Selling Social is brought to you by Ubu!

As customers are shifting further and further online and getting accustomed to shopping at home, brands need to find more and more creative ways to replicate some aspects of the in-store experience online — specifically, personalised recommendations and advice from salespersons on the shop floor.

And just like walking into a physical store, these recommendations should be accessible on-demand.

Let’s have a look at how some brands leveraged the power of live chat and chatbots to take their e-commerce game even further.

Join Selling Social by Ubu, and receive weekly actionable advice on everything social commerce & D2C.

Live Chat

For 49% of respondents, the most important factor in having a positive experience with a Conversational Marketing solution is getting quick, detailed, and expert answers to their questions. 36% also believe it’s important to get complaints and issues resolved quickly; and 29% say it’s important the solution is friendly, approachable, and easy to communicate with.

— 2020 State of Conversational Marketing, Drift

The best way to replicate an in-person sales experience online is through providing the exact same service, but through video chat. That’s what some brands have done, and it has been quite effective.

Estée Lauder achieved a 4.8/5 rating on its Live Chat

Estée Lauder went all-out with offering direct access to their professional makeup artists through live chat — what better way to convince customers to buy online?

They even have a section to review their live chat experience, and it looks like customers used the online beauty advisors for advice on acne, foundations, concealers, primer and other skin related questions.

They received an average rating of 4.8 out of 5, which would encourage even more customers to give it a try.

It’s the perfect way to build a positive loop – provide a great chat experience and then provide a way to publicly review that experience. I love it.

Clinique offers multiple different channels

It looks like companies within the Estée Lauder Companies group have a knack for this, because Clinique does it even better than Estée Lauder, by offering live chat through video, text-messaging, or Facebook Messenger.

We wrote about Clinique in our article on livestream shopping as well.

Chatbots

While live video chat is ideal, it also has constraints — it’s expensive and time consuming to implement. You can’t offer that service 24/7.

According to a 2020 report by Drift, customer frustrations with a lack of service outside of normal operating hours grew 1.4x since 2019. As customers are increasingly more online, the concept of “working hours” holds lesser and lesser meaning.

Vichy got 74% more adds-to-cart with Vicky the bot

Back in 2018 (that’s almost 4 years ago), Vichy teamed up with Automat.ai to create Vicky, a virtual skin expert, in the form of a bot that was created on Facebook Messenger.

When users chat with the bot to find the perfect skincare routine, each answer is remembered and stored in the brand’s CRM for future personalisation.

The bot was a success — 87% of users who engaged with the diagnostic made it to the product recommendation, which is 4X better than the web average session duration.

This led to 74% more adds-to-cart compared to the website, and 35% more average revenue. They also got 10X more email opt-ins than on the website, and collected 7 data points.

Join Selling Social by Ubu, and receive weekly actionable advice on everything social commerce & D2C.

Amika got 4X average revenue per user

Haircare brand Amika teamed up with Automat.ai to build a bot called Ace that not only talks to customers in a natural, friendly manner, but also customises Amika’s website by highlighting products that suit people’s exact needs and desires based on their conversations. Insane.

This led to 3X more conversion, 90% customers satisfaction and 4X average revenue per user once they chat with Ace.

L’Occitane got 22% email opt-in through their bot

L’Occitane teamed up with Numberly to create the “My Hand Expert” chatbot on Facebook Messenger with the objective to initiate real conversations, gain new customers and generate visits to points of sale.

As a result, 69% of subscribers shared their contact data with the bot, and 35% of participants used the promo code they received from the bot online or at a point of sale. 22% of bot users opted-in to the mailing list, where they were further nurtured.

Challenges

Hubspot published a wonderful and highly detailed article on chatbots and their future here, and we highly recommend you check that out. It speaks about the fact that the main challenge in building a chatbot isn’t a technical one — there are plenty of platforms today that will help you build a chatbot easily — but it’s a conversational challenge.

The most successful brands using chatbots ensured that their bot reflects the experience they would want their customers to have, irrespective of whether it’s a bot or a human delivering that experience.

When building a bot, you need to make sure that the bot’s messaging, and the bot’s user experience reflects the standard of quality, the tone, and the experience that you would want your brand’s customer to feel. Read the Hubspot article to know more – we can’t sum it up better than them!

To sum up

Conversational marketing is not going away anytime soon — customers now expect to be able to chat with a brand just as they chat with their friends, or chat with a salesperson at the store.

It’s not anymore about whether you should include conversations in your marketing strategy, it’s about how — whether through live chats, chatbots, or video consultations.

Shameless plug: if you want to manage your Instagram customer conversations better, you should check out our Inbox tool at Ubu.

Learn more about Ubu

Thanks for reading, and of course – if you have any questions or want to chat about this issue or about anything else, our inbox is open!