Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David

Conversational commerce plays a huge role in the success of any eCommerce business, yet many brands don’t take advantage of this marketing approach. Conversational commerce, or conversational marketing, refers to the point where messaging apps and shopping intersect.

For eCommerce businesses, this can mean live chat on your website, social media messaging apps, online chat tools, Slack, texting apps, and voice assistants. You likely are using at least some of these in your business, but are they working to your advantage by engaging customers and encouraging them to purchase your product or service or potentially hurting your business because you’re not using them to their full potential?

If you want to dive deeper into the subject of conversational commerce you can check out our previous blogs on this topic discussing how to better understand and adopt conversational commerce for your brand and how to win more customers using conversation commerce.

In this blog, we’re going to focus specifically on enhancing conversational commerce with the use of chatbots.

Chatbots and Conversational Commerce Marketing

In order to use chatbots to create a strong conversational commerce marketing strategy, you need to ensure that your chatbots are engaging while offering a great experience to the end-user. Here are 7 ways to accomplish this:

1. Through a Customized Chat Experience

A truly good chatbot (or live chat) experience for the customer is a personalized one. The first step in offering a personalized chatbot experience is understanding your customers’ needs and predicting the questions or problems they want to solve when they reach out to you.

The Re:amaze FAQ Bot offers a personalized experience as it is able to learn from Re:amaze FAQ content and help customers automatically when a matching question is asked. When customers’ questions can be answered quickly and effortlessly you’ll keep your customers engaged and happy with your brand.

2. By Ensuring Your Chatbot is Easy to Use

No one likes a clunky chatbot or one that is difficult to communicate with. In fact, your end-users shouldn’t be able to tell they’re communicating with a chatbot unless they need to be transferred to a live agent. If your chatbot is easy to use, your customers will be satisfied with their brand experience which can help lead to more sales and stronger customer retention.

3. Collecting Quality Customer Data

For any business to grow, they need to consistently collect both data and feedback from their customers. While collecting feedback can be a manual and time-consuming process for your employees, chatbots can trigger the feedback collection process while it is interacting with your customers making this task far more efficient.

4. Using Your Chatbot to Upsell or Cross-Sell Products

A chatbot is a perfect way to encourage customers to upgrade their service or try out a new product. Using the customer data you have collected to proactively recommend personalized offers and services tailored to the customer is a great way to utilize chatbots. Products suggested by chatbots based on a customer’s interest and historical purchases, increase the up-selling and cross-selling opportunities greatly.

5. By Building Customer Loyalty

The online buying experience of customers is what sets eCommerce businesses apart. This is because a strong customer experience leaves a lasting impression and creates brand loyalty and retention. By ensuring that the customers are happily engaging with your brand, you are building a long-term relationship that will decrease customer churn and create referral-powered growth.

6. By Increasing Conversions

The lead generation process begins the moment a customer begins browsing your website, meaning it’s time to begin nurturing that lead. An eCommerce chatbot should interact with your shoppers in a personalized manner that helps convert them into paying customers by guiding them throughout their buying journey. A custom chatbot from Re:amaze can be used here to help customers find products, qualify leads, schedule calls, and more.

7. By Decreasing Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest concerns for eCommerce brands. While there are a few approaches to handling abandoned carts such as sending automated emails or text messages, you can also employ the use of chatbots to help. A customized conversational chatbot can help your brand recover carts while the customers are still on the site by answering their concerns or questions in real-time and encouraging them to complete their purchase.

Putting Conversation Commerce Bots Into Action

Prior to building a custom conversational chatbot for your eCommerce website, consider the following:

Set a Goal

Whether you’re implementing a custom chatbot or a fully designed one, you should decide what your goal is. Your goal might include driving more sales, generating leads, customer retention, or upselling services. Once you identify your goals, you’ll be able to customize your chatbot accordingly.

Ensure Your Chatbot’s “Personality” Matches Your Brand Identity

Your chatbot’s personality should be reflective of your brand identity. If your brand is fun and whimsical your chatbot should also be fun and whimsical. Creating a chatbot that is too straightforward can cause the interaction to feel robotic or boring. Conversely, making the chatbot be too funny or casual can also annoy a customer. Finding an appropriate balance is key.

Create a Conversation Flow

Creating the right flow for conversations is a key part of creating custom chatbots for your website. To do this effectively you need to understand the entire customer journey so you can ensure customers have a smooth experience.

Learn more about chatbots or schedule a demo with Re:amaze here.