Everything you need to know about conversational commerce
What is conversational commerce, and how will it benefit businesses now and in the future? Learn about this as well as helpful use cases for your industry, helpful examples, and everything else you need to know about conversational commerce.
Today, brands are looking for ways to scale automated customer communication while retaining the human touch. Creating conversational experiences helps brands meet modern customer expectations on the one hand, while providing instant customer satisfaction on the other. For example, chatbots can provide customers with instant answers, resulting in customer satisfaction.
But conversational experiences go beyond customer support. Now, brands can engage with their customers throughout the sales journey using popular messaging channels. Welcome to the era of conversational commerce.
What is conversational commerce?
Conversational commerce is a term for selling products and services over chat apps. Chris Messina originally coined the term in 2015. Essentially, it is the marriage between messaging and eCommerce.
Conversational commerce covers a wide range of tools and channels, allowing brands to guide customers through the entire marketing and sales funnel with personalized, real-time interactions. This includes text messaging (SMS), social media platforms like WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, as well as web chat, voice assistants, and AI chatbots powered by natural language processing (NLP).
By selecting the right conversational commerce platforms and tools based on where their customers are most active, businesses can deliver seamless experiences across every touchpoint, whether it’s product discovery, purchase, or post-sale support.
This makes shopping more convenient, adds a human touch to digital communications, and helps build a stronger relationship with customers by making shopping easier than ever.
Personalizing conversational commerce
For conversational commerce to be successful, it must be personal. 71% of customers expect relevant personalized communications from brands and get frustrated when they don’t receive it. McKinsey research has found that personalization directly impacts your bottom line:
- 50% lower customer acquisition costs
- 15% higher revenues
- 30% increase in marketing ROI
All in all, personalizing customer interactions will improve your bottom line, increase customer satisfaction, and ensure that customers have an overall better experience with your brand.
Offering the entire purchasing journey within chat apps will only improve your customers’ experience with your brand and help your profits soar.
According to Statista, global spend on chat apps reached 41 billion dollars in 2021 and is forecasted to reach 290 billion dollars by 2025. Adapting your communication strategy to accommodate conversational commerce experiences means that your business will profit from this shift in purchasing behaviors.
Conversational commerce benefits
Customers seek conversational experiences. They expect the convenience and comfort of conversing with brands through their favorite chat apps from any location. Implementing conversational commerce use cases is not only beneficial for your customers but comes with massive business benefits for your brand.
Key benefits of conversational commerce include:
- Faster response times with real-time communication
- Personalized customer journeys using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI)
- Higher conversion rates through more engaging interactions
- Reduced operational costs via chatbots and AI chatbot assistants
Let’s look at each benefit in closer detail.
Improve conversion rates
Businesses tend to spend a lot of money on customer acquisitions. To put it in perspective, it can cost 7 times less to retain customers than to convert a lead. That’s why you should ensure that every interaction is engineered to increase the chance of a lead becoming a paying customer.
By adopting omnichannel solutions, businesses can boost conversion rates by:
- Removing long sign-up processes: Reduce the chance of leads dropping out of lengthy signup processes by turning them into conversational experiences.
- Sending one-time PINs or passwords over chat apps: Keep leads engaged and secure by using your verified channels to authenticate users.
- Deploying a chatbot to offer 24/7 support: Provide instant answers to common customer queries to improve customer retention.
Tip: Discover which chat apps individual customers engage most with and use them for marketing, sales, and support services. Being where your customers are will allow you to offer convenient support, leading to happier customers. Converting leads is never easy, but offering a wide range of use cases on communication channels they love will improve their experience during the consideration stage and lead them to convert more often.
Reduce cart abandonment
According to the Baymard Institute, 70.19% of shoppers abandon their carts and never complete their online purchases. Use your customers’ favorite digital channels to engage with them, collect feedback, and do some research to learn the main reason your customers abandon their carts.
Keeping engagement going with your customers is the best way to help reduce the rate of cart abandonment. By keeping the conversation active, brands incentivize customers to complete their purchase by:
- Sending promotional messages for their favorite products
- Sending back in stock messages for items they saved on their wish list
- Sending reminder messages for cart abandonment with call-to-action buttons for easy purchase
Tip: Use an omnichannel customer engagement solution to create workflows that will send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Tools with event-triggered notifications can help you engage with customers who abandon carts by allowing you to send reminder messages and follow up with enticing discounts to promote the sale.
