16 September 2021

Solve The Biggest Challenges in E-Commerce With Chat Marketing

Chat marketing has the ability to solve many e-commerce challenges. Let’s explore what some of these challenges are and how chat marketing can help you resolve them!

Faye Chong

Content Marketing Lead

Reading time: 4 minutes

It is now more important than ever to build a digital audience that’s primarily mobile. Statistics show that worldwide mobile e-commerce revenue is expected to reach 3.56 billion US dollars in 2021.

And, 58% of people feel more confident to message a business than to make a call.

How times have changed, right?

With the majority of consumers moving to mobile and having a preference for text messaging, it’s only natural that e-commerce brands should start looking into chat marketing.

And lucky for you, chat marketing can solve several e-commerce challenges faced. Let’s explore what some of these challenges are and how chat marketing can help you resolve them! 👇

Common e-commerce challenges and how to solve them with chat marketing

Challenge #1: Converting visitors into paying customers

We as consumers are spoiled for choice. With a myriad of options out there, we can simply pick and choose businesses we want to purchase from.

This is where the problem comes in — how do businesses then ensure that they drive customers to their e-commerce site to make a purchase?

Solution #1: Send promotional chat messages

Challenge #2: Poor customer service

Solution #2: Replying within seconds while maintaining context

Being an e-commerce business means that you don’t have the upper hand of owning a physical store and ground staff to provide the human touch that shoppers crave. This is why doubling down on providing excellent customer service via chat messaging is so important.

With chat marketing, you deliver real-time and personalized customer service. Easily respond to customers who are looking for a particular product or simply need some assistance.

Furthermore, you maintain customer context because the conversation remains in the same chat, even if you were to assign a different rep to best handle the conversation.

Challenge #3: Lack of personalization

Giving your customers a personalized experience is often overlooked in the e-commerce space. But, 33% of customers who abandoned a business relationship last year did so because of the lack of personalization.

That number is far too high to be neglecting it. How do you then create a personalized experience for your customers?

Solution #3: Sending tailored chat messages

Most live chat and chat marketing software collect valuable customer data such as browsing history, the amount of time spent on a specific page, and contact information. Such deep insights can allow you to craft highly personalized messages to your customers, such as through custom welcome messages or promotions.

For example, you send a promotional message such as “We noticed that you purchased XX, want to check out these on-sale items in the same category?” to make the customer feel recognized.

Challenge #4: Lack of customer feedback

Collecting reviews and ratings can be challenging because 71% of consumers will leave a review about a business, only if they were asked. In other words, customers rarely give honest reviews about a business if there was no push or motivation to do so.

Unfortunately, because 93% of consumers say that online reviews have influenced their purchase decisions, it’s important to gather customer feedback.

Solution #4: Gaining valuable insight through conversations

When chatting with customers through messaging, conversations are more personal and flow naturally because of the informal environment of a messaging platform.

Take this opportunity to send follow-up messages post-purchase to ask your customers about their experience with your products and services. You should also make leaving ratings and reviews as easy as possible by providing a direct link to the review page, or even allowing customers to reply within the same chat interface.

Challenge #5: High cart abandonment rates

I think we can all agree that cart abandonment is one of the biggest e-commerce challenges. Even large e-commerce companies aren’t spared from the high cart abandonment rates.

However, abandoned carts are a daily occurrence and it could be caused be by a ton of factors that aren’t within your control, such as customers getting distracted by work or they could have simply forgotten about it.

How then can you lower cart abandonment rates?

Solution #5: Send cart abandonment reminders via messages

Remember how over 80% of people open every text message they receive? This means that there is a much higher chance they’d see your cart abandonment message reminder too.

That said, send them messages to remind them about the items left in their cart to prompt them to make a purchase. You can even offer an exclusive discount code to further encourage them to cart out their items.

Challenge #6: Saturated marketing channels

There are over 24 million e-commerce sites worldwide and this number doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

With so many e-commerce businesses sprouting up every single day, how do you get the attention of your customers amidst all the strong competition? While email and social media marketing are certainly effective, they are definitely oversaturated.

To add to that, the human attention span today is shorter than ever — at eight seconds.

Solution #6: Use chat marketing

It might seem anti-climatic to say this now, but chat marketing may very well be the best solution to help you rise above the digital noise.

That said, you can make use of chat marketing to engage with your customers on a more personal level. Once again, it all ties in with how using platforms like WhatsApp to chat with your customers makes the experience more informal and personal.

Sending them promotions and updates through the platforms they use every single day will increase their chances of absorbing the information you are presenting to them.

Don’t let these challenges phase you

Every challenge can be seen as an opportunity. While you can’t eliminate external factors such as fierce competition, you can definitely work around it.

While incorporating chat marketing into your business strategy is only one baby step towards your goal, it’s still better than not doing anything about it.

If you’re ready to face your challenges head-on, why not give NovoChat a try and get started on your 7-day free trial today! 🥳