By Dani Mansfield
Here’s a fun fact for you – we humans can make over 10,000 different facial expressions, each one presenting a volume of information in a flash. Studies have shown a staggering 93 percent of communication is nonverbal, conveyed instead by tone, facial expressions, body language, and other physical behaviors.
You only need to spend about five minutes on Twitter to experience the implications that our reliance on digital channels has for our ability to accurately convey meaning. Putting a message out there, after all, is only one side of the communication coin. The other is how that message is received. A lot can get confused in the go-between.
The adoption of Zoom and other video conferencing tools during the pandemic demonstrates the value we place on being able to see each other’s faces and expressions. Having the camera switched on feels like a more intimate exchange, and the faces our listeners pull give us important feedback on how a conversation is going. But we can’t access that feedback across most other digital communication channels, like when a buyer is browsing your website, watching a video, or reading your sales proposal. And what Zoom and it’s kind don’t capture are those moments of social connection that happen on the peripheries of an in-person meeting: the off-topic chat on the way to the meeting room, the confessions made over the pouring of coffee.
Your ability to build relationships remotely depends on how well you’re able to compensate for the information and intimacy lost when communication moves online.
In the offline world – at events, in particular – you can spot a person who’s interested in your offering fairly effortlessly. There are clear signals that it’s a good time to strike up a conversation. They’ll perhaps have just finished chatting to a competitor at an adjacent booth, or they’ve been eyeing up your live demo from a distance. In the online world, companies like Bombora have emerged to help businesses read the digital body language of target accounts to help you get in touch at the perfect time.
They use intent data to spot if and when a prospect is actively searching for your kind of offering, and which exact parts of it they’re looking for. That’s your SDR’s cue to pick up the phone.
This sort of third-party data can fill some of your information gaps, but first-party data is your brand’s true ticket to building deeper relationships with customers online. You can design your website and content to passively collect feedback from your visitor, and then use that information to tailor future touchpoints.
The context, interactions, and duration of engagement a visitor has with your channels and assets tell you a lot about who they are and what they’re interested in. It’s never been more important to build a data house that captures this behavior.
Imagine a contact logged in your CRM visits your website and spends 10 minutes reading through your market report, mostly focusing on the parts about a particular pain point your business can solve. They then move on to browse a selection of case studies, finding one that really interests them – as indicated by the length of time spent reading and interacting with it.
Your content is playing a double role here. It’s giving your visitor important information about the credibility of your business, but it’s also giving you important information about the intentions of that visitor. From their behavior – their digital body language – you now know which parts of your offering to talk to them about, and which customer story to go into particular detail on when you do. You can work out which other materials are going to be most useful to them, and later see how they interact with those to reveal even more about their intentions and priorities. This is a virtuous loop powered by strong data architecture and a customer-centric strategy. Your touchpoints help your buyers know you and help you know your buyers.
Putting commerce and business to one side for a second, think about how you typically go about building and keeping relationships going with people you don’t often get to see in person. If you’re one of the 4.8 billion people who own a mobile phone, this probably involves a fair amount of texting. Text and chat are informal and accessible ways of seeking and exchanging information, and that’s true in the business world as much as in our private lives.
SMS sees far higher engagement than email. According to SMS MarTech company NEO, customer open rates for SMS is 98 percent, while email is just 15 percent. Response rates are as high as 46 percent. Email is a mere six percent. Six! This is a channel designed for conversation, and it’s through conversation that relationships flourish.
SMS and chat are essentially open doors, especially when paired with AI. Your customers can get answers to their questions at a time that works best for them, and you in turn get to know more about them from the questions they’re asking. And that door is open in both directions. It takes 90 minutes, on average, for someone to respond to an email, but just 90 seconds to respond to a text.
If your goal is to build relationships at scale, chat and SMS tools get you closer to and more personal with buyers with far fewer resources than picking up the phone, and in a far more effective way than by email. Combine conversational channels with the insights captured from visitor interactions, and you can bring all the delight and convenience of a personal shopper to the digital buyer journey. Wouldn’t that be something? ◆