Increase customer loyalty
The best way to increase customer loyalty is to build a strong relationship with your customers. That means that they need to have a good understanding of who you are as a brand and feel confident that you will deliver on your promises.
Building customer loyalty is about nurturing a relationship by constantly engaging with customers and ensuring they don’t forget about your brand. You can achieve this by:
- Segmenting customers based on loyalty status and offering special discounts
- Sending discounts for special dates like birthdays or anniversaries
- Delivery status updates
- Sending payment reminders
Tip: Craft a self-service chatbot to offer customers always-on service to increase their loyalty to your brand. You can design the chatbot to send automatic responses to FAQs or status updates and avoid long waiting queues for call centers.
Increase sales
Using your customers’ favorite chat apps as a sales channel is a great way to promote your products. By using what you know about their past behaviors and interests, you can send relevant products and services or upgrades on plans or memberships that you know meet their needs.
Customers spend approximately 38 minutes a day on WhatsApp, which means your marketing messages will get the visibility they need to have an impact when sent on the right channel.
To successfully cross sell and upsell try sending:
- Products that were frequently purchased with items from their last order
- Reminder notifications for items that need to be purchased frequently when you estimate customers might be running low
- Messages with easy-to-use call-to-action buttons to make purchasing simple
Tip: A customer data platform is essential for collecting data and learning all you can about your customers. All your customers’ information and past behaviors will be stored in one place where a detailed profile is created and gives you better insights into their shopping habits. Once you understand your customers and their needs, you can send the right messages and improve the chances of completing the sale.
Optimize costs and boost efficiency
Customer support agents are often answering high volume, low value questions. You can help your contact center agents focus on more complex, rewarding tasks by adding a chatbot to your communication stack.
Companies will save up to $11 billion and nearly 2.5 billion hours by using chabots. That means more money can be invested where it counts for your business, and call center traffic can be drastically reduced.
A virtual assistant is also available 24/7, so customers don’t have to call during certain hours or wait in long queues to speak with an agent. Your chatbot can also help customers:
- Book appointments
- Answer FAQs
- Get updates on delivery statuses
- Receive important documents or receipts using rich media
Tip: Although chatbots can handle a wide range of inquiries, live support agents are still necessary to offer impeccable service. By integrating a cloud contact center solution, you can give support agents the right tools to efficiently resolve any issues that a chatbot cannot.
Customer service chatbots can be designed to understand when it’s time to transfer the customer to a live agent. Agents can then take over the conversation and have a full view of past interactions. This reduces the need for customers to repeat themselves, improving experience. It also helps agents improve efficiency while increasing their sense of accomplishment by giving them more rewarding tasks.
To unlock these benefits, you need more than just tools, you need a thoughtful conversational commerce strategy that aligns with customer needs and business goals.
Conversational commerce strategy
To succeed with conversational commerce, your business needs to build a strategy that aligns with customer behavior and sales goals. This includes selecting the right conversational commerce tools, optimizing messaging for each stage of the funnel, and using conversational AI to deliver real-time support and recommendations.
Start by identifying which social media platforms and chat apps your customers use most, whether that’s WhatsApp Business, Messenger, SMS, or web chat, and map out key moments in the customer journey where conversational engagement can add value.
Next, leverage conversational commerce tools like AI chatbots, natural language processing engines, and real-time orchestration platforms (like Infobip’s CXOP) to build interactive, helpful conversations. This includes everything from answering FAQs and product recommendations to completing purchases within the chat itself.
A successful strategy also relies on integrating conversational AI into broader marketing and sales funnels. Personalize interactions based on past behaviors, use event-triggered messages to reduce cart abandonment, and enable cross-sell and upsell flows within conversations.
Finally, measure performance across every touchpoint by tracking conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and response times. Optimizing these elements ensures your conversational commerce work contributes directly to revenue growth while creating frictionless experiences for customers.
Once you have a clear strategy in place, the next step is to choose the right conversational commerce solutions and channels that will help you execute it effectively, tailoring experiences to your customers’ preferences at every stage of their journey.
Conversational commerce solutions
Learn about some of the most popular ways brands choose to connect with customers and craft conversational experiences that lead to greater sales.
