Defining Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is entirely different from a purely commercial, sales, or business-oriented talk, where the sales personnel try to provide product details and try to convince the customer to buy. Conversational commerce varies from a targeted ad, and personalized email, as it is an interactive communication medium that provides live and instant information. It is a combination of chatbots, artificial intelligence, and shopping to create personalized one-to-one transactional experiences with consumers. It does not demand customers to check emails or download apps. It rather engages customers using existing and preferred communication channels, like a chatbot, SMS, or Facebook Messenger. In total, conversational commerce is a combination of technology that enables live, two-way customer interaction, and shopping.

Why should Brands Consider Conversational Commerce

Consumers are shopping online and offline today and they are demanding more personalized information on discounts, offers, product updates, and availability, instantly regularly, as they want to save money and time. According to Business Insider, only 22% of the customers are getting such personalized information and a vast majority is not happy with the way they purchased a product or a service. 44% of customers that received personalized product information are revisiting the brand for repeated purchases and conversational commerce is successfully leading to enhanced brand loyalty. 

How do Conversational Commerce Engage Customers

Conversational commerce provides a seamless user experience by capturing a shopper’s attention, before planning a shopping trip. Right from creating brand awareness, it walks the customer through various stages of shopping experiences. It takes up product research for the customer and offers information on product size, price, color, utilities, and product/service qualities, features, and availability of various alternative products. It encourages customers towards conversion, leading to a purchase, and offers post-purchasing services.

Brands can equally employ these apps for sending product information, recommendations; establish an intimate conversational channel to attend to their queries, complaints, and grievances. While interacting with the customer, businesses can cross-sell, and upsell, by placing the best products that match the customer’s expectations and become personal shopping assistance like in a brick and mortar shopping.

Best Conversational Tools

 Conversational tools are used to circulate product-related information constantly to create a need in customers to buy it.

Awareness

Brands that have realized the importance of personalized messages have invested in technologies to scale such as one-to-one consumer conversations to send product recommendations, updates on discounts, waivers, and offers. Brands must consider providing multiple consumer touchpoints to ensure the brand’s reach to the target audience at the perfect moment in their consumer’s shopping journey.

Research

Customers generally like to know about a wide range of product choices and would like to compare their features, including pricing, utility, warranty period, product installation, and other services. Companies can engage machine learning tools that process language in natural ways to provide texting or voice assistance. These technologies create a feeling that you are interacting with a human being. Both chatbots and voice assistants fall within the conversational UI category and create a lasting purchasing experience. Online shopping platforms are adding innovations constantly to provide a unique shopping experience to the customers. Adoro, an online fashion network, for example, engages a chatbot that assists customers’ search needs instantly. It responds to customers’ commands, looks for a product, and places multiple alternatives to choose from. If a customer places a command to search for classic Wedding wear for women, it places several options for the customer to select. 

Considering a product/ service for Purchase

When customers have a wide range of product options to choose from, they seek assistance in finalizing them. 

An SME looking for funding to expand its business may have several institutional options. Yet, it would generally look for loyal banking services that facilitate speedy and timely services with competitive interest rates. There may be challenges like products with insufficient or no insurance coverage, huge processing charges, hidden fee, legal implications, and sharp payment deadlines. Conversational commerce is handy in placing various alternatives that suit customers’ specialized personal needs. JD.com, China’s largest eCommerce retailer has developed a conversational commerce platform on WeChat, a Chinese conversational app that lets customers borrow, lend, invest, shop, and transfer money online. 

Purchasing Decisions

Since most of the conversational commerce takes place through automated tools, brands that deployed omnichannel strategies to engage customers have made 102% progress in their conversion rates in 2020. By 2021, mobile commerce rose to prominence and over 50% of the web traffic is routed through mobile. As a result, many companies have launched SMS marketing, texting, and email marketing strategies because responses to the text messages are highly effective, and more instant when compared to answering emails, which is generally taking 3-4days. Instead, chatbots can send instant messages to the customer on their mobile phones to get responses within 3 minutes.

Customers can get a wholesome shopping experience, including payments to purchase a product, using their mobile, without ever leaving the platform. 

Post-Purchasing Experiences

Customers do ponder about their purchasing decisions, by carefully weighing every single penny they have spent on the product or service. Interactive commerce tools can clarify the shopper’s apprehensions, if any at any stage of their shopping journey, including after the product purchase.  

