Top 5 Conversational Commerce Platforms

For years, the e-commerce arena has enjoyed a steady influx of business from its brick-and-mortar counterparts. In 2020, the previously steady transition from physical retail became an outright exodus due to a concert of factors — including a global health crisis. According to Business Insider, global e-commerce reached nearly $4 trillion in 2020. While established brands and online storefronts, like Walmart, Amazon, and Alibaba lead the charge, the emerging frontier of conversational sales and marketing contributed significantly toward this radical e-commerce shift.

What is conversational commerce and why is it such a powerful subset of e-commerce? In a way, conversational sales and marketing provide e-commerce with the last piece of the puzzle. The one quality of in-person, physical retail that e-commerce lacks. That up until now, has been unable to simulate: the give-and-take interaction of face-to-face sales.

Conversational sales and marketing are a broad category. At its heart, it leverages chatbots, SMS, emails, and other messaging solutions to market and sell with an emphasis on meeting the customer on their terms. Conversational commerce may be broad, but there is incredible potential for companies that are ready to adopt it. Today we’re going to look at the top five conversational commerce platforms, weighing the utility and advantage of each.

Rep

When it comes to AI-powered conversational shopping, there’s no platform more powerful than Rep which offers a code-free integration with most of the major e-commerce platforms. Conversational shopping allows e-commerce merchants to offer their customers a guided shopping experience on their websites. Rep’s solution acts like an in-store sales associate to ensure you lift conversion rate and increase customer satisfaction

Rep’s AI detects customers before they are about to drop-off from the sales funnel on your website and engages them in conversation to offer assistance in finding the right product for them, or guidance on their buyer journey, all the way to checkout.

Using an AI-powered conversation, Rep adapts the conversation to each customer while offering product recommendations and personalized suggestions. Your customers can ask any of your frequently asked questions and the Rep solution will deliver the answer in an engaging conversation. Via Rep’s solution, the shopper can ask shopping-related questions, browse your products, quickly check out and make an order all through an engaging 2-way conversation.

Drift

Drift positions its platform as a revenue accelerator. The Drift platform’s goal is to eliminate the data silos and lack of communication that often exists between sales and marketing teams. It does that by combining conversational sales and marketing.

Drift is designed as a widget for use on your website. From there, it uses chatbots, email marketing, and voice integration to reach out to customers. Drift’s advanced AI helps to understand the customer’s reason for visiting your site quickly and seamlessly. Moving them from a potential lead to an active lead at the top of your pipeline.

The Drift platform can deliver a wide range of actionable visitor metrics, giving you the data and tools necessary to drive your business. Drift offers a powerful solution because it can obtain real-time info from visitors. It personalizes marketing and sales efforts on the fly using its visitor intelligence which harnesses IP lookup ad marketing automation.

Yalo

The Yalo platform caters to a global audience that prefers the freedom and utility of Whatsapp. Whatsapp has a huge user base, especially overseas in Asia. According to Whatsapp, users open the app more than 30 times a day, and their intent isn’t always social. Between Whatsapp and the comparable Facebook Messenger, 90% of conversational commerce happens via messaging apps. Yalo helps you harness Whatsapp as a complementary market to Facebook.

Yalo allows e-commerce merchants to integrate customer service options and marketing campaigns into their messaging. It offers users a way to penetrate untapped conversational marketing opportunities and convert that potential into a solid return on investment.

LivePerson

The LivePerson platform is all about intent, ease of use, and scalability.

Your customers aren’t visiting your e-commerce storefront for small talk. LivePerson’s intent manager is built to quickly figure out the reason for each customer’s visit and tailor the conversation directly toward that intent. It’s about providing frictionless customer service and improving the overall customer experience.

The platform features easy-to-build chatbots that excel at reading your customer and understanding their needs. LivePerson’s conversational solutions provide a wide range of relationship management metrics to help you control your business’s profitability. But beyond that, LivePerson is scalable.

The LivePerson platform is designed to be used across a huge range of conversation channels, including Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, Whatsapp, SMS, email, and many others. Through its multi-channel approach, LivePerson extends your marketing and sales reach exponentially.

ManyChat

To say that Facebook Messenger represents an incredible marketing opportunity is an understatement. The platform boasts 1.3 billion users per day. That is a significant chunk of the human race. ManyChat offers a conversational sales and marketing solution that can help your company harness Facebook Messenger’s true potential.

ManyChat is made with mobile in mind. Using the platform, your business can build chatbots specifically for use with the Facebook Messenger app. Those bots are designed to work at every stage in the sales process. From pre-qualifying users and inserting them into your sales funnel, to actively engaging them in the sales process, to helping with relationship management and customer service after the sale has closed.

While ManyChat might give you access to a huge pool of potential leads, its true power lies in its integrations. Conversational marketing begins in Facebook Messenger, but once the relationship is built, the platform integrates directly into SMS messaging, leveraging the power of Shopify to help you manage your long-term client relationship. The power of SMS integration is undeniable; 90% of customers open SMS marketing messages immediately upon receipt.

The Best Tool for the Job

Conversational sales and marketing isn’t one big channel; it is a broad collection of sub-channels that utilize similar strategies and tools. Many of the platforms listed above are best used in conjunction with one another. If you’re seeking new market penetration, Yalo provides an incredible opportunity. If you’re looking to understand customer intent across all your categories, LivePerson can help. Rep is virtually unrivaled when it comes to the voice commerce space.

Together, these platforms can give your e-commerce storefront the widest sales and marketing reach possible. Whether that means Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp visibility, or integration with the emerging voice commerce channel. Regardless, it’s a good time to be an e-commerce merchant. For more information on conversational commerce, specifically through voice commerce, please contact Rep today!

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