Social media
Social media profiles are a must have for businesses that want to share information with customers and add valuable touch points to their journeys.
Take Instagram for example. Customers can learn about who you are as a brand by reading your posts, browsing your products and sending direct messages to your business within the social media app.
Additionally, you can create engaging campaigns with click-to-chat ads to start conversational commerce journeys, as well.
This all makes social media a great starting point for any business to begin adopting conversational commerce practices to increase engagement and conversion rates.
Chatbots
Customer expectations have changed drastically over the past few years. They are no longer willing to wait for responses and get frustrated with having to repeat themselves to support agents on the same issue.
By deploying a chatbot, your brand can streamline conversational services such as:
- FAQ responses
- Sending receipts or important documents
- Updates on delivery status
- Sharing product information
- Booking appointments
Many AI chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer intent, respond in a human-like manner, and offer a smoother conversational commerce experience.
More recently, RAG Agents (a more modern AI chatbot) use Large Language Models (LLM) trained on company and customer data in combination with Generative AI to offer users the best possible customer support. These RAG Agents can complete more complex tasks making the user journey smoother.
What’s more, you will speed up customer support queues leading to fast resolution. This will increase customer and employee satisfaction and help you cut costs on call centers.
Live chat
When customers are navigating your website, live chat is an ideal tool for fast responses and immediate resolution for queries. You can help customers avoid having to make phone calls or leaving your site because they can’t be bothered to search for the answers they are curious about.
You can use an advanced Agentic AI agent that can autonomously make decisions and sort workflows or live agents to manage the live chats, and converse with multiple customers at once. Send product recommendations based on what information they share with you to walk them through the sales journey all on your website.
Conversational commerce use cases
Integrating conversations into every stage of the customer journey will help boost overall experience with your brand. From onboarding to re-engagement, you can craft conversations that will walk your customers through their entire journey:
Discovery
You can start designing conversational commerce experiences as customers are discovering your brand and products. Collect leads with click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook or Instagram and allow them to opt into notifications from you for promotional offers. If your channel of choice is Google’s Business Messages, allow customers to open a conversation with you over Google Maps or even directly on your website.
Having multiple entry points and allowing your customers to initiate the conversation is an excellent way to collect leads, inform potential buyers of your services and start a conversational experience that they are in control of.
Consideration
Now that you have an open conversation with your customer, you can continue sending relevant and meaningful messages that can help guide them through the sales funnel.
Take advantage of rich media features on chat apps to enrich the conversational experience. Send product catalogs over WhatsApp to allow customers to browse products and read details right in the chat app. Use list messages on Apple Messages for Business so customers skim through products, pick appointment times or find store locations.
Purchase
Completing a purchase through conversational commerce has never been more efficient. Gone are the days of opening multiple web pages or switching apps to complete a purchase. Now customers can pay right in the chat app.
On Apple Messages for Business and coming soon to WhatsApp, customers can complete payments within the conversation. This makes finalizing a sale easier than ever because customers can browse products, choose what to purchase and complete the purchase without ever exiting the conversation with your brand.
Retention
Your conversation shouldn’t die out after a purchase. Make sure you continue to chat with customers to increase retention and encourage them to repurchase with you.
By sending delivery status updates, and e-receipts on chat apps, you can continue the conversation after they’ve completed the payment. Then collect feedback from them right in the chat with easy reply buttons for fast responses.
You can loop their journey back to purchase by sending promotional messages, time sensitive deals or loyalty point updates that encourage them to browse your products and make another purchase.
Conversational commerce examples
These examples of conversational commerce in practice help demonstrate how businesses in general can benefit from adding conversational experiences to their strategy:
Petpetgo
Doubled their purchasing frequency with our omnichannel customer engagement solution to improve marketing performance.
Unilever
Used a WhatsApp chatbot to promote new products and increased sales by 14x.
Bajaj Auto
Doubled their conversion rates and boosted engagement by 133% by adding WhatsApp and RCS to their communication stack.
By combining the right tools, channels, and strategy, your business can turn every conversation into a meaningful, revenue-driving interaction. With solutions like Infobip’s CXOP, it becomes easier to transform these use cases into fully orchestrated, personalized customer journeys, delivered in real time, across every touchpoint.
