If you are following the digital world closely, you might have come across chatbots on any website or mobile app. Brands are relying on chatbots for almost every significant task, ranging across customer service, marketing, team communication, sales, and others. Chatbots have improved the ability of brands to engage in conversations with customers, thereby promoting the concept of conversational marketing.
Digital marketing has already enabled online businesses and e-commerce stores to reach their target audience flexibly. So, what difference can chatbots make in the future of e-commerce? Let us try to find the answers in the following discussion.
What is Conversational Marketing?
First of all, let us understand the definition of conversational marketing. Conversational commerce, or marketing, is basically the practice employed by brands, involving the use of interactive media for communication with customers and leading them towards a purchase. Many people often confuse the implications of conversational commerce and relate it only to customer support.
On the contrary, conversational chatbot marketing can transform the buying journey of a customer into meaningful and interactive conversations. People all over the world are actively involved in messaging platforms and are sending voice recordings and text messages regularly as a common mode of communication.
So, customers would obviously want to communicate with brands and other online businesses through text and voice recordings. At the same time, the rising use of digital messaging services and voice assistants is also widening the scope for conversational marketing. Here are some numbers that showcase the prospects for chatbot marketing:
- Almost 44% of consumers have already used chatbots.
- Around 50% of consumers have expressed interest in purchasing items during the course of their communication with a chatbot.
- 80% of businesses have already used or are planning on using chatbots as a point of contact for customers.
Benefits of Conversational Commerce
Conversational e-commerce provides many prospects for the growth of online businesses. However, the lack of clarity regarding the benefits of chatbots for e-commerce stores can hold back potential investments. One of the notable benefits of conversational chatbot marketing refers to the facility of enabling two-way communication with customers. Chatbots not only inform and guide customers but also learn from their feedback, questions, and requirements to better understand them.
A conversational chatbot could interact with two to five times more customers in comparison to email. Furthermore, stores using conversational e-commerce have pointed out annual revenue growth by 7% to 25%. Therefore, a conversational chatbot could be highly influential for the long-term growth of an e-commerce store.
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Importance of Conversational Chatbots
The next concern regarding the popularity of conversational marketing refers to its importance in the existing market. Digital marketing has been entrenched in SEO and the top rankings on Google, thereby making e-commerce websites cold and generic. Users don’t find language that is suited for their needs anymore. On the other hand, users come across a language that is fit for search engines. Conversational chatbots take away this trouble by bringing in personalization. The conversational style of chatbots adds a bit of warmth to the experience of customers with a brand.
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Improving Personalization with New Capabilities
The added functionality of Natural Language Processing or NLP, alongside AI systems also improves the capabilities of chatbots for understanding customers. Chatbots could use NLP for identifying patterns and context in the message conveyed by customers during interactions. The facility of personalized services through conversational chatbot marketing could boost engagement rates while saving the time of customers.
At the same time, machine learning capabilities can enable chatbots to improvise their conversations with customers on the basis of their past conversations, search history, and product purchasing history. The direct, human-like contact on conversational marketing delivers a formidable impact on customers, thereby resulting in higher sales conversion. AI-based chatbots could also help e-commerce businesses in accessing practical real-time user interaction information.
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Reduced Pressure on Customer Support Executives
Among the many value propositions of chatbots, the benefit of reducing pressure on customer executives will be the foremost. Chatbots could handle almost 80% of the common questions by customers, thereby relieving customer support executives from a huge burden. Chatbots help customer support executives to focus on resolving various complicated questions on a priority basis. So, e-commerce stores could enjoy the dual advantage of the intelligence of man and machine with conversational marketing. Therefore, businesses can save a considerable amount of operating costs while also earning the trust of customers.
Bottom Line
On a concluding note, it is inevitable that chatbot marketing will definitely be one of the highlights in e-commerce. Conversational marketing emerged from the notion of using chatbots to offer customer support for routinely asked questions. Over the years, chatbots have improved with advancements in AI and NLP technologies.
At the same time, businesses have been capable of using chatbots to offer a wide assortment of information on products and services. Most important of all, the personalized conversational style of chatbots makes them an instant favorite with customers. Contact us at eBotify to learn more about conversational chatbots and the different factors that make them unique in the domain of e-commerce.
