Making One-Way Messaging Campaigns Conversational

NLX has recently been exploring ways to bring one-way, outbound messaging to life. We are all familiar with the current state: a customer opts in to receive messaging from a brand and they then deliver outbound messages to said customer offering promotions, limited-time offers, and the like. With only a couple of exceptions, outbound messaging hasn’t changed much from a consumer standpoint over the last couple of years. Personalization has gotten a bit better but it’s not really delivering on its promise of better conversion, improved loyalty, and other key metrics.

Given NLX’s longstanding history as an AWS partner, we looked to AWS End User Messaging as a readily available and scalable service that can take advantage of NLX’s ability to easily convert any one-way touchpoint and make it conversational. And we did just that.

With NLX + AWS End User Messaging, customers can engage with any outbound campaign and get a response that respects the brand’s guidelines. Answers about the campaign/promotion itself like “When does this promotion end?” or “Can I share my promo code with a friend?” become straightforward to support. Simple questions like “Do you have it in my size?” or “What colors does it come in?” or “Is this shoe designed for marathon runners?” are easily answered without leaving the messaging channel the promotion came in on (i.e. WhatsApp). 

Importantly, the questions and answers from these inquiries are used to update a customer’s profile and continuously self-improve the brand’s next outbound campaign. This means outbound promotions go from “Sneaker X just launched. Use promo code SNKX20 to get 20% off” to “Sneaker X is dropping this weekend. We have your size (10 US) in stock and ready to ship. Follow this link to get 20% off and skip the line.”

To deliver on an experience like this, you only need a handful of ingredients: NLX, AWS End User Messaging, some flavor of CDP or CRM, and a campaign manager (optional).

The ability to have an ongoing conversation with a brand from inside one of the more intimate parts of a mobile device (i.e. Messages, WhatsApp, or similar) creates a tremendous opportunity for brands to build richer relationships with their customers. We are still in the earliest stages of this new form of messaging capability and in the famous words of Randy Bachman “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”