Marketo Supercharges Dynamic Chat

Adobe have announced a major product update for Dynamic Chat, the often ignored chatbot feature within Marketo. The update finally gives Adobe a viable conversational marketing product, that will interest Marketo users without an alternative chat solution.

Adobe have been heavily promoting the Dynamic Chat capability within Marketo for a while. They see it as an important upsell for users of the Marketo platform. It was rolled out to all instances last year. However, adoption of Marketo's conversational marketing capabilities has been limited by a restricted feature set.

Perhaps the most significant limitation has been the lack of live chat. At the moment, Marketo Dynamic Chat can only be used to create chatbots, which means that it's often ignored in favour of an all-in-one chat solution. Many brands look to include the option of live chat with LDRs as part of their conversation flows. A purely bot-based chat solution simply isn't flexible enough, even for marketing, as it can't cover bottom of funnel use cases.

Prime

This week, Adobe will release a new Dynamic Chat Prime SKU that includes Live Chat capabilities. The new feature will include dynamic routing and ABM-based routing, as well as an SDK that can be used to implement Dynamic Chat on any landing page. It's still early days. However, it does mean that Marketo is now a viable solution for piloting chatbots across any campaign. Before now, it's been used for pilot projects or one-off campaigns rather than as a key channel for lead generation.

The launch of a viable Adobe solution for conversation marketing has implications for other vendors of chatbot apps, particularly marketing-focused solutions such as Drift. Conversational marketing definitely has a role to play in aiding content discovery and accelerating lead generation. Chatbots are an excellent channel for personalising the customer experience, because they allow you to seamlessly collect the information needed for the personalisation to be accurate and effective.

Beyond Marketing?

Although, the use cases for customer chat extend far beyond marketing. For many enterprise organisations, chat is often seen foremost as a support or sales capability rather than a marketing capability. That's ignoring any e-commerce use cases, which Marketo can solve, but for which there are more specialist solutions. However, that introduces friction into the customer experience because it means that customers can't be transparently passed between teams depending on their requirements.

For many brands, chat provides an easy way to screen support queries before they reach sales. That's often the first thing that marketers use chatbots for. If sales, marketing, and support are all using different systems, this is more difficult. The latest Marketo Dynamic Chat enhancements at least give prospects a way to directly reach sales through chat. This is just as important.

Adobe have generally tried to pitch chat through the content discovery and personalisation benefits, which are harder to get right and have lower ROI. Typically, these capabilities are something you experiment with once you have the conversational marketing capability in place. When implementing chat on the website, marketers are instead pushed to prove ROI through better lead collection. This requires live chat to be effective. With that capability in place, Adobe now have a solution which can be pitched against the likes of Drift as a key part of the martech stack.