Conversational marketing: The beginner's guide

Conversational marketing is the practice of connecting with customers through real-time, two-way conversations across channels like live chat, chatbots, messaging apps, SMS, and email. Today’s buyers expect fast, personalized answers on the channel they choose, and they expect your team to remember the conversation when they switch channels.

That expectation is the latest step in a long shift. From letters to voicemail to email and texting, each new channel has shortened the time people will wait for a reply. What hasn’t changed is what people want from a conversation: helpful, personal, and empathetic. Technology now lets businesses deliver helpful, personal, and empathetic conversations at scale. In HubSpot’s State of Customer Service & Customer Experience research, 82% of service professionals say customers expect immediate resolution.

With HubSpot’s free live chat software, you can connect with website visitors in real time, automate first responses with the built-in chatbot builder, and log every conversation to your CRM. Let’s talk about conversational marketing and its benefits, how it will help your business grow, and what you need to build a successful conversational marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

• What is conversational marketing?
• Conversational Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
• The Key Elements of Conversational Marketing
• Conversational Marketing Is More Than Just Live Chat
• The Benefits of Conversational Marketing
• Conversational Marketing Examples
• How Conversational Marketing Will Grow Your Business
• An Inbound Approach to Conversations
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Moving Forward: Why Conversations Are the Future

What is conversational marketing?

Conversational marketing is a customer engagement approach that uses personalized, two-way conversations, in real time or at the customer’s own pace, to answer questions, qualify leads, and guide people to what they need. Conversational marketing focuses on real-time, two-way customer interactions and uses channels such as live chat, messaging apps, SMS, email, voice, and AI chatbots.

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 The practice of marketing through conversation predates the label. The term gained traction in the mid-2010s as messaging apps went mainstream and chat tools moved from support desks into sales and marketing.

Despite the name, conversational marketing isn’t limited to marketing teams. It spans the whole customer journey:

• Marketing: Greet visitors, answer questions, and replace long forms with short chat flows that capture leads.
• Sales teams can qualify leads, book meetings, and route prospects to the right rep while leveraging conversational AI to personalize each interaction and accelerate the sales process.
• Service: Answer common questions, create support tickets, and hand off to a person when a bot can’t solve the problem.

Context is what connects these teams. HubSpot’s live chat software enables real-time website conversations, its chatbot builder automates common first responses and lead qualification with no coding required, and HubSpot Smart CRM stores every conversation in a unified customer record. Marketing, sales, and service can all see it, so the next reply builds on the last one.

Want to go deeper? Learn how to apply a conversational growth strategy to your inbound marketing in this free HubSpot Academy lesson.

Conversational Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

Conversational marketing differs from traditional marketing by replacing one-way campaigns with personalized dialogue. Traditional tactics like ads, content, and broadcast email are still effective at building awareness at scale. Conversational marketing adds what they can’t: two-way conversations that answer questions in the moment.

Email can be either. A broadcast newsletter is one-way, while a reply-ready email thread with a real person is conversational.

How the Two Approaches Work Together

Conversational marketing doesn’t replace campaigns—it picks up where they leave off, turning static landing pages into interactive experiences where your ads, emails, and content bring people to your site, and conversations guide them toward a decision. It picks up where they leave off. Your ads, emails, and content bring people to your site, and conversations help them take the next step.

Here’s what that looks like in HubSpot:

1. A visitor lands on your pricing page from a campaign.
2. HubSpot’s live chat greets them with a welcome message written for that page.
3. A chatbot answers common questions, qualifies the lead, and books a meeting, or routes them to the right person on your team.
4. The conversation is logged in HubSpot Smart CRM, so the next person who talks to them has the full history.

What we like: HubSpot’s live chat lets you set different welcome messages for different web pages or audience segments, so the conversation matches the campaign that brought the visitor.

Pro tip: Start by adding chat to the pages your campaigns already drive traffic to, such as pricing, demo, and key landing pages, then expand from there.

The Key Elements of Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing might sound a lot like what you already do: you’re on multiple channels and talking with your audience. If you’re a customer-focused marketer, you’re probably close. Four elements set it apart: conversations happen in customer time, they’re scalable, they have context, and they meet customers where they are.

