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Ravi Sundararajan, chief operating officer, GupshupWhile digital marketing spends have been growing steadily over the last few years, customers now want the communication with businesses to be interactive, responsive and personalized.

Ravi Sundararajan, chief operating officer, Gupshup addressed how brands and marketers can use conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to power digital marketing.

He explained the threefold key trends that have driven this change over the last few years. One is the mass adoption of smartphones and cheap availability of bandwidth. Second is the pandemic, and third are the innovations happening in the area of ​​digital interactions.

This has enabled people to use conversational AI and conversational messaging.

“Today businesses want to go where the customers are. About 180 million people are using or communicating with businesses on WhatsApp. Over 90 percent of people who use Instagram follow their brands. 84 per cent of the consumers agree that interacting with business or messaging apps helps build relationships,” said Sundararajan.

So, the priority for digital marketers is all the future initiatives target or use conversational AI to have personalized and targeted journeys for customers.

The executive elaborated, “That’s why multi-channel or omni-channel communication is very important. It could be a popular messaging app, text messaging or voice, depending on the dialect.”

A lot of these messaging apps have also realized they have to cater to the business audience. And in the last few months, they’ve opened up full funnel journeys where users could not just only do post-purchase conversations but also pre-purchase ones on WhatsApp.

With this innovation, brands can also understand which are the ads that are performing well by tracking them to offline or online interactions, such as QR codes and click to ads.

Brands can also use a combination of social media with messaging apps and tie it together. “They can enter from any of popular social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Google and direct the traffic from there to WhatsApp or Instagram,” said Sundararajan.

After this, brands can create even a conversational bot that can actually monitor various channels of their brand and know what’s going on.

He added, “Dissatisfaction with the experience can be addressed right away. If it’s a positive or a negative review, the bot can react to it.”

Sundararajan strongly believes conversational AI is the future of digital marketing.

“All the customer purchase journeys are getting much more personalized and targeted. They’re moving to various messaging apps for mobile engagement. Hence, conversational AI is becoming a very big part of digital marketing,” he concluded.

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