way conversation with your business by personalizing your messages and ensuring they are relevant. This is especially true in the age of AI. Personalized messaging fosters customer satisfaction.
  
  
• Implement AI and automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can help your business converse with customers around the clock and reduce the need for manual responses. Consider setting up auto-replies to common questions or implementing an AI chatbot on your website so customers get answers even after hours. With AI and automation, you can reach more customers more efficiently.

• Develop an omnichannel approach. Utilizing multiple channels for conversational messaging allows your business to reach more leads and customers. Each channel offers a unique set of features and values, and your customers will have different preferences. Diversifying your messaging channels ensures that you have the best chance of reaching your target audience and maintaining consistent communication. 

<h2 id="Grow">The growing importance of conversational messaging</h2>

The need for businesses to implement conversational messaging is only increasing. In fact, 71 percent of customers now expect businesses to have a conversational messaging option. 

Rather than simply being marketed to, customers want to engage in real-time communication with business representatives. This humanizes the marketer-to-consumer experience and provides more value for both sides. Businesses collect quality customer data and feedback to improve their strategies, and consumers get real-time responses and valuable guidance about their inquiries. 

Not to mention, conversational messaging increases sales. That’s why 79 percent of businesses that exceed their revenue goals have a conversational messaging strategy in place. 

Boost your conversational messaging strategy with Textline

Now that you know all the benefits of conversational messaging, it’s time to develop your own strategy. Textline provides you with all the tools you need to get the most out of conversational messaging. 

Textline’s conversational messaging software allows businesses to converse with customers via SMS, Facebook Messenger, and web chat. Plus, you can create a seamless omnichannel strategy with Textline’s unified inbox, where you can access all of your conversational messaging channels in one place. 

Sign up now and get your 14-day free trial with Textline. 

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