Major Communication Channels Used for Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce primarily relies on voice or text-based chats. Hence, automated communicational apps and tools are frequently used for this purpose. 

Chatbots

Chatbots are automated throughout and they can engage multiple customers at a time, rendering a relentless job throughout the day. What the enterprises need to do is to make a thorough and elaborate exercise of possible challenges the consumers may face across their shopping journey and be ready with suitable answers. Companies generally provide frequently asked questions as Q & A tabs on websites. They are not interactive sessions. Yet, based on such questions, companies can prepare content for a live chat. Chatbots, unlike web messages, engage customers with warmth, wit, and humor with great spontaneity. They are adding emotions through emojis, music, and sounds to make it more attractive. It is always desirable for companies to place these services under the supervision of back-end service staff to react immediately, in cases when chatbots are unable to react to a question that is not included in their memory. 

Messaging Apps

It is difficult to judge whether messaging apps have changed the way customers shop or conversational commerce has turned messaging apps pivotal to their operations, as they are integral to modern-day eCommerce operations. Facebook’s Messenger, Whatsapp, and Snapchat are the earliest platforms to embrace these features. While brands like Walmart and Alibaba have partnered with messaging application Tango, shopping app like Shopify has a deal with Facebook Messenger to promote interactive commerce. Live interaction via apps is driving more customer satisfaction as, 73% of customers are happy interacting through a messaging app when compared to 61% of customers, who preferred checking mails, and 44% of customers, receiving telephonic messages.

Messaging apps are meeting the shopping needs of customers in the below-mentioned ways.

• A communication channel to engage customers with a business in private.
• To make payments once the product purchasing completes ( E.g Facebook Messenger for Business and Snapchat’s Snapcash).
• Acting as a virtual personal assistant to serve customer needs
• Collects customers’ shipping addresses, personalized customer interests, streamlines payments, monitors delivery process, and maintains customer relations.
• Facebook M, for example, assists customers, right from product discovery to Payments through Facebook Payments.   
• Acts as a virtual employee for small business that operates with minimal staff in accomplishing several time-consuming tasks, like delivering campaigns.
• Meet the content needs of the brands and customers. E.g., Snapchat has added search features, along with photo-share and Buzzfeed added a Whatsapp button on mobile to attract more clicks.
• Quartz’s interactive app, ‘A Tidbit of News’ lets users read news on conversational mode, an innovative experience for readers where a bot responds to a customer’s request for news. It replies to their comments, and the chat interface will offer an exciting interactive user experience. 
• Brands can exploit its potentialities to deliver more personalized content to users.
• Messaging/chatting apps for diverse audience needs 

With 1.25 billion active monthly users, WeChat allows its users to perform various tasks through its app, including, but not limited to, booking a taxi, ordering food, making payments, buying flight or movie tickets, playing games, making investments (e-wallet), meeting people and many more. 

Voice-Based Conversational Commerce 

Marketers can provide customers with a seamless shopping journey across the channels by deploying automated ML and AI tools to connect with consumers. Companies have started using Amazon’s Echo, Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri, or Alexa to promote voice-based search, sales, and purchase. Linc’s voice assistant, Shopify Plus, and BigCommerce are some of the prominent examples of voice-based commerce. 128 million people in the US used a voice assistant at least monthly in 2020, up 11.1% from 115.2 million in 2019. Apart from smartphones, and smart speakers, conversational devices are present in cars and homes as smart TVs, wearables, appliances, and smart home components. It is part of the US mainstream commerce today, and people of all ages, including children, millennials, elders, and Gen Z are using them for work, play, education, entertainment, and business.

Brands and Platforms Integrated With Conversational Commerce

• Shopify offers a wide range of conversational commerce services from product discovery to purchase and delivery.
• Shopify plus for business is meant for enterprises that earn revenue of more than $2000, offer advanced online shopping features for customers, designed for higher volume stores.
• Omnisend, a platform integrated with conversation commerce tools handles the entire customer shopping journey and performs tasks, including marketing strategies.
• prAna is a brand that sells sustainable clothing has made conversational commerce an integral part of its marketing strategy.
• eBay deployed voice-assisted conversational commerce. It uses Google Assistant for its eBay Shopping Assistant program.

