Chatbots | Our New Future | Conversational Commerce

Chatbots have been in talks since early 2016, for all the brands. Since the increase in chatbots, marketers started using this channel more effectively.

No doubt that chatbots are making our lives easier. Also, there’s one reason brands will be interested in creating and using them for their marketing channels. It’s simple that the goal is to make ads much more exciting, to make them appear as though they’ve come from an actual human being. The goal is to make ads much more interesting, so that people feel like they are dealing with an actual person, and not with a large corporation.

Marketing today is very different from how it was in the early 2000s. Back then, SEO and SEM completely dominated the marketing processes. Then, since 2010, we saw social media advertising, propelled by Facebook ads, come into its own. Now we’ve been witness to mobile marketing. Traditional forms of online marketing have reached a point where they have stopped growing. Users are not downloading as many mobile apps, for example, as they used to in the past. However, now messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Apple iMessage, WeChat, etc. are very popular. They have created a new marketing channel, where there is less competition and not as much ad fatigue as elsewhere on the web.

And now ads?

Chatbots are soon to be benefit, because of their ability to approximate human speech very closely. They provide advertisers and marketers with a huge advantage. There are several surveys that show that consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations, more so than radio, TV or internet ads.

These messages are still not fully developed as marketing tools. As of now, chatbot ads are probably still a few years away. They do have a tremendous potential. There’s every possibility that, marketers will be able to place ads on chatbots in a seamless and non-obtrusive manner.

This is Conversational Commerce

There are five steps in any customer purchase journey:

1. Need recognition (Awareness)
2. Search for information (Research)
3. Evaluation of alternatives (Consideration)
4. Purchasing decision (Conversion)
5. Post-purchase evaluation (Re-purchase)

Now let’s see how conversational commerce will play its role:

Awareness

Conversational commerce platforms help businesses create a sense of need for their products to potential customers. Growing trend in the conversational commerce segment is using this channel to push relevant content. A real-time conversation between user via their conversational commerce platform with a relevant piece of news. This is a great way for companies to let consumers know about the latest products or sales.

Research:

Potentially the most influential part of the purchasing journey, customers are always looking to have the widest choice of products available to them. Enter conversational commerce chatbots, which can act as a personal shopping assistant to customers everywhere. For Example, ask a bot, I need a dress in blue color, the AI equipped bot picks up the collection from the inventory showcases all the blue dresses. It simply like asking a shopkeeper, do you have blue color dresses.  In comes an era in which conversational commerce helps us discover our new favourite brand.

Consideration:

Once customers have shortlisted what they want and gone through a variety of options to choose from, now this Chatbot, will go ahead and give them options to purchase and close the sale like a normal shopkeeper does. This is conversational Commerce.

Purchasing:

Mobile commerce has grown multiple folds over the last few years. Mobile marketing now accounts for half of all marketing purchases, with 65% of people starting their customer journey on their smartphone(s). Instead of having to send the user to a checkout page on their desktop, chatbots can will bring the page right there and on your smartphone.

Post-Purchase:

In the last stage of purchasing life cycle, shoppers evaluate the value of the product they just spent on. For online businesses verticals, the best way to gather this information would be a chatbot that requests customer feedback. Customer data provides valuable information, both positive and negative, about a consumer’s experience with your product and services of the company.


If you want free consultation and want to discuss your idea for chatbot usage, please connect with us on www.auquall.com. We have built our own platform with AI serving Chatbots to varied industries.