In a session at the Brand Bharat Summit 2022 organised by ETBrandEquity.com, Beerud Sheth, co-founder and chief executive officer, Gupshup spoke about how to make marketing automation conversational. “Brand marketers are betting big on automation to meet their goals,” he said. This includes streamlining marketing and sales efforts, improving customer engagement and experience, minimising manual tasks, optimising workflows among others.

However Sheth also mentioned that in spite of all the investment in marketing automation, the results remain mixed. “This is partly because there is a lot of challenge since the focus has been on one way communication. It was more like brands talking at customers rather than talking to customers,” he said.

He highlighted that today’s customers are more interested in having two way conversations with brands. “But traditionally, that has been very hard to do on scale,” Sheth pointed out.

“With the rise of conversational messaging, it is now possible for brands to have one on one conversations that are individualised and personalised,” he said, highlighting the need to automate conversations between brands and customers.

As per Sheth, in mobile-first countries, messaging apps are where the users are. “By far the frequency and intensity of usage of messaging apps shows that this is where users are spending most of their time,” he mentioned. If brands want to engage with their consumers, especially younger users, then they need to go where the users are, he added.

“With conversational messaging in place, brands can make every stage of the customer life cycle conversational,” Sheth shared. He also mentioned how conversational automation can orchestrate user journeys across marketing, commerce and support. These can include lead generation through SMS, collecting payments via messaging or handling user queries over WhatsApp.

In these cases there is no new app to be downloaded, Sheth pointed out. “In most cases there is a download barrier. People don’t like downloading a lot of apps,” he added. According to Sheth, this makes things easier and convenient for the consumer because they continue to use the app that they are familiar with.

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