Future of the Conversational Commerce

By 2025, a 590% surge in spending on conversational commerce is projected and the market for a chatbot is expected to reach $145 billion. Chatbot occupies 50% of conversational commerce spend in the years to come.  

Conclusion

Conversational commerce has transformed the way consumers are shopping today and it is offering convenience and great flexibility, along with personalized feed on shopping. It is equally opening several avenues for the business to engage customers in more personalized ways by providing complete personal shopping assistance. There is a bright prospectus ahead for conversational commerce, as it is emerging as an effective tool to maintain customer relations using text and voice-based conversations in a more personalized manner. 

The post How Conversational Commerce Transforms The Shopping Experience first appeared on Publir.

Beginning of Social Commerce

Brands’ efforts to sell products or services online, using a social media platform throughout, from the product search to purchase, and payment, providing a rich shopping experience to consumers can be rightly called Social Commerce. Brands and retailers have developed specific strategies to reach customers online during the COVID-19 forced shutdowns. Several brick-and-mortar companies that used to sell products and services for ages in stores have invested heavily in digital transformation to grab the retail opportunities out of this social and physical distancing era of the forced lockdown. Consumers from the urban and suburban areas have also flocked in massive numbers to these online retail stores, resulting in the emergence of several new online retail players, other than Amazon, including but not limited to Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Kroger, and others that have increased their online sales more than 85% in 2020. Consumers have spent a whopping $2.67 trillion globally on online marketplaces in 2020. 

Takeaways from this Massive Consumer Shift

• Consumers in the US alone have spent $791.70 billion on online retail shopping in 2020, and it is expected to reach $933.30 billion in 2021, contributing to 15.3% of total retail sales. The story is not yet completed and it is still unfolding several other new dimensions of the same coin in the form of social commerce evolution and explosion.
• Accelerated time spent with social media platforms
• Increased click-and-collect consumer behavior
• Enhanced and enriched consumer shopping journey online with social media platforms unveiling new shopping features.
• A projected rise in online retail sales equals $140.96 billion by 2024.
• Increase in the US Social commerce sales from 35.8% to $36.62 billion in 2021.
• One in four digital buyers will adopt the buy now, pay later (BNPL) service.

Factors That Favored the Emergence  of Social Commerce

Exploiting the Cowdcultural space of the shared networks is the most prominent feature of social commerce. Brands have realized the importance of this space, as the branded and sponsored content and ads are not paying them the expected ROI. The following features of the social media platforms are responsible for the global social commerce explosion.

Massive Follower Base

Social media platforms have amassed a huge follower base. The below-mentioned details provide glimpses on the daily/monthly active users of the popular social media platforms globally, by 2021.

• Facebook: 2.85 billion
• youTube- 2.2 billion
• Instagram with features like Checkout, Instagram Live Shopping, Instagram Shopping From Creators, and Instagram Stories 500+ million 
• Pinterest Shop From Boards, Search, and Pins.- 478 million
• TikTok-689 millions

Ability to Form Communities

Social media platforms have segregated the audience as communities. They are a diversified mix of demographic and socio-graphic groups with a rich cultural background. Social media users have followers and they equally follow influencers, who are thought leaders, celebrities, athletes, and members of their own family, and friends. Influencers with a significant social media follower base recommend products, post product reviews, and endorse brands for a fee. 

Leveraging the Power of Influencers

While the star sports personality Cristiano Ronaldo alone enjoys over 500 million followers in various social media platforms by 2021, the other prominent personalities and celebrities including LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Justin Bieber,  and Pope Francis have their own set of followers. Social media platforms are engaging these fans and followers with personalized content that appeases their interests to retain them for a longer period. Brands are doing their best to push their product updates, via these handles, thus contributing to the growth of Social Commerce.

Attractive and Innovative Shopping Features

Social media platforms are evolving constantly by adding innovations to promote brands. Some of the top features are,

• Adding shopping features that display products for sale.
• E, g, Shopify’s new global hub to promote cross-border commerce I billion brands across the globe,  Instagram Live Shopping, Pinterest’s Buyable Pins, and product Pins, etc. 
• Collaborated with sites to enable shopping features, such as TikTok-Shopify partnership
• Provide product reviews.
• Interactive features for consulting peers, friends, and followers.
• Photos, videos, and streaming, featuring or narrating product stories and details.
• Chatbots, AR/VR features for an enriched shopping experience
• Shopify, for example, added conversational features in local languages and payment in local currency.
• Product discovery and research features.
• Recommendations and endorsements.
• Incentives, as discounts, points, rebates, free shipping, and more.
• Payment and checkout options from their favorite social media sites.

