Every online business owner wants to get more sales and conversions. But everyone knows securing a sale requires a conversation with an active buyer. It’s vital for eCommerce as the customers stay more connected with each other and the brands they love. 

No matter whether you stay connected with customers via a chatbot, chat app, or messaging platform – it’s essential to make customer communication useful and well-structured to motivate them to purchase. That is where conversational commerce comes into play. 

It helps brands build an online reputation, secure conversations and compensate for online stores’ need for a personal touch. According to this research, total spending on conversation commerce channels is expected to reach $290 billion by 2025. That proves the fact that conversational commerce is the future of customer engagement. 

What Is Conversational Commerce?

Conversational commerce is a new form of eCommerce marketing, also known as conversational marketing or chat commerce. 

It lets customers and brands communicate via conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology like live chat, chatbots, messaging apps, or voice assistants. But, some brands also have live representatives to increase customer lifetime value and provide high-level expertise. 

Conversational commerce allows online retailers to unlock the potential of customer interactions to sell more products and services. It is a good way to go with customers at every step of their buying journey and add a human touch to their communications. 

This technology can help you answer customer queries and provide an introduction to your products or services. It is like having a sales representative behind the desk at the physical store, but it all happens online for consumers to find solutions to their problems quickly. 

How To Use Conversational Commerce To Boost Sales

You know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It can take some time to incorporate your conversational commerce strategy. If you want to stand out, keep the following tips in mind. 

1. Prioritize Your Business Goals

Before using conversational commerce, you should set realistic business goals, especially regarding a new eCommerce business. Think about problems your customers face and what you can offer to fix them. Research how other businesses in your area take advantage of conversational commerce.  

Your strategies should align with social media and messaging platforms that specific gender, age and geographic groups use to maintain customer awareness. That will help you deliver more personalized conversations and messages to satisfy customers and increase the overall customer experience.

Once you make your dream list, group and prioritize the most crucial goals for your business. Increase sales or deliver more convenient customer support – just name them and provide available solutions.

You can ask for demos or sign up for free trials to learn more about solutions’ pros and cons. Don’t be afraid to try novelties and test how they work for your business. Ask your customer’s opinions and research reviews to find gaps in your services.

2. Identify a Reliable Conversational Solution

Finding an effective conversational commerce option to integrate with your business is essential. But more important is implementing and handling it potently without using professionals on board. Fortunately, there is a wide range of valuable solutions, such as live chat, chatbots, voice assistants, messaging apps, social media, or SMS text messaging. To improve communication efficiency, consider auto-forwarding SMS to email for seamless access to important customer interactions and inquiries.

Let’s say you choose a live chat option to answer common queries. That means you should train your employees to deliver high-quality live support via text. You must provide fast service within 30-40 seconds, or customers will get angry and abandon your website. If you can’t do it, you should look for chatbots. 

Before choosing a conversation solution, consider what business goals you want to achieve and how you can solve your customers’ aches and pains. You can hire a specialist or agency to help you decide, implement and manage which tool to use to make conversations more effective and easier with customers.

3. Apply Conversational AI Automation

Conversation AI automation is the process of using artificial intelligence or AI to automate interactivity between people and programs in a conversational, two-way format. That will help you improve both the customer and employee experience. 

Automating support with conversational AI considers the following things: 

• Provide immediate 24/7 live support and availability.
• Personalize your conversational experience at any buyer journey.
• Offer cross-selling and up-selling product recommendations.

As you know, customers can show up at any time in different time zones. Being available around the clock and answering their questions immediately is essential. According to this research, 90% of online shoppers consider swift responses to their problems as an important thing of customer support, while 60% can wait for this 10 minutes or less. 

If you have a good budget, you can hire live chat agents to quickly respond to different issues like changes, order status, or shipping. When it comes to AI chatbots, they are less expensive and require minimal manpower. That means that speed is essential for improving customer experience and the likelihood of purchasing.

Personalize your offers, messaging and information at every customer journey stage before purchasing. Consider what stages they may want to contact you and learn more about. Many bot integrations with customer relationship management systems (CRMs) allow you to get customer data, including their previous interactions, purchase history and whether they are current customers or leads. You can use this information to tailor your messaging and easier guide customers through the buying process.

Advanced AI technologies can help you monitor customers’ preferences and suggest relevant products based on personalized data. It will make the shopping experience more intuitive and effective for your company. 

You should automate instant cross-selling and up-selling product recommendations once you detect customers’ intentions and purchase history. With conversational AI, you can quickly solve their problems and provide recommendations based on collected data to increase conversion rates.

4. Optimize Your Website for Voice User Interface

Gone are the days of the traditional graphical user interface. Right now, it looks more conversational and natural. Its main idea is simplicity – customers can find everything they want, order that, orient themselves, or say something into their smartphone in real time.

Here are some tips to optimize your website for voice user interface:

• Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness for Your Website

Someone who initiates voice commands prefers using smartphones for that. According to this research study, 27% of all global users perform voice searches on mobile to find something they need. That’s why mobile responsiveness matters if you want to make it easier for customers to interact with your conversational website.

The best way to analyze your mobile responsiveness is to conduct a site audit using WebCEO, which will do it within a few seconds. By doing it, you can check out your website for mobile optimization, detect any existing gaps in technical and mobile search engine optimization (SEO) and quickly fix them.

• Include Long-Tail Keywords

You know well that people use more words when they speak. Using more explicit and relevant search terms is essential when optimizing your site for the voice user interface. Using long-tail keywords makes sense, especially if you want to target more niche-related search queries and boost conversions.

People and search engines love when websites provide answers to the most frequent questions that are easy to read, relevant and short. The best way to do it is to create a frequently asked question or FAQ section on your conversation website. 

Add structured data markups to ensure search engines easily understand your content. 

That will indicate that your content is speech-friendly for the voice user interface.

5. Create an Omnichannel Presence 

Customers want to use different channels to research products or services and come into contact with their customer service and checkout in their buying journey. Businesses must adopt new platforms and create an omnichannel presence across all customer touchpoints.

Start by blueprinting your customer journey and supporting touchpoints with good technology. First, you should build a unified customer profile across all channels. That helps you meet customers’ needs by providing a highly individualized approach and increasing profitability. Chatbots can create a great omnichannel experience.

Use Google Business Messages for your brand. Once users find your company on a mobile search or a map, they can easily click Google Business Messages and start a one-to-one conversation. This way of connection is perfect for customers who use voice or video when searching for answers to their questions.

One more thing to consider is the platform-independent chatbots. You can use platforms like Facebook, SMS, or other messaging apps to increase multi-channel engagement and brand perception. Using chatbot technology, customers can quickly interact with your business around the clock in real-time.

6. Monitor Your Performance 

Before monitoring your conversational commerce success, choose the best key performance indicators (KPIs), such as satisfaction core, conversion rates, or customer conversations for your business. That will help you better understand which technology and solutions receive greater results and which require improvement. 

Ensure that asking customers about their experience with your company is an important part of your performance. Moreover, 79% of consumers want to share useful information about businesses to let them tailor customer experience. So, that will help you detect areas you need to improve and build better customer relationships.

To get it right, monitor your performance and adjust your conversational activities at any customer journey stage. You can do it using real-time metrics.

Conclusion

Conversational commerce is a new era in the eCommerce world that helps businesses and customers interact directly and develop better relationships. Real-time communication tools, like chatbots, voice assistants, or messaging apps, can bring tremendous value to any brand. 

Creating a new strategy may take time and resource investment, and managing all the channels may be challenging initially. But step by step, everything will line up by making your customers feel comfortable while staying home.