Time to Start Chatting

This is my last memo for IDEX (at least for the moment). As of next week, I'm handing things over to my colleague John Jeffay. Since he's a fellow Brit (and also from the north of England, where all the best people are from), I know IDEX will be in good hands. 

I've written several times here about how we are not doing a good enough job of connecting with consumers and helping them understand the good that diamonds can do. 

With evolving technology, we are now better positioned than even to reach customers and prospects. Email marketing has become an art, social media has extraordinary reach and there's more information out there than ever. 

There's also a way of targeting and reaching people that has even more reach and effect than any of these methods - chatbots. 

If the mere mention of chatbots makes you think "spam" that's because you haven't seen good ones in action and yes, like many other means of communication, unscrupulous people try to take the lazy and spammy way to make a few dollars.

Set that objection aside and instead think about this. Chatbots empower companies, businesses and organizations to have one-to-one conversations (at scale) with the people they are trying to reach. 

And these conversations can be about anything at all. About your company, a way to highlight your products and services or just a way to increase engagement. They are also a powerful tool for helping educate people about important issues. 

For example, diamond education. The 4Cs are basic, but for a consumer looking to buy their first ring it's not necessarily a simple concept to understand. Once they move into certification and grading, it gets more complicated. A bot can "talk" to consumers and take them step-by-step through the whole process and ensure prospects understand what they should look for when buying a diamond. 

Or how about a conversation that explains the differences between lab-grown and mined diamonds and highlights what a particular store carries. A company might sell both types of diamonds or be a lab-grown or mined diamond retailer only. The important thing is that anyone coming to that company's page or website knows what is on sale. Better still it educates them in a friendly and accessible way that can increase consumer confidence. 

And I'm sure you can think of many more use cases. 

Plenty of businesses already have, as the statistics can attest. Businesses and clients already send 20 billion messages back and forth each month on Facebook Messenger, one of the most popular chatbot platforms out there.

But it's not just companies reaching out into the dark. Consumers also want to talk to companies differently. According to Salesforce research from 2019, 54 percent of customers say companies need to transform how they engage with them and 77 percent say chatbots will transform their expectations of companies in the next five years.

The time is here to start chatting seriously using chatbots, which is what I'm going to be doing in my next venture. 

So do reach out if you'd like to hear more about chatbots and Messenger marketing at danielle@chatitudemarketing.com or have a chat with my bot whose always available to talk https://tinyurl.com/vssc49u.

Have a fabulous weekend and please stay in touch!