The rise of conversational marketing

Marketing

·

Nov 12, 2025

Jan 31, 2023

Guide Takeaways

    • Conversational marketing is accelerating as businesses face shrinking budgets, stricter privacy rules, and higher customer expectations.

    • Messaging apps are now the preferred customer-to-business channel thanks to convenience and real-time responsiveness.

    • Immediate replies and personalized assistance significantly reduce friction and increase customer satisfaction.

    • Conversations support every stage of the customer journey, from discovery to purchase to post-purchase retention.

    • Automation, structured flows, and rich media create efficient, scalable experiences without heavy agent involvement.

    • Brands using conversational marketing consistently see stronger engagement, higher conversion rates, and better long-term loyalty.

Q&A Highlights

  • What is conversational marketing?

    Conversational marketing is a real-time, two-way communication approach using messaging channels to help businesses engage, assist, and convert customers throughout their journey.

  • Why is conversational marketing becoming essential?

    Shrinking budgets, privacy limitations, and rising customer expectations make messaging a more efficient, compliant, and high-performing channel compared to email or phone.

  • How does messaging improve customer experience?

    Consumers prefer instant, convenient communication. Messaging delivers fast responses, persistent conversations, rich media, and more personalized interactions.

  • What business outcomes does conversational marketing improve?

    It increases conversions, speeds up customer support, reduces operational costs through automation, and builds better customer relationships with ongoing dialogues.

  • How does it support the entire customer journey?

    Messaging helps customers discover products, compare options, ask questions, and complete purchases — all within a single thread that maintains context.

  • What role does automation play?

    Automated workflows handle FAQs, guide users with buttons and prompts, collect data, and escalate to a human agent when needed—improving efficiency and consistency.

  • Can conversational marketing improve advertising performance?

    Yes. Click-to-message ads transition users directly into high-intent conversations, increasing conversion rates and reducing acquisition costs.

  • Why is conversational marketing more privacy-friendly?

    Messaging channels use explicit opt-ins and clear consent signals, giving customers control over their data while ensuring businesses stay compliant with modern privacy standards.

Introduction

Introduction

Shrinking budgets, difficulty tracking customers due to evolving privacy regulations, and ever-rising consumer expectations. These are some of the macro trends we expect will affect Marketing in 2023.

Do any of these trends resonate with you? Maybe all of them? 

Then it’s probably time to consider the potential of conversational marketing. Conversational marketing is making it easier for consumers to engage with brands, and for businesses to have better insight into customers' needs and preferences.

In a world where 61% of customers consider messaging businesses more convenient than picking up the phone, and 59% choose it over email, the movement towards messaging as a customer communication channel is becoming too big to ignore. 

Take the 800-pound gorilla, for example. In its Q2 earnings call, Meta reported that more than 3 billion people use a Meta messaging product—Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp—every month. WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, sees 2 billion active users each month. 


Bar graph illustrating a progressive increase in values from 2010 to 2020, with significant growth observed from 2017 onwards.


WhatsApp monthly active user figures Source: Backlinko

These changes spell out the need for businesses to use technology to better understand their customers and communicate with them easily and efficiently. Conversational marketing will allow businesses to offer personalized assistance and immediate responses to customers, as well as proactive support and targeted recommendations. 

So what makes conversational marketing work so well?

So what makes conversational marketing work so well?

Time is of the essence

People want instant gratification. They don't have the time or patience to wait for a response. 90% of them want immediate responses when they have a customer service question, which more than half of people consider to be ten minutes or less.

The key is to make sure that your business is set up in such a way as to be able to respond quickly and effectively, and conversational marketing platforms enable this.

Build better customer relationships

Reacquiring a customer every time can be costly. Instead, build long-term relationships with them and make sure they’re engaged throughout the entire journey.

By establishing an open dialogue, you create a conversation that reflects each customer's needs. And by using opt-ins, you can gain consent at every interaction and each time your customer shares information with you. 

You can then use that information to build richer customer profiles and build out personalized relationships. Your customers are more likely to keep coming back if they feel they’re part of a conversation. Not just as a sales call. 

Conversation enhances engagement

Conversational marketing allows you to engage customers at every stage of the customer journey. It can be used to create rich experiences that go beyond marketing and advertising. And customers want the ability to message businesses throughout their entire journey, as highlighted in this Facebook Business article on how messaging is transforming the path to purchase.


A customer journey infographic outlines pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages, highlighting percentages and actions such as inquiries, purchases, appointments, support, and comments.


When customers are in the discovery stage, you can use it to help them find the right product. If they’re in the consideration phase, you can provide additional information and recommendations that will help them make an informed decision because 83% of them will ask about a product or service in this stage. And if they’re ready to purchase — which 75% will be — you can guide them through the checkout process quickly and easily with a few clicks.

Channel performance

When compared to other marketing channels, conversational marketing has shown impressive results.