1. Conversations happen in customer time.

Conversations should happen whenever the customer prefers: in real time, after their meeting, or late that night. Your team needs to be able to chat in real time, and also let customers finish at their own pace, whether that means starting at 7 AM over coffee and wrapping up at 9 PM after the kids are in bed.

HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah says, “Customers should be able to pick up things right where they left off whenever it is convenient for them to continue. The key is to remember that conversational marketing should be designed around the needs of the customer — not the needs of the business.”

2. Conversations are scalable.

Customers don’t care whether you’re talking with 50 people or 5,000. They care about their issue. Chatbots make that possible by answering common questions 24/7 with data you already have, so small teams aren’t left behind. Scale shouldn’t cost you the human touch, though. Bots should give customers quick access to information or to a person.

3. Conversations have context.

Conversations can’t exist in a vacuum. If you reported a defect yesterday and chatted today about return instructions, you’d expect the person you’re talking with to know which product you’re sending back. Context also makes messaging convenient. Without it, bots and reps ask the same qualifying questions every time, wasting time and testing patience.

That’s why a CRM belongs at the center of your strategy. Context means gathering, storing, and making accessible the customer data that matters, from recent orders to pricing-page visits to job titles. HubSpot Smart CRM stores conversation history in a unified customer record, and the shared inbox brings every channel into one view, so your team and your bots always know what came before. The more you know about the customer, and the more you show it, the more helpful you’ll be.

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Pro tip: List the three pieces of context your team asks customers about most, such as their last order, plan, or open ticket, and make sure they appear on the contact record.

4. Conversations meet customers where they are.

Inbound marketing is about giving value where your audience already is, and conversational marketing is part of that. The right channel depends on the customer: live chat, a messaging app, SMS, email, or a phone call, with a person or a bot.

Nobody should have to call a 1-800 number when a quick chat could hand them a knowledge base article. The goal is to deliver the right message, to the right person, with the right information, on the right channel, every time.

Conversational marketing is more than just live chat.

Live chat is the most familiar way to talk with customers, but conversational marketing isn’t tied to any one tool—it’s powered by conversational AI that can understand and respond to customer needs across multiple channels.

Channels that support conversational marketing:

• Live chat: Real-time website conversations. Your team can also get chat notifications and reply from Slack or the HubSpot mobile app.
• Chatbots: Automated conversations that answer common questions, qualify leads, and book meetings.
• Email: Shared team inboxes where messages are routed or assigned to the right person.
• SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger are messaging channels where customers expect quick, informal replies and where many businesses now handle the bulk of their customer service.
• Phone and voice: Calls made and logged inside your CRM.

AI-assisted Responses and Routing

Conversations scale when automation handles the routine questions and routes the rest to the right person.

• Chatbots: HubSpot’s chatbot builder is free and needs no coding. It integrates with HubSpot Smart CRM, enabling bots to personalize messages using existing contact data.
• Routing: Live chat and the conversations inbox automatically connect contacts with the right people on your team.
• AI support agent: HubSpot’s customer agent answers questions, takes action in your CRM, and hands off to your team with full context. It works with chat, email, forms, voice, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and it’s available on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.
• Managing and building agents: Agent Hub is where you run and review your AI agents, and Agent Builder lets you create custom ones, with Breeze Assistant helping you build.

What we like: When the customer agent passes a conversation to a person, that person sees the full context, so customers don’t have to repeat themselves.

One Inbox For Every Channel

More channels shouldn’t mean more places to check. HubSpot’s shared inbox brings live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, social channels, Messenger, chatbots, and team email into one place. Sales, marketing, and service teams can view and reply to every conversation, and the history stays on the customer record in Smart CRM.

Pro Tip: Start with the two or three channels customers already reach you through, connect them to a single inbox, and automate your highest-volume questions first.

The Benefits of Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing isn’t new. People have always had conversations, and now technology lets businesses have them at scale. So why wouldn’t we use tools that optimize business conversations? Let’s talk about a few of the key benefits.

1. Conversational marketing is a more delightful way for customers to get answers.

Customers don’t want to dig through a website or wait for a form follow-up to get an answer. Conversational marketing lets them ask in their own words and get a reply in the moment, on the device already in their hand. HubSpot’s live chat page notes that today’s buyers want information, and they want it now.

