Conversational Marketing--the 82% demand that only 9% are meeting

Right now there are potential customers searching for your business online just like there have been since 1998 when Google made it possible to search the worldwide web. Since then, websites have been an important tool to capture interest from interested consumers, but there is one big difference today that didn’t exist back then -- today, 82% of consumers expect you to respond ASAP in real-time to their questions, and yet only 9% of small businesses actually have chat on their website. 

The bottom line? Your customers want you to respond NOW--not when you get back in the office or have the chance to find their contact info from a webform they filled out. (Which, by the way, no one is filling out anymore.)

And you can thank Goliaths like Amazon for this behavior change in consumers. Today they offer around 197 million consumers a month an on-demand, one-click shopping experience to deliver goods locally with hardly any live customer service agents to answer questions. Now consumers expect the same personalized experience from every kind of business, whether large or small.

Gartner just released a report on conversational marketing that suggests that by 2022, requests for customer service through consumer mobile messaging apps will outnumber requests for customer support through traditional social media by a factor of two. Right now, only 9% of small businesses have chat enabled on their website. Most of them don’t even answer the phone the first time a customer calls. The disconnect is massive.

This week FreshLime, a company we started a few years ago, announced the launch of a powerful messaging platform to enhance the other customer interaction and engagement tools used by thousands of our customers. This is a direction we saw coming several years ago but never imagined the explosion of growth in front of us now. It's exciting to provide a solution for small businesses that actually makes a difference. In 1999, we knew pay-per-click advertising was the best move for small businesses trying to grow as consumers moved online. In 2008, that became true again as search engine optimization became an important part of the marketing stack for SMB's. From the beginning of FreshLime, we have been focused on building the best data-driven customer engagement platform, and today it is more important than ever that small businesses have these tools and technology to interact, engage, and have real conversations with consumers where they are spending most of their screen time by embracing conversational marketing.

Technology can give consumers new ways to interact with businesses through text and chat-based conversational marketing and give businesses a way to get ahead of competitors struggling to adapt to where consumers are today. 

So here we are, and the future is chat. Let's chat about it--where do you see this going?