Zero-Party Data, Chatbots and Connecting the Dots: The Future of Conversational Marketing

13/09/2024

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Conversational marketing is the use of real-time two-way conversations to engage with your customers – and is one of the fastest, most meaningful and personalized ways to convert. 

With the rise of AI, it is becoming a fundamental part of marketing for many brands, as it supplements how businesses interact with their audiences. Conversational marketing can happen on various channels – website chatbots, messaging tools like SMS or WhatsApp, social media, phone, or even email if you can get it right!

The core function of conversational marketing is to make bi-directional customer interactions more intuitive and efficient. As a marketer, you know that this is exactly what customers seek today – speedy and helpful experiences that cater to their specific needs and preferences. 

Conversational marketing is strong in zero-party data collection, as your customers leave a vast amount of that on your chatbot when they want to resolve an issue, or find a product or service for their needs. This is where its future shines bright, as collecting and analyzing zero-party data is more important than ever today. 

In this article, you will dive further into the future of conversational marketing, understanding how emerging AI technologies, the collection of zero-party data, and new customer expectations are shaping the next generation of digital engagement – and how your brand has to be a part of it.
 

‘Conversations’ as the Future in Digital Marketing 

Conversational marketing’s journey began in the early 2010s when chatbots and triggered messages from social media platforms like Facebook started to gain traction as tools for customer interaction. These early interactions were basic and limited in scope, and provided scripted, generic responses that frustrated customers.  

The turning point came when advancements in generative AI and NLP began to transform such interaction tools into more sophisticated, contextually-aware, and proactive communication agents – which allowed for a more frictionless approach to customer engagement. 

Now, conversational marketing tools are often fun, interactive, and playful. They can add humanity to the interactions you have with your customers, and they are smart enough to integrate a brand’s identity into its interactions to achieve a certain goal. That could be brand awareness, lead generation or improving personalization in messaging, or something else. 
 

For instance, Duolingo uses AI in dialogue-driven interactions to engage users in language learning with humor. Domino’s helps their customers to start an order easily by typing a pizza emoji on any channel – Facebook, Twitter, Google Home – you name it. Randstad implemented a questionnaire-based chatbot on their website through which candidates could navigate to the job offers that would better suit their profiles. 

When integrated with other tools, conversational marketing today is also capable of accommodating even more advanced contextual awareness to deliver hyper-personalized experiences – taking into account factors like the customer’s location, language, the time of day, previous interactions, and even their current mood or emotional state.

For instance, if a customer is shopping for a laptop late at night, the bot might infer that they are looking for a quick solution and offer options that are easy to purchase immediately.

If able to retrieve information in real-time from a Customer Data Platform (CDP) then knowing if that’s an existing customer who has bought high-end gaming laptops before, then knowing that could elevate that conversation too by making recommendations based on past behaviors.
 

After years of low-quality interactions with brands, this is exactly what contemporary customers want – to stay away from the overload of impersonal engagements, and get close to the type of engagement that resonates with them. 

And when customers converse with a brand via a chatbot or two-way messaging channel – especially one that is owned and managed solely by the brand itself – marketers have the golden opportunity to know exactly what customers want and when they want it, so that they can offer the most tailored experiences. Eventually, this leads to faster conversions. 
 

Getting the Ultimate Benefit from Conversational Marketing: Combining Zero-Party Data with Other Types of Data for Better Personalization 

Zero-party data is arguably the most valuable asset for digital marketers. But, it should not be viewed as a standalone source of truth, but as a supportive element in mapping, elevating and hyper-personalizing your customer journey. 

What connecting the dots looks like in the future of conversational marketing is to combine users’ interactions on the chatbot or any other conversational tool (zero-party data), their behaviors on the company website, email or mobile app (first-party data), their interactions on an affiliate or partner channel (second-party data), and external insights gathered from broader audience trends and demographics (third-party data) in a single view – which a CDP can enable easily. 

Let’s put that into perspective: 
 

As a marketer reading this example, you might be thinking of countless other ways Max interacts with your brand and leaves various types of data for you to leverage – voice search, social media, survey responses, customer service interactions, loyalty program activity, and even location-based data from his mobile device. 

When your CDP connects these data points, and can be used to train your conversational marketing channels, you can craft a sophisticated view of Max's preferences and needs. Then, this will allow you to converse with Max with all the background information that you need next time he appears on your website chatbot, allowing you to deepen the level of personalization in your conversational marketing. 

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Key Takeaways 

• Today, conversational marketing enables great benefits to brands by collecting significant amounts of zero-party data, providing deep insights into customer preferences. 
• While zero-party data is extremely valuable in data quality, the future of conversational marketing lies in connecting it with first-party, second-party, and third-party data. This allows brands to create highly-personalized campaigns, convert faster, and decrease ad spend. 

Interested in connecting the dots? Learn more about Relay42’s Customer Data Platform here.