Best Conversational Marketing Tools to Create Authentic Connections in 2024

If you have ever visited a farmers’ market, you know what it’s like to step into a vibrant community of fresh produce, artisanal delights, and friendly faces. It is the place where you can eye the exotic varieties of tomatoes, discover new flavors — and, the best part, chit-chat with the sellers and learn about the hidden gems of their assortment.

Today, visitors expect more than just information. They crave conversations. What if your website could also turn into a bustling marketplace, alive with memorable interactions and insights — all happening in real-time, 24/7? Meet conversational marketing software, the ultimate tool that can transform any abstract online store into a dynamic engagement hub.

In this post, we’re exploring conversational marketing tools and uncovering how they can revolutionize website experiences, create meaningful dialogues, and turn casual visitors into enthusiastic advocates. We’ll show you diverse conversational platforms and highlight the features that can help you better engage your audience.

What are conversational marketing tools?

By default, most website experiences are static — it’s the specialized customer engagement tools that bring them to life. Conversational marketing software is one of those tools. It replicates sales assistants to provide help around the clock and extends the capabilities of the real support agents and representatives.

Conversational marketing tools usually have the form of a self-initiating chat widget, always ready to engage with your visitors, answer their questions, and guide them through their journey. In a nutshell, these tools are like your website’s personal chat concierge, greeting newcomers and anticipating and addressing their needs on the spot.

The said chat widget usually includes live chat functionality and some sort of chatbot with automated conversational flows and pre-written replies. It’s also becoming increasingly common to see fully AI-powered conversational marketing tools requiring little to no human intervention.

Communicate with your customers across different channels

With SendPulse, you can reach your target audience by sending various types of messages through a communication channel they prefer — email campaigns, web push notifications, SMS, live chats, and chatbots for WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, or Telegram.

The benefits of using conversational marketing tools

Going back to our earlier example from the intro, the appeal of visiting a farmers’ market lies not just in the quality of the products but in the immersive experience of engaging with the sellers — chatting, asking questions, and forming a connection beyond the transaction. It is the kind of connection that makes people come back to you despite the abundance of alternative options.

Similarly, the allure of having virtual conversations with businesses through chat and other software mirrors this personalized experience. Here’s how:

• It feels more personal. Just as you might strike up a conversation with a farmer about the best way to enjoy their seasonal berries, virtual conversations with businesses add a nice personal touch to the online experience. Customers can inquire about products, seek recommendations, or simply engage in a friendly chat, creating a more human and memorable interaction.
• It can be automated in the best way possible. Conversational tools allow you to employ smart chatbots to handle routine queries, gather information, and guide users through predefined paths or redirect them to the best-equipped agent. This allows you to have more productive interactions without sacrificing personalization.
• It instantly provides the exact information the customer is looking for. Much like a farmer sharing insights on the ideal ripeness of a fruit, businesses can use virtual conversations to provide expert guidance when it’s most needed. Whether it’s choosing the right product, troubleshooting an issue, or offering personalized recommendations, the chat becomes a well of information that never runs dry.
• It helps you build long-lasting relationships. The social aspect of customer relationships extends beyond monetary transactions. Businesses can use conversational platforms to build rapport with customers by understanding their needs, addressing concerns, and genuinely demonstrating their empathy.
• It creates space for spontaneous real-time interactions. Farmers’ markets thrive on real-time interaction — you ask, the seller answers. Virtual conversations can replicate this immediacy. Whether through live chat or chatbots, businesses can provide instant responses, creating a seamless and responsive customer experience.
• It’s a precursor to building a vibrant community. Farmers’ markets are often a communal experience, where sellers know their customers by name. Virtual conversations mimic that community feel by recognizing returning customers, remembering preferences, and making each interaction feel tailored to the individual.
• It enables you to collect time-sensitive feedback. Just as you might provide feedback to a farmer about the taste of their produce, virtual conversations allow customers to share their thoughts and feedback with businesses. This two-way communication loop is invaluable for businesses looking to improve and tailor their offerings.
• It creates an opportunity to learn more about customers. Conversational marketing software provides valuable insights into user behavior and preferences. By analyzing chat interactions, you can understand your audience better, identify pain points, and optimize your website or marketing strategy.
• It can enhance your existing setup. Most conversational tools easily integrate with various platforms, including your CRM system, social media, and even popular messengers. This ensures a consistent and unified brand presence across channels.

