The aspirational goal for any brand is to connect with users through the digital cold, to emulate the in-store experience. If there’s one thing that keeps coming up in this week’s conversation, it’s “long term relationship”. It’s not about pounding the database to death until they unsubscribe, but understanding their needs and trying to meet them, as personally as possible.
Let’s look at the case of EHS.tv, the largest teleshopping platform on the Iberian peninsula, which has just been rebranded to Ventaprime, and the recently rebranded CRM Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue. We spoke with Julia de Lama, head of digital at Ventaprime, and Antoine Lefeuvre, head of Conversations at Brevo.
Interview Julia de Lama and Antonie Lefeuvre
- Julia: EHS is the largest telesales platform in Spain and Portugal. We sell products through TV commercials. Although at the beginning the business started with phone calls, in which each commercial had his or her assigned phone number, people called and bought the product, nowadays, due to the evolution of the market and technologies, it is no longer only telephone sales, but we are moving to other platforms, such as digital and retail at an international level.
- Antoine: At the beginning of April we changed from Sendinblue to Brevo. As Sendinblue, we are the European leader in email marketing, although we have a presence in other markets, many people know us as a marketing automation tool that allows them to send their emails, newsletters, and all kinds of emails. That’s why we were also called sending, even in the old days, Mailinblue, which shows the expansion of the offer.
The truth is that the sending part didn’t represent me very much, because in my department, Conversations, we make sure that our clients, like Julia, can have conversations with their users and it’s not just about sending. This is the evolution that justifies the change of name, from Sendin to Brevo, linking us with a platform that offers much more than email.
We are now a CRM that allows you to have long-term relationships with your customers through campaigns, conversations and sales management. Generally, we have an only one strategy for digital marketing and digital sales, so the name change was important to say that we had changed and that our offering is much broader.
10:54 To start the topic that we are going to discuss here today, could you explain how you apply the concept of “conversational marketing”?
- Julia: Our goal in implementing conversational marketing in our business is to build long-term relationships with our customers. Being able to provide solutions to doubts and queries that customers may have in a personalized way and in real time is an incentive that helps a lot to our goal, which is to increase conversion rates to sales.
This strategy integrates all the points where we can interact with our customers and give them answers. On the web we have, apart from chat, telephone, email, social networks, which allow us to have that conversation in real time. All of them can be managed from Brevo and you can have control over what you talk about and how and how many times you talk about it with your customers.
We still don’t manage the telephone part with Brevo, because it’s a more complex product.
- Antoine: Conversational marketing is about long-term relationships. This is very important for the mindset change and saying that what I want to have with my customers are these long-term relationships. It’s not just about sending campaigns and one-off things with the goal of wanting to sell more, but the goal is that I want to have long-term relationships with my customers.
The main change we have made in this sense is to put the contact at the center of the platform. That is, when you have a contact within Brevo, you will be able to visualize in 360 all the interactions you have had with that contact, whether it is a phone call, an email campaign or an email that has gone out through a marketing automation system.
In addition, Brevo allows contact segmentation, in order to personalize the interaction that a company has with its customers.
16:52 What interaction channels do you use and which ones work best for you?
We have a target audience with an average age between 55 and 60 years old, that is, people who are phone natives. However, the internet is becoming more and more part of our lives and people are buying a lot online, so chat is becoming more and more important. We have a very high percentage of conversion from visit to chat consultation of between 20% and 30%.
In addition, chat is helping us to eliminate friction at critical moments in the navigation, for example, at check-out.
There are certain questions or relationships that we handle with chatbot, such as the initial presentation, but one of the most powerful parts within the company is our 24/7 customer service department, with which we deal personally with chat, social networks and email.
- Antoine: There are many other types of segmentation. First if it is a new visitor or a returning visitor. In many cases, our customers depending on the type of customer are going to have the chat differentiating between an anonymous visitor and an identified customer or user. We have companies that decide to have conversations only with their identified customers, because this is a matter of internal organization or sales objectives.
A system like Brevo can centralize these interactions and from there you can have segments based on data, events. For example, if someone has entered into a conversation through the chat, they will enter into automation workflows so that it becomes a long-term relationship.
Although the chat moment has this advantage and disadvantage, it is in real time, that is to say, if the person leaves the page, you will not be able to continue through the chat.
An example of an automated workflow would be that you start with a campaign sent to a very large contact base, which is going to have a call to action to direct you to the page and from there, you can have a special attention for these customers. For example, with a temporary campaign with a discount, as you get closer to the end of the promotion, you can re-message everyone who has had a conversation through the chat, with a personalized message, either by SMS or WhatsApp, if you have a phone number, or through email again.
35:19 Are you applying or are you planning to apply artificial intelligence in these customer service processes?
It’s been a year since ChatGPT changed many things about AI, but it was not new to us. What we do, is that we always try to handle it very cautiously, because the conversation in particular is something quite difficult to automate and we insist that the customer knows that he is interacting with a machine.
Now, what is coming, and it is coming, is to use artificial intelligence to automate what can be automated and the typical thing is frequently asked questions. This knowledge base that a company usually has about its service and product, allows teaching a chatbot to answer the questions. Although we already had systems that did this, they did not allow it in such a conversational way as now, which can answer between 50% and 80% of the questions.
And there will always be an escalation part, that is, the possibility of moving from machine to human. What happens is that customer service people will increasingly deal with very precise questions and the job will shift to giving the necessary knowledge to the machine so that it can ask.
In general, at Brevo we offer this universal inbox for chat and having one place to connect all your conversation channels, like Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, email, with a Gmail inbox or other.
47:10 What can you tell us about SMS?
The perception between WhatsApp and SMS is very interesting and it changes a lot from country to country. For example, in India SMS means fishing and if you use it you can’t send a link, because nobody opens it. In Spain, where WhatsApp is 100% conversational, campaigns are seen as intrusive, because they are not expected.
In the case of SMS, it works very well for small companies, such as micro-SMEs, which are not very current, that is, they do not have a campaign per month, and also at a transactional level, for order confirmation or when a package is going to arrive. These are more typical cases of SMS and it is more effective than email.
51:47 How do you use email?
We have a very important database of about 300,000 users and we work with it in a segmented way, especially by age. This is what tells us more if the user is going to accept only one weekly mailing, two, three, even in cases where they accept up to four.
The key is to identify which type of segmentation is the most appropriate for your business. We, for example, segment by categories and the customers that fall into certain categories are grouped together, so when you do campaigns for products that fall into those categories, you already have that group of customers that are more likely to like the product because they have already been interested in it.
We have segmentation by category, by age, by number of purchases that have been made and so on. Also, we work especially on two things: notification of new products and promotions.
59:53 What metrics do you use as a reference and what are “healthy” performance data for you?
- Julia: We have three key metrics: average ticket, cost of acquisition and customer lifecycle. But knowing whether they are healthy or not depends a lot on the product and the campaign, because we have very different products that you can have one season and the next season you don’t have them anymore.
Antoine: A typical one is CSAT, Customer Satisfaction, which is the possibility of leaving a note when a conversation ends and is usually more linked to customer service, to support, than to sales. On the other hand, a metric more related to campaigns, whatever the channel, is the Open Rate, although it is increasingly complicated to have something more reliable, because there are privacy tools that prevent the opening from being tracked.
