Conversational Commerce: How Conversational Chatbot Marketing is Future of Ecommerce[Tips and Tools]

Here, we are going to discuss Conversational Marketing for Ecommerce aka “Conversational Commerce”. Do you know? How conversational chatbot marketing is going to transform the future of e-commerce and the ways of serving prospective visitors for online stores? Let’s take a deep dive…

Trends change in e-commerce industry based on the changing needs and demands of customers along with the introduction of new technological features. This industry has kept expanding over the past decade keeping in pace with the growing demands for online marketing. This past decade has also noticed an increase in the number of e-commerce businesses which led to an increase in competition in the online market. In this scenario, it has become important for the e-commerce businesses to keep the flow of service uninterrupted and the automation is being used in order to fulfil the growing demands of consumers. Of late, many e-commerce businesses use Chatbots to provide customer-centric and customer-driven service with the help of conversational Chatbot marketing.

What is Conversational Marketing?

Conversational marketing is one type of inbound marketing strategy which is used in order to engage the visitors to a website and to convert the leads via various dialogue-driven activities. This marketing strategy focuses on interactions with the customers instead of focusing on one-way communication. The tools capable of capturing leads or communicating with the users in their preferred mode of communication are used for this type of marketing. Some messaging apps (WhatsApp or Social Media) are used for this type of marketing, as they unify the sales team with the users’ needs.

Benefits of Conversational Marketing in Ecommerce

Conversational marketing can be included in the existing inbound marketing strategy without modifying the current process. You may use it as an alternative to the marketing strategy that is currently working for your business with respect to sales, and customer service. The main benefits of using conversational marketing for any type of business are -

• Gathering accurate data regarding your audience
• Personalized service to build a stronger relationship with consumers
• Shorter sales cycle which saves time
• Enhanced customer satisfaction
• Creating more leads and increasing sales through new channels
• An automated tool with 24/7 availability

It is possible to refine the existing inbound marketing strategy of your businesses with the inclusion of conversational marketing.

How Conversational Marketing Works?

Conversational marketing works in the following manner…

Stage 1) Connecting with the Audience

You may use a Chatbot to start an amicable conversation with the visitors landing on your website. It is better than using lead-generation forms and pop-ups. A chatbot is a powerful tool. You may personalize its features based upon the theme of your brand and the behaviour of your audience. You may manually customize the script or use artificial intelligence for this task.

• A visitor may notice the chat-box at the corner of your website and may decide whether or not to start the conversation. If an audience is interested in chatting, then the script (on Chatbot) will guide him/her to become a part of the sales funnel as a lead or customer. You may customize the script for conversation based upon various parameters.
• You may use the Chatbots as a customer-service tool.
• The Chatbots may be used as a sales and lead generation tool.
• Chatbots may be customized to send targeted messages to different visitors to your website.

Chatbots are expected to have more advanced features in the near future with the advancement of AI technology.

They may have the ability to answer the queries with a higher level of intelligence or to resolve the issues that are currently being handled by the customer service representatives.

Stage 2) Understanding Behavior of Audience

E-mail nurture campaigns are developed based upon the behaviour of past users and you have to develop the right marketing automation system for such campaigns. It enables you to build and maintain a relationship with the leads. You cannot accomplish these tasks without understanding the behaviour of audiences to your website or target customers. It is a time-consuming task. The sales team has to work hard in order to create customer segments or to find out qualified leads.

Chatbots can complete the entire process while interacting with first-time visitors to your website.

Chatbots can be used to separate the leads in a few steps.

• Design a Chatbot which asks visitors to select one of the specified options or answers.
• You may customize the content or offers based upon a visitor’s needs or demands depending upon the answer. However, you have to design the right script for the Chatbot if you want to ask qualifying questions and want to collect relevant data.

Chatbots can automatically monitor the visitors’ behaviour. They need not even interact with the visitors for this task. They can divide the audiences based upon your selected properties, such as;

• Visited/viewed pages
• Interaction with customer-service
• Cart abandonment
• Geolocation/language
• Browser

You may even develop conversational landing pages using Chatbots and they can answer the questions of each prospect in real-time. You can accomplish the following tasks when Chatbots are used for conversational marketing.

• Automating the process of customer communication
• Personalizing the content
• Using the collected data for future email campaigns or lead nurturing

Stage 3) Sales Ready Data

Chatbots are ideal for repetitive tasks or less complicated tasks related to marketing. You may use them to learn about the preferences of visitors to your website. However, human interaction may be required in order to move the visitors towards the last stage of ‘sales funnel’ that is a purchase.

At the last stage of conversational marketing, the collected data are transferred to the sales team. This team may use these data to understand the behaviour and expectation of customer segments. Sales representatives can personalize a buyer’s journey based upon the collected information in order to successfully convert the prospects into your customers.

A Chatbot can be designed to suggest the visitors chat with a sales rep or to place a call once he/she has passed through the automated qualification phase. You may display a link through chat-box which can be used in order to call a sales rep. A Chatbot may even keep you informed whenever a prospect leaves the e-commerce site or delete items from the shopping cart if it is designed to rescue data regarding ‘abandoned’ shopping carts.