As you can see, visiting a real market and shopping virtually do have something in common. In both cases, the success formula lies in forming genuine human connections. Selling products is just one part of it. It’s also about the experience, the stories, and the relationships formed along the way. Whether you’re discussing tomatoes at a market stall or providing advice through a chat window, the essence of meaningful exchange remains at the heart of both experiences.

Conversational marketing platforms you must know about

Let’s take a look at some of the best conversational marketing software that can help you supercharge customer interactions and approach them more proactively.

SendPulse for streamlined omnichannel communications

SendPulse is a holistic marketing and sales platform that offers a whole suite of conversational tools. The platform allows businesses of all sizes to establish a consistent messaging strategy across various channels and minimize time spent on repetitive tasks and switching between apps.

Here are the key features that make it possible:

• Live chat solution. This feature enables customers to instantly connect with support agents and receive expert guidance in real-time. The live chat widget initiates a conversation automatically, making it easier to reach users who otherwise would be struggling in silence.
• Chatbot builder. You can create AI-powered chatbots to automate part or even most of the customer interactions on your website, answering frequent questions, capturing leads, and providing product advice in a hands-off manner. Bots can be taught to speak in your tone of voice and “understand” your company’s offerings.
• Email marketing tools. Email campaigns can be a valuable addition to chat interactions, building up on those conversations and enhancing them. For instance, you can send your customers quick recaps, follow-ups, and post-chat surveys among your regular newsletters.
• SMS campaigns. With SendPulse, businesses can leverage SMS marketing campaigns, sending targeted messages and promotions directly to users’ mobile devices for effective and immediate communication.
• Pop-ups. SendPulse offers customizable subscription forms that businesses can embed on their websites to capture leads and grow their subscriber base.
• Web push notifications. These notifications allow you to reach users even when they are not on your website. You can send timely updates, promotions, or personalized messages directly to users’ devices.
• Automation. SendPulse makes it easy to set up automated message flows based on user behavior, preferences, or specific triggers to nurture leads and drive conversions. This applies to chatbot campaigns, emails, SMS, and other notifications.
• A/B testing. You can optimize your campaigns through A/B testing features, which enable you to experiment with different elements of your emails or other messages to determine what resonates best with your audience.
• Built-in CRM. The platform helps you collect, store, and manage customer data with ease. You can create details directly in your live chat and chatbot conversations.
• Landing pages. You can craft informative dedicated pages for each of your offers and equip them with chatbots, allowing new visitors to connect with someone from your company right away.
• Analytics and reporting. SendPulse provides detailed analytics and reporting tools, offering insights into the performance of chatbots and other campaigns, user engagement, and conversion metrics.
• Integration capabilities. The platform seamlessly integrates with various third-party tools, CRMs, and eCommerce platforms, ensuring a unified approach to customer data and marketing efforts.

With SendPulse, you don’t have to worry about how your marketing tools will “speak to each other.” The platform allows you to get a quick overview of all of your campaigns and gather chatbot conversations in a unified inbox. It is a great fit for marketers, small to medium-sized businesses, content creators, and support teams.

Pricing. SendPulse has a flexible, volume-based pricing strategy. It can be used as free conversational marketing software — you can send up to 10,000 messages across all your bots every month at no cost. The paid pricing plans start at $10 a month, billed monthly. Annual subscriptions are 20% cheaper.

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Drift for precisely targeted, human-like experiences at scale

Drift is a premium conversational platform helping businesses better engage with their website visitors. It’s focused on accelerating sales conversions through personalized and instant interactions.

