How to Use Conversational Commerce to Increase Your Retail Sales

Traditional retailers understand the value that providing an open dialog with customers brings for their business growth. This 1:1 connection between buyer and seller can help increase sales by improving consumer comfort level, providing shopping guidance, and building trust that leads to repeat purchases.

Today’s consumers are increasingly turning to ecommerce shopping options to purchase the goods and services they want and need, a behavior that is especially accelerated during a pandemic quarantine that makes in-person shopping even more difficult.

In 2020, the retail industry saw a 27.6% worldwide increase in ecommerce activity, but that doesn’t mean these buyers stopped wanting the help and information they would traditionally gain from talking to a trusted sales or service expert inside a store.

Ecommerce retailers of all kinds can bring that traditional 1:1 experience to their digital ecommerce shopping experience by incorporating a conversational commerce strategy into their online retail offering.

Keep reading to find out more about what conversational commerce is, why all kinds of retailers should pay attention to it, and how retailers have seen success by incorporating this into their communication strategy.

Conversational commerce is an emerging digital framework that facilitates a 1:1 back-and-forth connection between companies and customers. Conversational commerce integrates messaging technologies like SMS and online chat to allow businesses to quickly and easily converse directly with customers in a responsive and personalized way, mimicking the way retail businesses have traditionally been able to communicate with their clientele in a brick and mortar store.

Smaller brick and mortar businesses have the advantage of knowing and maintaining personal relationships with most of their customers from the natural experience of talking and helping them in the store. After the customer walks out of the store, however, the business’s view into the customer’s life is often limited.

Conversely, larger businesses use technology to power commercial communication that occurs en masse. These communication strategies are primarily one-way directed at the customer, including materials like flyers, catalogues, and email blasts. It can feel impossible to conduct genuine, warm, 1:1 conversations at scale with their high volume of customers. It’s challenging to solve for short of hiring thousands of people to staff a phone bank.

Conversational commerce takes on that challenge and solves it  by using connective messaging technology to bridge the connection between sales and service representatives and customers to scale by personalizing meaningful 1:1 customer relationships.

People have historically been more willing to purchase goods with brands they can reach, talk to, and trust, which can be challenging for ecommerce offerings to provide at scale. Conversational commerce is well-suited to support retail businesses because it melds the personalization of the brick and mortar experience with the power and scale of technology.

Studies show that people want to be treated as an individual, rather than as just one data point amidst a massive blob of data points -- similarly to how one may feel walking into a traditional retail environment. Ecommerce retail businesses can create a similar connection by using messaging and SMS technology to keep their brand experts accessible to shoppers as they consider and decide what to buy.

According to a 2018 Facebook study, 69% of US consumers who message businesses say that being able to message a business helps them feel more confident about the brand and 53% of consumers are more likely to transact with a business that gives expert advice via messaging apps.

Technologies that unlock conversational commerce allow brands to give consumers the personal connection they want at scale by facilitating personalization and 1:1 connection.

When retailers add an ecommerce channel to their sales offering, it can be challenging to adapt to the new online environment. In 2020, 84% of retail consumers abandoned their online shopping carts before checkout.

Why are the results different in an online store? In a retail environment, the shopper can easily engage with an expert. They have an opportunity to connect with the brand’s representative to get advice, and learn about the brand and products. It is complex to recreate the shopper attention and focus this 1:1 connection naturally creates in a retail environment.

Conversational commerce solves these challenges by giving retailers a way to reach and respond to all their customers quickly in a warm, personalized fashion. Retailers can mimic the in-store/in-restaurant experience digitally, at scale, no matter  the physical distance. This back and forth communication is far more successful than only relying on one-way promotions.

These 1:1 conversations can drastically improve the customer’s experience, a key objective for successful retail groups. It also builds customer trust. Through conversational commerce, retail enterprises can leverage social proof and direct customers to their peers who have had exceptional experience with their product or service.

Retail businesses looking to add 1:1 conversational commerce functionality into their customer communication strategies should consider a solution that consolidates all conversations into a single intuitive hub to assign and manage response. As the volume of conversations increases, features like personalization tokens, search and CRM integration become more and more important.

At ReplyBuy, we’ve seen firsthand how much value the ability to have 1:1 conversations with customers adds for retail customers and brands.

When retailers onboard a conversational commerce platform, they empower themselves to give every customer a white-glove experience. The more customers can communicate with brands, the more they feel they have their direct attention, and the more they begin to trust and remember them. This translates directly into a more profitable bottom line.

Check out how these retailers are using conversational commerce, powered by the ReplyBuy platform, to grow their ecommerce business. Which approach speaks best to your retail business model?

Both email and SMS are capable of instant delivery. In terms of instant gratification, however, SMS delivers a far better experience than email. SMS is rapidly engaging and satisfying, making it easier for people to easily respond to the message. On average, it takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text, but 90 minutes to respond to an email.

Some types of messages need more detail and depth to be effectively communicated to consumers. Email is a better method for distributing these types of messages, however, most of the time companies don’t need a recurring, lengthy email for simple updates. This is when a simple, straightforward text or chat message is a better communication choice.

With SMS for business communication, companies give users the precise information they need (and nothing more) as fast as possible. In a digital ecosystem in which consumers feel information rich and time poor, consumers appreciate this mode. No wading through long emails like it’s 1999 just to get to the crux of an issue. Only lean, rapid info.