Interactive and User-generated Content (UGC)

The popularity of social media platforms stems from their ability to promote interactions with users from within and outside the community. While TikTok allows users to upload short videos of 1 to 3 minutes, YouTube is the home for video channels of individual star influencers that promote ideologies, products, services, lifestyles, educational practices, tutorials, and many more. Brands are tapping these opportunities to showcase their products, where users add their own creative and interactive ways to display or share content to their followers as songs, dance, performance, chats, discussion, conversations, and what not? The sky is the limit for the users, who can exhibit their native language, word power, popular culture, and lifestyles to attract viewer’s/follower’s attention and promote brands simultaneously.  Users are allowed to display disclaimers denoting whether it is paid or organic content. There is no wonder to claim exquisite social commerce promoted trends within the US and from across the globe. 

Social Commerce unveiled new shopping trends and buying behaviors

• There are exclusive TikTok stores to sell products displayed on these platforms in the US.
• Product sales have got more than doubled or went out-of-stock, thanks to the publicity TikTok extended.
• Inspiring stories on how social media enhancing commerce is providing livelihood to the pandemic stuck communities and drawing more visitors to these platforms to try their luck or to exhibit their creativity.
• Apart from visiting social media platforms, users are engaging themselves with the shopping features projected on the platform in-person and they are eager to perform the feats exactly, the way it is shown on the digital platform.
• Users are drawing immense satisfaction from views, posts, and comments for their narration and they are spending time and money to make a purchase.
• Users are enticed to generate content as they are getting paid for it. 
• Having built a solid social media follower base, people are making their online or real-time business efforts.

Industry Reaction to the Social Commerce

Retail social commerce is a multibillion-dollar industry in the US with nine out of ten North American businesses making an effort to reach customers via social media platforms. A 2021 survey has projected 75% of the US companies have already exploited the commerce potentialities of the social media platforms, while the others trying to join the bandwagon.   

Major Social Commerce Statistics for Brands and Marketers

• China is the world’s leading social commerce market, with $351.65 billion in sales in 2021, followed by Russia.
• While 51.5% of social network users have purchased via a social channel in China, 49.5% of Russians used these platforms for shopping.
• Social commerce sales of the US will be $36.62 billion in 2021, up by 35.8% from 2020.
• Facebook is the leading social commerce platform in the US, with 56.1 million buyers in 2021, followed by Instagram (32.4 million), and Pinterest, (13.9 million). 
• TikTok and Shopify are the latest entries into the social commerce space and they are expected to surpass others soon in this race, going by their social media user behavior.
• Livestreaming commerce is the dominant form in China, which is expected to generate $131.52 billion in streaming social commerce sales in 2021. 
• Livestreaming commerce is in its infancy in the US
• Social commerce is popular among the US adult Gen Z uses. 
• Over 50% of US social media users aged 18 to 24 have made purchases via a social commerce channel.
• The majority of US millennials are considering social commerce sites as a useful source of shopping information.

Final Thoughts

With irresistible popularity and an ever-growing user base, social media shopping sites are here to stay and companies cannot afford to ignore them, given the power and reach of the shared community networks. Brands, for sure will have to allocate an exclusive budget to meet their social commerce marketing strategies, as they are galvanizing massive sales through their huge active daily and monthly users. Platforms are equally reciprocating with updates to grab the existing and future social commerce opportunities by adding innovations and product updates. For more analysis on social media platforms and commerce, explore our blog!

The post Social Commerce in Emerging Markets and its Impact on Online Community Engagement first appeared on Publir.

• In 2016 alone, 90% of the people read at least one or more reviews before making a purchase.
• According to a survey, about 40% of shoppers expressed that they wouldn’t buy a product without reading an online review about it.
• As per People Claim, around 70% of people consult customer reviews or ratings before making a final purchase. And to add to it, a whopping 63% prefer an online purchase if the site has either product reviews or ratings.
• Around 88% of people trust product reviews as much as they would trust a personal recommendation.

Online reviews play a massive role in today’s eCommerce-oriented world. So, now let’s know some of the ‘whys’!