Let’s look at why Drift is among some of the best conversational marketing software solutions:

• Live chat capabilities. Drift provides an AI-powered live chat feature that allows businesses to conduct conversations with customers around the clock. Drift’s AI can then score those customers based on their activity.
• Chatbots. The platform helps build intelligent chatbots that can automate conversations, qualify leads, and assist visitors even when human agents are unavailable. These chatbots leverage AI to understand user intent and deliver relevant responses.
• Audience segmentation and intelligence tools. Drift can automatically recognize your website visitors and build target audiences based on the data from your other marketing tools. The software can identify your customer’s company name, industry, employee count, revenue, and more.
• Conversational landing pages. This feature allows you to build tailored assets that automatically spark exchanges with customers.
• Custom conversion playbooks. Drift offers to automatically build personalized playbooks for more impactful and resonating communications.
• Industry-specific AI. Drift’s AI is trained on 100M+ B2B sales and marketing conversations and can also be custom-trained to represent your specific business.
• Video messaging. With Drift, teams shorten their sales cycle by sending rich, highly personal messages that stick and convert.
• Meeting scheduler. Drift includes a meeting scheduler feature that streamlines the process of booking appointments or meetings with leads and customers. This eliminates back-and-forth emails and makes conversations more productive.
• Analytics and reporting. The platform enables companies to access and interpret historical data at the team and individual level.
• Integrations. Drift offers 50+ native integrations, webhooks, and a Zapier connection to 500+ apps. Popular integrations include Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce.

Drift is an ideal solution for large sales, support, and marketing teams as well as eCommerce businesses and B2B enterprises seeking to accelerate their sales cycles, qualify leads efficiently, and build strong relationships with potential clients.

Pricing. Drift offers custom pricing based on a company’s needs and size. The pricing plans start at $2,500 a month, billed annually, and include training, strategy sessions, a dedicated success manager, and more.

Intercom for AI-powered, human-controlled customer guidance

Intercom is an AI customer messaging platform designed to facilitate communication and engagement between businesses and their customers. Its suite of tools enables companies to streamline customer support through chat, email, and automation.

Here’s a quick overview of Intercom’s most popular features:

• Live chat. Intercom offers advanced live chat features that enable seamless human handoff and omnichannel messaging. You can also customize your company’s chat widget to match your branding.
• AI chatbot. According to Intercom, the platform’s sophisticated AI can resolve up to 50% of customer questions without ever escalating them to a real agent. This helps teams manage their resources more efficiently.
• Automated workflows. Intercom offers no-code, time-saving automations for the native chatbot Fin as well as other bots, triggers, conditions, and rules.
• In-app messaging. You can use in-app messages to proactively guide users within your resource, announce new features, or share important updates. It’s also possible to send cohesive, targeted message sequences and offer product tours.
• Email campaigns. Intercom provides you with the tools for sending personalized and segmented emails to nurture leads, onboard new users, or re-engage with existing customers.
• AI-enhanced ticketing system. Intercom’s ticketing system offers a centralized workspace that connects your shared inbox, tickets, and help center. This helps access customer conversations in an instant and preserve full user context.
• Self-service help center. To reduce the number of incoming questions, you can take advantage of the knowledge base feature, which allows you to create and manage a repository of articles and resources to help users find answers on their own.
• Customer segmentation. The platform collects user behavioral data and provides robust customer segmentation tools to help you categorize users based on various criteria and send targeted, context-based messages.
• Integrations. Intercom easily integrates with over 300 third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and other helpdesk software.

This conversational marketing software is invaluable for customer support, sales, and marketing teams as well as product managers. Intercom is especially popular among SaaS and tech companies, providing them with the right tools needed to engage users and drive user adoption and retention.

Pricing. There’s a free 14-day trial. The pricing plans start at $39 per seat per month, billed monthly. You can also book a demo to see Intercom’s features in action.

Birdeye for a multifaceted approach to customer engagement

Birdeye is an all-in-one reputation management and customer experience platform designed to help businesses enhance their online presence, manage reviews, and engage with customers effectively.

