Conversational commerce is one of the ways of building relationships with your consumers. You must've known the importance of conversation for any relationship to work, be it with friends or a spouse. That rule applies to eCommerce as well.
What is conversational commerce?
It refers to your business interacting with your customers through messaging platforms such as Messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, etc. Here's an example to make understanding conversational commerce easy. You walk into a burger house, and the waiter approaches, asking what you would like. Before you can decide what you want, you ask them about the particular items or anything about the meals you saw on the menu. This conversation, but through online platforms, is conversational commerce.
Why conversational commerce is essential to grow your company, it aims to make shopping convenient for your customers, which encourages them to become loyal to your business. How? All your prospective consumers will be present on different platforms. For instance, part of potential buyers uses Facebook but not Instagram. And the other part uses Twitter and Snapchat but not Facebook. Conversational commerce requires you to be present on numerous sites to be available to your target audience on their platform.
Conversational commerce is a broad topic. But you won't have to go through multiple sites to learn all you need. Below we've discussed everything from the benefits of conversational commerce to its implementation and examples.
Benefits of Conversational Commerce
Conversational commerce enhances the online shopping experience for your buyers, resulting in a tremendous response from them.
Here are some benefits of conversational commerce for your business.
1. Personalized Experience
Everyone loves a personalized consumer experience. When people get a personalized experience, they get the impression that you value them. And that sense of being valued drives them to your brand repeatedly.
Your brand's human agents and chatbots can combine to deliver a customized experience to your consumers while they search for products or services on your site or social media pages.
Technologies such as customer intent recognition and natural language processing can help chatbots comprehend consumer behavior and make relevant product/service suggestions.
2. Decrease in Cart Abandonment Rate
One of the benefits of conversational commerce is a reduction in cart abandonment rate. Many businesses fail to complete a sale because consumers abandon a product/service in a cart for some reason. There could be numerous things holding them back from completing a purchase. That's when chatbots come in.
If your prospective consumer abandoned their selected product in the cart, your chatbot could notify them about the incomplete purchase. Sometimes it can encourage them to complete their order by offering discounts or gift cards.
3. 24/7 Customer Support
When potential buyers reach out to you, they expect instant replies. Chatbots can get back to your prospects, offering them relevant suggestions or even answering simple questions through keyword recognition. A high level of consumer support tells your prospects that you value them, which helps them trust your brand.
4. Helps You Get Buyer's Feedback
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One of the greatest benefits of conversational commerce is getting consumer feedback without involving a live agent. Customer reviews tell you about your target audience's needs helping you develop products/services they would love.
Another plus point of customer reviews is increased brand credibility. You can display those reviews on your website or social media pages to make it easy for other prospects to trust your brand.
Your journey with a consumer doesn't end when you deliver the product. Your chatbots can send them follow-up messages after receiving their order, asking for feedback.
5. Takes Care of Multilingual Consumers
Every prospective consumer should be taken care of regardless of language. Multilingual chatbots break language barriers allowing your business to expand its customer base and do business with foreign buyers.
6. Helps Your Customer Decide
Sometimes users get indecisive. They need the last push that points toward the right product for them at that time. Your chatbots or live agents can reach out to customers like this and help them decide, increasing your sales conversion chances.
Examples of Conversational Commerce
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You must've come across multiple conversational commerce platforms but didn't recognize them because you probably weren't familiar with this term. Here is a list of conversational commerce examples through which companies connect with their target audience.
1. Live Chat
Live chat has a significant impact on your customer experience. It allows your brand's human agents to interact with two to three customers simultaneously, keeping your users from experiencing a long wait time.
Through live chat, you can engage with your site visitors who otherwise might have left without any engagements. When communicating with your site visitors, you can implement strategies and try to convert them into your customers.
2. Messaging Apps
Messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Messenger, and WeChat are among the most popular conversational commerce platforms through which numerous people connect with bands daily.
Messaging apps are similar to live chat, except they don't take space on your site and allow users to send and receive videos and photos. These apps help you create a natural conversation, persuading prospective consumers and generating more sales.
3. Chatbots
A chatbot is software that communicates with customers without a live agent. It can converse with multiple consumers reducing your prospects' waiting time. You can implement chatbots on every conversational commerce platform, like websites and messaging apps.
Chatbots allow brands to connect with their target audience with minimal effort and reduce the cost of hiring numerous customer support representatives.
Many types of chatbots perform different jobs. For instance, multilingual chatbots converse with customers in their preferred language using artificial intelligence.
4. Notifications
Have you ever visited a website where a pop-up asked you if you would like to get updates from them? Or have you given your email to a website and received notifications about the latest updates? These are some of the most popular examples of conversational commerce.
When people are given the option to choose whether they want to receive notifications, they think they have some authority, which helps build trust with the brand.
Tips for Getting Started With Conversational Commerce
After knowing why conversational commerce is vital for a company, you would want to adopt it. To help you with that, we've compiled a list of easy-to-follow tips to implement conversational commerce.
1. Identify Your Brand's Problems
Identifying your problems will tell you which strategies you should implement. For instance, what is the first problem you want conversational commerce to solve? Is it the cart abandonment rates? Or are you unable to respond to all your prospects timely?
Once you've identified the things you need to improve, rank them. You cannot solve the issues all at once. Therefore, it's crucial to start with the most important ones and proceed to the least important ones one by one.
A great way to identify your weaknesses is to check your consumers' feedback. Listening to your customers' feedback can help you improve drastically.
2. Research
Research is the key to excelling in any kind of business. You need to research your target audience to know on what platform most of them are present. Then, you can begin with that platform and invest most of your effort and money there.
You must also research your competitors to know what strategies they're implying. This will help you stay ahead of them.
3. Monitor Your Performance
Image taken from Strikignly’s user’s website
Once your business has adopted conversational commerce, monitor the changes it brought. See if it solved the problems your customers were facing and fulfilled its purpose: generate sales and help you connect with your customers efficiently.
Adopt Conversational Commerce with Strikingly
Strikingly is a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder that allows you to create a stunning responsive website using pre-designed website templates. We at Strikingly care about our users and their customers. We offer our users numerous features for communicating with their prospects and existing customers.
Image taken from Strikingly
On your Strikingly website, you can enable the live chat feature to communicate with your users on-site, offer email subscriptions to give your consumers the latest updates about your brand, and add social media buttons to connect with your audience on multiple social media platforms.
You can add live chat to your Strikingly website in three simple steps.
1. Open the website editor and go to "Settings."
2. Go to "Audience," then tap "Live chat" from the drop-down menu.
3. Click the "Activate live chat" button, and that's it.
Another way of connecting to your audience is by enabling comments on your blog posts. If you plan on creating a blog using Strikingly, you must consider enabling your readers to comment on your posts and give their opinions or give content ideas.
You can use this article as your ultimate guide to growing your business through conversational commerce. Lastly, remember that conversational commerce is about making shopping from your brand convenient for your customers. Therefore, you must take adequate measures to solve your consumers' problems promptly.