Three things make the experience better:

• It’s fast. Chatbots answer common questions instantly at any hour and route harder ones to the right person, which is the speed customers now expect.
• It’s where customers already are. WhatsApp passed 3 billion monthly users in 2025, according to Meta. Adoption of messaging apps varies by region. Meta’s CEO has acknowledged slower adoption in the U.S., where people lean on their phones’ default messaging apps, so match channels to your audience.
• It’s specific to the customer. Messaging lets people describe their exact problem, and CRM context lets your team and bots answer it.

Delight takes more than speed. Your business should make it easy for customers to reach a person when a bot can’t help.

Pro tip: Measure delight directly with a post-chat survey, as HubSpot’s conversational marketing team did.

2. Conversational marketing is a great way to gain new, valuable insights about your customers.

When else do your customers tell you, in their own words, what they want to do, learn, or change? You don’t get that candor from a web page or an ad. Customers and businesses do not need to infer or guess in a conversation, as they do when analyzing web traffic. Customers simply tell you how they want to interact with your business.

Conversations also create customer behavioral and preference data at scale. Each one adds individual details to a customer record, such as a preference or a preferred channel. Together, those details show patterns. HubSpot’s Brian Bagdasarian explains how individual “micro” data rolls up into “macro” insights in Talking Data Part 2. One example is a table of customers who prefer Facebook Messenger over other channels.

What that looks like in practice:

• Conversational marketing helps businesses spot misrouted questions by analyzing chatbot conversations. In an experiment with its chatbots, HubSpot’s marketing team learned from its sales team that 15% of website chat questions were about technical support. A bot that sent those questions to the right resources removed the friction.
• Conversational marketing helps businesses catch customer confusion after a website redesign or pricing change. If a redesign or a new discount triggers the same question repeatedly, that’s a signal to fix the page or clarify the instructions.
• Conversational marketing helps businesses identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities by analyzing customer inquiries. A customer asking about one product is a natural moment to suggest related items, based on what you know from previous interactions.
• AI analyzes conversation transcripts to identify customer needs and suggest next steps in the sales process. In Sales Hub, AI analyzes conversation transcripts, emails, and deal history to suggest CRM updates, draft follow-up emails, and next steps. For phone conversations, HubSpot’s conversation intelligence records sales calls and collects the resulting voice data.

Pro tip: Review a sample of transcripts every week and tag them by topic. Patterns are much easier to act on when they’re labeled.

3. Conversational marketing is a great way to build relationships.

Relationships are built from many small interactions, and messaging makes each one easy. A conversation can pick up where the last one left off, on whichever channel the customer prefers, because your team can see the full history in HubSpot’s shared inbox.

Three habits help build trust:

• Your business or bot should ask one question per conversation at a time. Instead of a long form, a bot or rep can ask one question per conversation and save the answer to the contact record, so you never ask the same thing twice. Details from live chat are automatically logged to your HubSpot’s Smart CRM.
• Your business should tailor conversation content to match each customer’s relationship stage with your brand. A first-time visitor and an existing customer need different things. HubSpot’s chatbot test showed that different segments of your audience have different problems, and what works for one isn’t best for another.
• Your brand should express its personality through tone, emojis, images, and video in conversational messages. Tone, emojis, images, and video can reinforce your brand. The goal is to share value rather than push a sale, because people are quick to ignore anything that feels like a pitch.

Pro tip: Businesses should write chatbot copy to match the conversational style and language of their best sales representatives. Read it aloud, and cut anything that sounds like a form.

Conversational Marketing Examples

These marketing conversation examples show how brands use chat, messaging, and AI to answer questions and guide customers. The early ones show where the approach started, and the current ones show where it’s going.

Sephora and HelloFresh

The platforms behind these early examples have changed, but the ideas still work.

• Sephora: In 2016, Sephora launched a Kik chatbot that opened with a short quiz about age group, favorite brands, and must-have products, then delivered tailored recommendations and let people buy without leaving the app. It later added Messenger bots, including a Reservation Assistant for booking makeovers. What still holds: Ask one easy question at a time, then use the answers to personalize what comes next.
• HelloFresh: In 2017, HelloFresh launched Freddy Freshbot on Facebook Messenger to handle customer service, recipe ideas, FAQs, and meal reminders. What still holds: Support that continues after the sale keeps customers cooking and subscribing.