The platform’s key conversational features include:

• Live chat. Birdeye allows you to connect with your website visitors in real-time and capture their contact information to follow up through other channels. You can manage your live chat interactions from a unified inbox.
• AI automations. Equipped with auto-response templates and pre-written flows, the platform’s AI chatbot can take care of FAQs and free up your teams. The AI-writing assistant can also help human agents craft more empathetic and on-brand replies.
• Lead capture forms. With Birdeye, you can create engaging pop-ups to initiate conversations with new visitors, share valuable content, and help them explore your best offers.
• Surveys. The software helps you send customized surveys and rely on AI-driven analysis to understand user feedback and quickly act on it.
• Bulk messaging. You can use Birdeye to send personalized, conversion-oriented messages at scale and reach your audience using the channels they prefer. The mass messaging feature can also be used to request reviews and referrals.
• Social media management. Birdeye provides tools for managing social media profiles, scheduling posts, and monitoring social interactions to maintain an active online presence.
• Review management. With the help of AI, you can request, monitor, and manage reviews across 200+ websites. The platform lets you automate and personalize your review replies, maintaining a spotless brand reputation.
• Ticketing and case management. These features streamline customer support by converting messages into tickets and ensuring timely resolution. Birdeye makes it easy to track tickets from start to finish in one place and assign them to the right agents.
• Sentiment analysis. Birdeye utilizes sentiment analysis to understand the tone and context of customer reviews, helping businesses gauge overall customer satisfaction.
• In-depth analytics. The platform enables you to get detailed reporting on chat conversations and filter by location or user. You can also integrate with Google Analytics and other platforms.
• Integrations. Birdeye is compatible with 3,000+ apps and allows data import from any CRM.

Birdeye is a unique conversational marketing platform that allows you to go beyond superficial one-time interactions and work toward building a sustainable, long-term positive image for your company across different channels. It’s especially useful for service-based businesses and eCommerce enterprises.

Pricing. Birdeye offers custom pricing to better cater to individual companies’ needs. You can request a demo to experience the platform as a user.

Tidio for transforming a regular helpdesk into a growth-driven powerhouse

Tidio is a versatile live chat and chatbot platform designed to facilitate real-time communication between businesses and their website visitors. It promises to answer up to 70% of customer inquiries without human intervention, and it can do so on any channel in seven languages.

Here’s what makes Tidio one of the best conversational marketing software solutions:

• Live chat. Tidio empowers you to talk to visitors and solve their inquiries in real-time. The platform offers customizable chat widgets, allowing businesses to match the chat interface with their branding. You can access chatbot and live chat conversations from a single dashboard.
• AI chat capabilities. Tidio’s Lyro AI Agent helps automate conversations, manage routine inquiries, and even send personalized offers to customers. There are over 35+ chatbot templates and the possibility to establish automated workflows.
• Email campaigns. The platform offers email automation tools and over 500 templates to help create personalized promotional campaigns in minutes. It also includes an email validator to keep your sender reputation clean.
• Visitor tracking. Tidio can provide you with insights into user behavior by registering their browsing journeys. This data will help you understand customer preferences and tailor their experiences accordingly.
• Helpdesk. With Tidio, you can monitor, prioritize, and assign customer requests. It stores all your tickets in one place and allows you to set priority levels and tag tickets for better organization.
• Multi-channel support. Businesses can use the platform to engage with customers across various channels such as email, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and a live chat widget on their website.
• Integrations. Tidio can work as an organic addition to WordPress, Shopify, and other top CMS platforms. There are also dozens of apps that Tidio can be easily connected to.

Tidio is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, especially those in eCommerce. Bloggers, content creators, and online publishers can also take advantage of this platform to engage with their audience in a natural, conversational manner.

Pricing. This conversational tool offers a 7-day trial. The prices are calculated separately for each toolkit and start at $29 a month, billed monthly. You can save around 20% by paying annually.

Final thoughts

If you’re about to take your first steps in conversational marketing, start small and focus on the tools that give you the most bang for the buck. Platforms like SendPulse offer AI-powered chat functionality at a reasonable price and are created with small businesses in mind.

Sign up for free now and explore our toolkit to see how it can enhance your users’ experiences on your website and beyond. We offer a live chat widget, an intuitive chatbot builder, an email service, and many more features that are absolutely code-free and beginner-friendly. Give it a try today!