Top 5 Reasons Why Online Reviews Are A Gamechanger

1. Increased Purchases

As per Reevo, the presence of online reviews lead to an average sales increase of 18%. People are more likely to buy a product if others around them, even complete strangers, agree to the quality of it. As of now, online reviews are the biggest form of social proof.

For instance, on food delivery apps like Zomato and Swiggy, food dishes that have more 4 or 5-star ratings or good reviews get sold more than the ones that don’t. And on websites like Yelp, the restaurants having better ratings and reviews experience more traffic than those with lesser reviews.

2. Improvement of Rank

Online customer reviews prove to be beneficial for your SEO ranking too. How? Whenever you get a new review, you get fresh and new content for the search engines; the content that has been created by the user for you, and that also without any cost. And when you have new content, Google algorithms favor your website in search engine results. 

Online reviews give you a consistent pipeline of (hopefully) positive content that web search tools esteem profoundly while picking which results to return. When your website is ranked higher, algorithms and individuals are more likely to see you and your website as an expert in your industry, which likewise prompts more exposure.

3. Increased trust

From a steady supply of positive reviews from your old consumers, you can garner loyalty and build the trust of future potential customers. Potential customers question organizations that have evaluations below four stars. This leaves a little safety buffer at the top, however, organizations with better original reviews are fundamentally bound to see more views converting over to traffic and deals.

To illustrate this, 45-50% of consumers prefer to dine at a restaurant that has 4 or more stars with some pretty good reviews while the other 39% prefer an eatery with 3 stars or more on online sites.

4. Increment of Brand’s Reach

Positive reviews about a brand by its consumers expand the brand’s reach as very good or very bad reviews have a tendency of spreading wide, and quickly. Happy customers like to spread the good word about your brand and they do so by posting their reviews on external websites like Trip Advisor, Four Square, Google, and Yelp. These websites are extremely important to expand your reach as a lot of potential customers look up to them for recommendations and suggestions.

In fact, you can even leverage bad reviews to gain more traction online. Gossip Girl, a popular television show, posted all of its bad reviews by its audience on online posters and it increased its daily watchers exponentially. This made the show much more popular than it already was.

5. Clear connection with the customers

Apart from increasing brand reach, upping brand profits, and making the brand more searchable, reviews also help to establish a clear and open connection of the brand with the customers. With the help of reviews, a brand can learn about the drawbacks or the shortcomings of the brand from the customers’ point of view, giving the brand an opportunity to both respond and improve. Furthermore, by the process of replying to their brand reviews, the brands can additionally make their customers feel like they are seen and heard, which leads to a better connection and increased loyalty and trust.

For instance, clinical organization MedQuest was able to drastically improve its reviews by increasing the speed at which it responded to both positive and negative reviews. The organization’s audit volume on Facebook took off by 163%, while it got 23% more reviews on Google.

How Can You Get Your Customers To Review Your Product?

Reviews do play a very important role in the success of a brand and there are many ways through which you can acquire a good amount of reviews for your site. Let’s know some of the ‘Hows’?

By emailing the customers for a review after the purchase

• Asking customers to review the item is key. Most won’t automatically do this on their own.
• Give your clients time to get your item and use it enough to experience the item and determine its quality and credibility. 

By asking your customers the right questions

• Ask your clients the right questions and get the most suitable answers with a nice explained description. The questions you ask will vary depending on the type of product they purchase but they might include:
  • How would you rate the quality of the item?
  • Did the item meet your expectations?
  • How can we improve the item?
• More thorough questions make the clients answer all the more nicely, bringing about more client reviews. 

By making the review posting process simple and short

• Make the review process smooth, straightforward, and uninterrupted. 
• Don’t forget that not all customers will go through the survey process, even if they are incredibly happy with the item or service. 

By creating neutral grounds for their review platform

• Venders ought to make impartial grounds for their reviewing stage.
• Clients effectively trust a survey locale/rating site like Yelp over the business’s review platform itself. Why? It’s an impartial third party.

Takeaway

The way in which you market your brand image is extremely important, yet having individuals talk about you is an even more powerful tool. By empowering customers to give you regular, timely feedback, you’ll receive content that can help you in your own marketing. 

Don’t leave your customer reviews to chance. Ask for feedback regularly and respond to everyone–whether it’s positive or negative. To read more such amazing articles, visit Publir’s Blog today!

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