Current Messaging and AI Use Cases

• Domino’s: Customers with an Easy Order saved in their Pizza Profile can order by texting a pizza emoji or the words “Easy Order.” Domino’s AnyWare also lists ordering through Alexa, Apple CarPlay, and Apple Watch. What we like: The conversation uses a single text, and the customer never leaves the channel they’re already in.
• HubSpot customers: Synergym says HubSpot’s customer agent resolves 85% of its support requests autonomously, and ISSA reports cutting first-response time from 7.5 hours to 4 hours.
• Bank of America’s Erica: In 2025, 20.6 million people used Erica nearly 700 million times for proactive, personalized financial guidance. What still holds: Assistants work best when they start the conversation with something useful, like an alert or a tip, rather than waiting to be asked.
• Sephora in ChatGPT: In March 2026, Sephora began piloting an app in ChatGPT in the U.S. that offers product recommendations and can use a customer’s Beauty Insider profile for personalization, with checkout planned. What still holds: Customers increasingly start product discovery in AI conversations, so your content and data need to work there too.
• Klarna: Klarna’s AI assistant had 2.3 million conversations in its first month, covering two-thirds of its customer service chats and cutting resolution time from 11 minutes to under two. In 2025, the CEO said an emphasis on cost had lowered quality, and Klarna began recruiting human agents again.

Pro tip: Klarna’s story is the best argument for a hybrid model. Let AI handle routine questions, and make it easy for a customer to reach a person for anything complex or sensitive.

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How Conversational Marketing Will Grow Your Business

Start with one goal and work backward. Know what you want to get out of each conversation and what data you need to make that happen, because every conversation should add value to your business. Then review your results regularly and keep improving the experience. Two essentials make that possible: a CRM and chatbots.

Your CRM and Conversational Marketing

A CRM is your shared memory. It stores communication history and customer details, so every conversation on every channel starts with context.

• Collect the basics and the history. You don’t need to know everything about a customer, just the essentials and what you’ve discussed before.
• Start with the outcome. Decide what you want customers to accomplish in chat, then work out which information you need to make that happen.
• Track what’s happening. Watch performance, moments of confusion or drop-off, and new questions.

What we like: In HubSpot, chat conversations are logged to the contact record, and you can target chat flows with segmented lists based on CRM data. A returning customer and a first-time visitor can see different bots.

Adding Automation with Chatbots

Business happens in every time zone, every minute of the day. Chatbots keep conversations going around the clock and help smaller teams keep up with volume.

Chatbots can:

• Answer FAQs and customer-specific questions using data you already have
• Qualify leads
• Book meetings
• Collect quick feedback after a conversation
• Route conversations to the right person

Pro tip: Never use a bot as a barrier between customers and a person. Offer a clear path to a human for complex or sensitive questions, and track handoff and drop-off rates to identify where your bots fall short.

An Inbound Approach to Conversations

Developing a conversational marketing strategy requires patience as you juggle the daily demands of running a business. That’s why Stealth AI founder Brian Bagdasarian created some tips for building a conversational marketing strategy. You can’t just set and forget your conversational marketing strategy. You have to optimize your strategy to see the best results continuously, but there are five things you should keep in mind:

• Personalize
• Contextualize
• Standardize
• Empathize
• Optimize

Personalize

When speaking with a customer or prospect, conversations should be personalized with relevant shared knowledge. Shared knowledge is the foundation of good conversations. Think about it: If you’ve already given a business your phone number, do you really want to waste time reciting it every time you have a simple question? Personalized details keep the conversation authentic and help you get to the root of the issue quickly.

Contextualize

Including in conversations improves the end-user experience and minimizes misunderstandings—get straight to the center of the issue. Because you don’t have to waste time collecting information you already have access to, you can provide immediate value. Context is necessary to help answer the right question, at the right time, in the best way possible.

Conversations that aim to answer the most important question first will provide the best user experience. Even though it’s a conversation, it isn’t like one with friends. When customers interact with your business, chances are they don’t want to spend time talking about cat videos or their weekend plans. They want to address their most urgent need as efficiently as possible. Spend time analyzing your interactions to determine what data will help improve your customer relationships.

Standardize

However, it’s important not to get too caught up in personalizing your messages. While personalization and contextualization are important, standardizing elements of your conversations helps bring professionalism and consistency to your business. Conversations should be consistent.

