Conversational Commerce: Simple Guide to Follow to Increase Sales

The busiest shopping season is nearby, and we wanted to introduce a quick guide to conversational commerce to help you convert more customers quickly.

It’s obvious that online shopping can be exhausted for some people, especially those who love to research a lot before buying anything.

Shoppers nowadays are also more cynical and expect brands to read their thoughts and offer them personalized offers. Although this sounds impossible, we are here to say it’s quite common for successful brands to invest in conversational commerce methods.

Let’s see what’s the fuss with this term and what are some techniques you can quickly adopt today to start seeing positive results.

What Is Conversational Commerce?

In a nutshell, conversational commerce is the adopting of different digital communications like chatbots or messaging apps to drive the communication between a client and a brand to convert sales.

Conversational commerce can start at the beginning of the sales journey, as early as the research phase. Answering important questions from the get-go increases your chances of a sale and improves customer loyalty.

How Does Conversational Commerce Look Like:

“Ironically, a lot of people think that they’ve never used a chatbot, they’ve never experienced it, when in fact they have. Because Siri and Google and Alexa and all those voice-activated speaking bots, if you will, those are actually audio chatbots.” Kelly Noble Mirabella, Spiderworking

Conversational commerce or chat commerce is an automated type of communication. It looks like a chat conversation on a website, a help center in an app, a two-way SMS, or a rich media message.

The term became popular when brands figured that while they were promoting their products and services on the messaging channels, they grew the numbers of users considerably.

Since then, the popularity of channels changed.

• WhatsApp is the number one messaging app with over 2 billion active users
• Messenger has fewer users, around 1.3 billion
• WeChat, with 1.2 billion users
• Snapchat with 332 million users
• Telegram with 55.2 million users
• many other smaller players

Benefits of Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is tied to delivering superior customer service and improving customer experiences while shopping.

Because all channels are important and with a diverse customer range, an omnichannel strategy is what we advise businesses to invest in. Here’s a few tips to make it count:

1. Plan individual customer touchpoints to better direct customers towards making a sale.
2. Never forget a chance to personalize a conversation.
3. Always allow customers to pick up a conversation where they left off.
4. Be polite and try to solve their issues.
5. Allows customer to continue conversations on other channels.
6. Create seamless experiences by offering a variety of communication channels.

Important Statistics to Get You Started

Consider the following stats relating to conversational commerce:

• 9 out of 10 consumers would like to use messaging to communicate with businesses.

• 84% of consumers say that the overall experience with a brand is as important as the product or service itself.

• 75% of customers will increase their spending with a brand they follow on social media.

• 40% of consumers expect brands to respond within the first hour of reaching out on social media.

• 80% of consumers begin their buying process from a mobile device.

• 73% of consumers say that an exceptional experience with one business changes their expectations of other businesses.

• 78% of consumers would like local businesses to continue offering contactless payment.

Types of Conversational Commerce

Live chat software

Live chats are one of the most popular technologies that exist on eCommerce sites. They are great extension or replacements of customer support, being available 24/7 for your customers’ needs.

Ecommerce live chat allows businesses to be there when customers have questions. You can either automate answers by implementing scripts, or have a live-agent option available, or a combination of the two.

It’s an essential part of the ecommerce customer experience, and it can help your online shoppers feel more secure in their purchases.

In conversational commerce, live chats can be a great way to completely turn a shopping experience around.

Chatbots

Firstly, by deploying a customer service chatbot, companies can significantly reduce their operational efficiency by automating low-value manual tasks that were performed by live agents.

As a result of the simulated human conversations through text or voice interactions, companies achieved higher productivity and customer engagement.

Chatbots as a solution for conversational commerce is a great move. They are super easy to integrate and with a flexible infrastructure, chatbots can be added to your omnichannel strategy.

Brands can then use chatbots as extensions of other channels to continue a conversation or complete a transaction.

Messaging Apps

A messaging app, like Messenger or WhatsApp, is a chat platform that lets you exchange instant messages.

Consumers are eagerly using them because of their private communication, to contact brands, or for online shopping.

Messaging apps are useful because they allow the use of pictures, videos, and Gifs that can increase customer engagement and keeping the conversation spirit lighter.

Same goes for Rich Media Messaging which can achieve high open and engagement rates of up to 48% for brands.

Voice Assistants

Could voice assistants be the future of conversational commerce or eCommerce in general? With voice search becoming one of the most preferred searches, it would not surprise us.

Voice assistants can offer immediate answers to voice commands and are growing in popularity among businesses looking to improve customer relations.

In fact, 40% of the United States population use voice search features and 71 percent of consumers prefer to conduct queries by voice instead of typing.

Conclusion

Conversational commerce is directly related to conversational marketing. Continue to add value through personalization and improving customer experiences, and you’ll find yourself converting more.

Interested in learning more about conversational commerce? Don’t hesitate to contact us to find out more our messaging solutions.