5 Ways Messaging Improves Ecommerce Traffic and Sales

Messaging is the most popular way for modern consumers to communicate, and it is clear that people want to interact with more businesses via messaging apps.

Messaging with customers makes your ecommerce store more accessible and convenient, and benefits you by driving additional sales and online traffic to your store.

In addition, focusing on customer support and interaction via instant messaging makes it easier for your business’ support teams to tap into the growing trend for working from home.

These are the top 5 ways that messaging can increase site traffic and sales on your ecommerce store:

1. Personalized Marketing

Messaging allows you to send specific marketing content and offers to each customer. The ability to personalize the content you send to each customer is one of the biggest advantages of using messaging to drive traffic and sales. 80% of marketers say that personalized marketing is more effective than impersonal marketing.

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Messages custom-tailored to your customer’s interests have higher response rates and keep customers engaged with your marketing campaigns. In addition to directly boosting sales, personalized marketing increases customer loyalty by rewarding subscribers with offers and content you know has value to them.

Rewarding loyalty to increase repeat customers is a very effective way to drive additional sales. For every 1% of buyers who become repeat customers, your revenue increases by about 10%.

2. Chatbots

Messaging chatbots ensure your customers and leads can get instant responses to their queries at any time. They can be used on instant messaging apps, and also the messaging features of many social media networks. This means you can use them to support your audience on the ideal social platform for your business.

There are several Chatbot benefits for businesses. Chatbots can help users by answering frequently asked questions and handling simple customer support tasks, as well as product recommendations and by linking to useful content. Using frequently asked questions as the basis for content can help drive additional traffic to your store. If customers are frequently asking the same question, they are probably also Googling the same query.

For more involved tasks, chatbots can act as a bridge between your self-service support and live agents, and can be used to create support tickets or pass the conversation to a live agent, giving your support team more information at the start of their interaction. 

Improving your ability to respond quickly and effectively to customer messages has a big impact on sales. 50% of customers purchase from a company more frequently after a positive customer service experience.

After implementing a chatbot on Kik Messenger designed to interact with users and get a better idea of the products they were interested in, American Eagle Outfitters saw an average monthly growth of users more than twice as high as their social media growth.

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This was a highly effective strategy as the campaign targeted Millenials, who are the most active on instant messaging apps and big spenders when it comes to clothing, making instant messaging the ideal way to reach their audience.

3. SMS Marketing

Creating SMS marketing for ecommerce that your most interested customers and leads can subscribe to means that you can reward their interest with exclusive deals and offers, and keep them updated on your latest products. 

Most text messages are opened within minutes and have an average response rate of 45%, which is more than 7 times higher than email. This makes them ideal for distributing limited-time discount codes that would be impractical through slower communication methods.

Besides giving your customers more reasons to return to the store, this can add convenience for customers by giving them immediate alerts when their favorite items are back in stock, or when an upcoming product launches.

4. Customer Feedback

Collecting useful customer feedback is critical to improving the sales and traffic of any ecommerce store. Instant messaging is a very effective way to gather feedback, enabling customers to respond to SMS surveys or give feedback during interactions with messaging apps they already use.

Short multiple-choice surveys are ideal for getting a high volume of responses about a process or feature on your ecommerce store quickly. You can also use messaging to ask for more detailed written feedback.

Turning feedback from written responses to useful information can be time-consuming without the use of text analysis software to help you categorize answers. Neal Taparia, founder of brain training app Solitaired recommends spending some time reviewing written responses. He explains, “You can find how the customer talks about their problems, which gives you great ideas on how to write effective copy.”

This results in higher response rates than requiring customers to visit or log into a feedback page to give their comments. You can increase sales by more than 10% by implementing an effective and convenient feedback system.

5. Create A Community Around Your Business

Creating group messaging channels on platforms like Discord helps to build a community around your ecommerce store and products. It provides a way for customers to quickly get help and purchasing advice from not just your support team but also other customers.

Group messaging apps are a great way to find customer advocates who want to support your business and help other customers. Group messaging apps like Discord offer community-building features allowing you to promote users to make their messages easier for other users to spot, as well as pin important messages and frequently asked questions.

An active and helpful community helps drive traffic to your store and encourages new leads to make a purchase, as they can discuss the benefits of your products with impartial customers. It also enables you to interact with your customers and the public in a more direct and informal manner than social media, as you can use it to take part in a group conversation with users instead of just creating posts and waiting for comments.

Conclusion

Messaging offers a number of benefits to ecommerce stores. It can be used to increase interest in your industry and brand, improve the customer experience, and demonstrate your level of customer care. 

By improving your ability to communicate with customers via messaging apps, you can improve traffic and sales to your ecommerce store through repeat customers and a positive reputation.

SleekFlow allows multi-channel communications to reach customers faster on chat. You can sell and transact seamlessly through WhatsApp Business, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram or on your own messaging app. Also, you can manage chats from all apps in one single place for a unified customer experience. 

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