Identify your customers’ most frequently asked questions and draft approved answers for bots and marketers to use. Repeating conversations will help automate, optimize, and improve future interactions. Predictable conversations help users have a natural dialogue with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Standardization is imperative to delivering clear, consistent answers across conversations and users.

Empathize

Before you solve a problem, show the customer you understand it. Imagine you get a coupon code from your favorite store, spend half an hour deciding what to buy, and then the code doesn’t work at checkout. You don’t just want a fix. You want the business to acknowledge how frustrating that was, and then help.

That order matters on every channel, including bots:

• Your business should acknowledge the customer’s problem first before offering a solution. Name the specific problem in plain words (“Sorry that code didn’t work after you’d built your cart”), then give the solution.
• Businesses should write bot and template replies to address frustrated customers, not only those with routine requests. Make sure bot and template replies include empathetic language for moments when something has gone wrong.
• Your business should ensure a human agent remains accessible when a customer is upset or the issue is complex. When the customer is upset or the issue is complex, make it easy to reach one.

Pro tip: Track satisfaction to see how conversations feel. HubSpot’s conversational marketing team added a post-chat survey to its live chat and reported a 7% increase in CSAT after acting on the feedback.

Optimize

Finally, it’s crucial to optimize. Learn from your past conversations so you can improve them in the future. Businesses should choose the channel that best suits both the communication strengths required and the type of answer needed. Aim to provide answers that people would receive in a real, one-to-one conversation.

For example, live chat or phone support might be better, while a messaging app could be a better choice for content delivery. Businesses should listen to customer feedback and observe their behavior to identify where their conversational strategy needs improvement.

Conversational marketing is a repetitive process, and what seemed to be the solution does not always provide the best experience. Take time to ask your customers for feedback. Their advice will help you delight your next customer. Remember, every conversation should be impactful and help add value to your business.

How to know it’s working. Optimizing starts with measuring, and the right metric depends on where a conversation sits in the funnel. Pick one or two metrics per stage and compare against your own baseline rather than an industry average. Benchmarks vary widely by traffic source, page intent, audience, and how each team defines a “conversation” or a “resolution.”

Define your terms before comparing numbers. HubSpot’s customer agent, for example, counts a conversation as resolved when the agent provides support and no handoff to a human rep happens for 72 hours, and it can also count a lead qualification as a resolution. Another team’s “resolved” may mean something different.

Pro tip: Judge each conversation type by its own goal. A sales chat is measured on qualified meetings, and a support chat on resolution and satisfaction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of conversational marketing?

Common examples include live chat that greets website visitors and routes them to the right person, chatbots that qualify leads and book meetings, and text-based ordering, like Domino’s pizza-emoji texts. More recent examples include Bank of America’s Erica assistant, Sephora’s pilot app in ChatGPT, and HubSpot customers using the customer agent to resolve support requests automatically.

What is conversational advertising?

Conversational advertising, also called conversational ads, uses ads that start a conversation instead of sending people to a landing page or form. The most common format is the click-to-message ad. According to Meta, these ads send people who click directly into a conversation with your business on Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

Because the conversation begins the moment someone clicks, reply speed matters. A shared inbox like HubSpot’s, which connects WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger conversations alongside live chat and email, lets your team respond from one place.

Pro Tip: Before running click-to-message ads, make sure a person or a chatbot is ready to reply within minutes, with an easy path to a human for complex questions.

Moving Forward: Why Conversations Are the Future

Customers have gone from waiting days for a reply to expecting one in minutes, on the channel they choose. Conversational marketing helps you meet that expectation with fast answers, personal context, and a real person whenever it matters.

Getting there takes more than a chat widget. A full conversational strategy runs on connected infrastructure:

• Marketing Hub brings the automation behind your campaigns. HubSpot offers more advanced chat features in Marketing Hub editions to help you automate and scale.
• Sales Hub turns conversations into a pipeline. Its free plan includes live chat, and AI analyzes conversation transcripts, emails, and deal history to suggest CRM updates, draft follow-up emails, and next steps.
• Service Hub is where conversations become resolved tickets, through a help desk and omnichannel service. Customer agent is available on Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.

All three build on HubSpot Smart CRM, so every conversation adds to one customer record instead of starting from scratch.

Start small: pick one channel, one goal, and one metric, then expand. The channel, the conversation, and how the strategy fits your overall inbound marketing strategy are what need your attention the most.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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