A Chatbot can be designed not only to learn about a visitors’ decision after abandoning the shopping cart. It can be designed to troubleshoot the issues that prompted such decision (abandonment of shopping cart) or to persuade the prospects to complete the transaction.

How to Implement Conversational Marketing

Unify Conversational Marketing with Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel customer support has been found to do wonders for many businesses and conversational marketing can generate better results if you pair it up with an omnichannel strategy.

Businesses providing omnichannel customer experience use multiple digital platforms (social-media, Chatbots or Smartphone) to interact with the target customers. You can synthesize the customer experience across all digital platforms by implementing the omnichannel marketing strategy. It enables you to develop engaging content for the target customers. Hence, the chance of conversion is higher if you unify omnichannel marketing with conversational marketing.

A Chatbot can be designed for two-way communication. Customers can send you text messages on your official business website alongside sending messages to the social media account. You can have all these data to the user history. However, it is essential to have sufficient information as well as support-guides for different stages of the buying cycle.

Provide Personalized Content for Better Result

These days, online customers may have an ‘attention span’ of a few seconds and it is not easy to capture their attention within this limited period of time. The advertisements and promotional campaigns cannot help you in this regard, as most customers disregard this type of content.

Therefore, you have to create personalized content using relevant data based upon your customers’ needs. You may use the data regarding customers’ behaviour or preferences (collected through Chatbot) to create relevant content for your customers. You may even use various data-tools or mobile-apps to provide engaging customer-experience and to lower customer attrition. You may even notice an improvement in brand loyalty if the ‘customer-experience’ is consistent across all channels.

Unify Human Voice and Automated Conversation

Your customers may prefer chatting with another human being instead of a Chatbot. Hence, it is important to design the ‘chat script’ of the Chatbot in a way that it sounds like having a conversation with a human. You may add videos/GIF/Emoji to the chat flow. You may even use the ‘AI (Artificial Intelligence) plus Human’ model for conversational marketing. In this model, conversation with a Chatbot continues unless a user needs to talk to a support executive.

Benefits of Implementing Conversational Marketing in Your Ecommerce Business

Personalized Conversation

You can make the visitors to your e-commerce site feel appreciated using personalized messages. These days, you cannot capture the attention of customers using generic marketing scripts. They can easily figure out which messages are promotional, and most customers ignore such messages. You have to use personalized conversation to engage the customers or to encourage the prospects to share what they think about your brand, product or services.

Less Workload for Customer Support Team

You may use the assistance of ‘customer support’ team to resolve the complex issues, as Chatbots can be used to automate various tasks that can be performed without requiring human intelligence, such as

• Onboarding prospects
• Capturing their details
• Sending out notifications
• Routing visitors to the concerned departments or customer-care executives etc.

In the future, Chatbots are expected to have an assortment of improved features due to advancement in technology.

All-Day & All-Time Availability

Chatbots remain available 24×7 to answer to the queries of prospects or customers. On one hand, it reduces the workload of the customer support team. On the other hand, it keeps your customers or prospects happy and reduces customer attrition. The 24×7 availability of Chatbots has another benefit. You need not have a dedicated team to work post business hours in order to handle the customers who may prefer contacting your business on weekends or at a later time of the day.

Easy Identification of Qualified Leads

It is a time-consuming process to find qualified prospects. However, Chatbots can easily identify such leads when used for conversational marketing. Hence, the customer-service team need not spend hours to qualify the leads and you may finally bid adieu to capture forms.

Have Better Understanding of Customers

Chatbots have a real-time conversation with the visitors to your website and can collect a variety of information regarding their likes, dislikes or complaints. After having detailed information regarding your visitors, you can identify qualified leads or make necessary adjustments to the areas that need improvement. Alongside helping the visitors to your e-commerce website, this information can keep you updated regarding different aspects of your business.

Tools to Implement Conversational Marketing Successfully

Intercom: This is a Conversational Relationship Platform. Using Intercom, businesses can build better customer relationships through customized and messenger-first experience across a customer’s journey. This platform delivers conversational experiences with solutions for Conversational Support, Conversational Customer Engagement and Conversational Marketing.

HubSpot Free Live Chat: At present, more than 68,800 customers in over 100 countries use software applications of HubSpot along with its services and support in order to modify the way they attract, engage and entertain the customers. It is made of Sales Hub, Marketing Hub and Service Hub. It also comes with a free and powerful CRM. It has everything that a business may need in order to successfully run the inbound marketing campaigns.

ActiveCampaign: This is a category-defining CXA (Customer Experience Automation) platform. It has helped more than 120,000 businesses around the world to connect to their customers to date. It can automate numerous sales, marketing or support processes to provide better customer experience. Businesses of all sizes have access to pre-built automation when using ActiveCampaign, such as marketing automation, email marketing, CRM or machine learning.

Explore here, all the conversational chatbot marketing tools…