Channel

Typical outcome

Conversational marketing outcome

Email

Low response speed, lower engagement

Faster responses, higher engagement

Digital ads

Expensive + low intent

Click-to-message ads create higher intent

Support channels

Long wait times

Instant replies and guided flows

For example: Matahari, a leading Indonesian eCommerce platform, ahieved a 2.5x conversion rate across tens of millions of messages using WhatsApp as a conversational channel to share promotions. 

There’s potential to use conversational marketing’s high conversion rate to improve the performance of your digital ads. By using click-to-messaging ads, you can drive customers to a more personal (and effective) interaction.

And, of course, messaging directly into your conversational channels means you don’t have to pay for ads (or at least not spend as much on ads). 

Richer interactions

Alongside a speedy response, using different channels opens the door to rich media content. These can include videos, podcasts, chatbots, and other interactive formats.

Text message greeting someone and offering a video tutorial on setting up a new laptop.

‍

The more questions your rich media can answer, the better. When using a messaging platform, offer suggestions with buttons to guide the conversation before pushing right to a human being.

You can also customize your conversational workflows, with buttons to guide the conversation and the option to escalate to an agent or sales rep at the right time. 

This benefits both the customer and the business: customers get quick answers to their questions, and marketers can collect data to build richer profiles for more personalized interactions over time. 

Time is of the essence

People want instant gratification. They don't have the time or patience to wait for a response. 90% of them want immediate responses when they have a customer service question, which more than half of people consider to be ten minutes or less.

The key is to make sure that your business is set up in such a way as to be able to respond quickly and effectively, and conversational marketing platforms enable this.

Build better customer relationships

Reacquiring a customer every time can be costly. Instead, build long-term relationships with them and make sure they’re engaged throughout the entire journey.

By establishing an open dialogue, you create a conversation that reflects each customer's needs. And by using opt-ins, you can gain consent at every interaction and each time your customer shares information with you. 

You can then use that information to build richer customer profiles and build out personalized relationships. Your customers are more likely to keep coming back if they feel they’re part of a conversation. Not just as a sales call. 

Conversation enhances engagement

Conversational marketing allows you to engage customers at every stage of the customer journey. It can be used to create rich experiences that go beyond marketing and advertising. And customers want the ability to message businesses throughout their entire journey, as highlighted in this Facebook Business article on how messaging is transforming the path to purchase.


A customer journey infographic outlines pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages, highlighting percentages and actions such as inquiries, purchases, appointments, support, and comments.


When customers are in the discovery stage, you can use it to help them find the right product. If they’re in the consideration phase, you can provide additional information and recommendations that will help them make an informed decision because 83% of them will ask about a product or service in this stage. And if they’re ready to purchase — which 75% will be — you can guide them through the checkout process quickly and easily with a few clicks.

Channel performance

When compared to other marketing channels, conversational marketing has shown impressive results.

Channel

Typical outcome

Conversational marketing outcome

Email

Low response speed, lower engagement

Faster responses, higher engagement

Digital ads

Expensive + low intent

Click-to-message ads create higher intent

Support channels

Long wait times

Instant replies and guided flows

For example: Matahari, a leading Indonesian eCommerce platform, ahieved a 2.5x conversion rate across tens of millions of messages using WhatsApp as a conversational channel to share promotions. 

There’s potential to use conversational marketing’s high conversion rate to improve the performance of your digital ads. By using click-to-messaging ads, you can drive customers to a more personal (and effective) interaction.

And, of course, messaging directly into your conversational channels means you don’t have to pay for ads (or at least not spend as much on ads). 

Richer interactions

Alongside a speedy response, using different channels opens the door to rich media content. These can include videos, podcasts, chatbots, and other interactive formats.

Text message greeting someone and offering a video tutorial on setting up a new laptop.

‍

The more questions your rich media can answer, the better. When using a messaging platform, offer suggestions with buttons to guide the conversation before pushing right to a human being.

You can also customize your conversational workflows, with buttons to guide the conversation and the option to escalate to an agent or sales rep at the right time. 

This benefits both the customer and the business: customers get quick answers to their questions, and marketers can collect data to build richer profiles for more personalized interactions over time. 

Stop being transactional — start being personal

Stop being transactional — start being personal

The takeaway here is clear: to drive customer loyalty and increase sales, you need to prioritize conversation-based marketing. 

By integrating your messaging channels with conversational marketing, you can create a personalized experience for each customer and help develop relationships that will last for years.

And the results are worth it. 

Messaging interactions with customers helps build relationships, reduces customer service wait times, establishes better two-way communication, and ensures customers’ privacy.

Whether you’re an eCommerce store, a streaming service, or another type of business, don’t underestimate the power of conversation. Make sure your customers have the opportunity to communicate with you and utilize conversational marketing to keep them engaged, loyal, and coming back for more.

Ready to adopt conversational marketing for your own company? Read on to see how other companies are tapping into its potential.

As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you are looking for help setting up your use-case.

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© 2026 Bird

Contact Support

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The complete AI-native platform that scales with your business.

Contact sales

Start for free

© 2026 Bird

Contact Support