So you’ve recently heard and read everything you can about Guided Selling and want to reduce your CAC, 3X your website conversions, AND build a better relationship with your customers.

We get it; you’re excited. The possibilities and inspiring examples of other brands successfully implementing it must have gotten you curious about how you can get similar results.

In our previous posts in the Masterclass series on Guided Selling, we covered how it’s different for e-commerce, what are some best practices to execute, and some excellent examples to inspire you.

In this post, we’re going to help you choose what Guided Selling Tool you should look out for and what factors we’ve personally seen makes a huge impact.

Let’s begin!

What is Guided Selling? What is a guided selling tool?

Guided selling is an excellent marketing strategy that prompts, nudges, and advises your potential customers before they drop off and matches them to the right product from your diverse catalogue.

While it does that, it creates a stronger and more impressionable bond that encourages repeat purchases. Excellent customer support is key, which is a cost-effective way of delivering that.

There are several ways you can implement guided selling- through product guides, quizzes, and chat- but our favourite has been the latter from the success stories we hear from our clients.

However, setting any of these up can be cumbersome and time-consuming.

You will need to deeply study your customers and discover

• their needs, desires, and shopping patterns (are they more discovery-oriented customers or goal-oriented?)
• the awareness level of your products (within multiple target audiences)
• what kind of support do they want from you (which is the least non-intrusive)
• your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses w.r.t their customer support
• What channels do they frequent the most (and even shop in)
• Analyse what complaints and queries are coming already, etc

However, this can take months as designing pages, conversations, and workflows from scratch will go through several stages and will need an experienced person to drive it forward to see immediate results.

How many guided selling tools exist? Are they expected to grow?

There is a growing marketplace for guided selling tools, and because of the success D2C brands have seen with this strategy.

Plus, Whatsapp keeps making it easier to create more unique campaigns that bring more returns and impressions and reduce CAC.

However, most of them cater to a wide category of clients, and we personally and strongly feel misses out on the specific challenges only e-commerce businesses face, especially in such a difficult time economically.

Our entire focus has been to notice how online shoppers behave and communicate from pre-purchase to post, and then after that, how they reach out for a repeat order, what stops them from coming back, and what industry-level differences exist so we can make it easy and smooth for our clients to execute guided selling.

Also, conversational commerce is the future- more and more companies are realising its power, with newer generations hating having to call and speak to an agent unless completely necessary.

What Makes a Great Guided Selling Software for Ecommerce

From our experience with clients and the commerce industry, we think the following are integral in deciding the success of this strategy.

Built for D2C

Guided selling has long been in play, yet guided selling software has tried to cater to many niches without truly understanding what sets e-commerce apart.

With rising ad spends, complex privacy laws (zero party data), and increasing competition, D2C brands need customised solutions in a scalable manner without increasing overhead costs.

Shopping also needs to be engaging for online shoppers, especially because they cannot feel or touch the product in real life.

That pure dopamine hit in finding the right product is fun offline and needs to be replicated across all touch points in the buying journey.

Guided selling can make it fun for people to shop from your brand, along with educating them about your industry and products and driving repeat behaviour.

But most guided selling tools have the same strategy and templates for different industries leading to errors and poor customer support, eventually leading to wasting hours customising it.

Instead, choose one that works well for e-commerce and knows exactly what struggles you are going through, and can present solutions at scale.

With more than 150 clients gained through word of mouth alone, we have managed to drill deep into what D2C brands need and each product update is done keeping in mind our client’s requirements and introducing new campaigns in conversational marketing.

Quick Implementation Time

Most D2C brands also are racing against time and reduced funding.

It is essential for any digital marketer in such a brand to find a tool that matches their needs and implement it quickly and efficiently to create more developed and complex campaigns.

LimeChat has 10X faster implementation than other guided selling softwares in the market and we can enable a bot that works for YOUR niche, within 7 days.

Not to forget, within 30 days, we will deliver on our promise of 70% automation of all chat support queries coming your way.

Plug and Play workflows for different industries

Ready-made templates are a magic phrase.

If that gets you excited, here are a few more!

More than 20+ customisable templates based on your industry niche…

Easily integrated with Shopify…

Customisable bot personality and brand tone, depending on your niche…

Do we need to write our implementation time again? 🙂

With LimeChat, you get access to all this and more!

Checkout on Chat

Why does your customer need to leave chat and land back on your checkout and potentially drop off?

Plus, the less work you make them do, the better.

We’ve noticed checkout on the chat itself leads to more sales and reduced abandoned cart rates.

Most guided selling apps in the market only have checkout enabled on the website, which we find is a missed opportunity.

Let’s say, for example; you have enabled CTIA (Click to Instagram Ads). Your customers can complete checkout right there without leaving their favourite app with LimeChat!

This leads us to our next point.

Retargeting through Instagram DMs or Whatsapp Widget

As we mentioned earlier, privacy laws are getting stricter and will further reduce your CAC budget.

Retargeting is getting difficult and can often feel intrusive.

This is another impressive advantage of guided selling- since you have your customer’s consent in chat, along with their details, you can send customised reminders that won’t spoil your brand’s reputation.

This way, your ads reach them where they’re present most of the day.

Robust Product Quiz that a Bot can Handle

One of the main features of guided selling is advising your customers and taking them through your catalogue in a non-overwhelming way.

A product quiz is a great way to do that, but having a static landing page isn’t engaging.

Choosing tactile buttons on chat and quickly getting answers is.

We have gamified the experience and figured out the right number of options, categories, and how to take your customer through products and sharing just the right amount of information to lead them to checkout.

Level 3 AI can Support Free Text

A big advantage of our Level 3, human-like AI, is that our bot can understand the free text and respond accordingly.

So even if they cannot choose an option and wish to converse with you, as they would offline, our bot can handle such requests and lead them to checkout.

It can also decide on its own when it needs to hand off conversations if they require human intervention.

Making shopping online feel natural, like they are talking to a human, is a huge reason why conversational commerce is the future of shopping. And our bot is made to reassure the customer in a natural way.

In-depth Analytics to Measure and Refine your Strategy

Once implemented, if you want to refine anything in our approach, you will need granular data to find out what’s working and what needs to be customised or built. Our help desk will be able to help you realise-

• How much automation is happening
• Breakdown of user intent (Why are they coming to your bot?)
• How many sales are generated through conversations?
• Product-wise sales data to learn what to push more, when
• Total revenue generated by your guided selling tool, and
• Your CSAT score

This way, you can truly judge the success of you guided selling technology and improve your strategy to increase your conversions by 3X!

How to use Guided Selling Software?

Want to learn how to put guided selling into action without making tons of errors along the way?

Take a look at this post where we break down what are the best practices your strategy needs to comprise of and this post for inspiring examples from brands and our clients.

Guided Selling with LimeChat

Our Ecommerce Guided Selling tool was made (and is continuously updated) with our focus on purely D2C brands.

Research from several industries, like beauty, health, wellness, fashion, etc., has given us unique data into what convinces a customer to shop online.

We can create a guided selling tool that

1. Engages both discovery-oriented and goal-oriented customers to maximise your sales
2. Keeps customers invested in their shopping journey by minimising fatigue from information overload and choice overload
3. Address product-specific queries to boost confidence, and
4. Deliver an incomparable customer experience

In addition, our ecommerce help desk minimises resolution time, is omnichannel, has several customisable templates created for e-commerce brands, and can be quickly integrated with Shopify apps.

Want to find out how we can help you ace Guided Selling? Book a demo now!

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This post is the seventh lesson in our Masterclass series on Guided Selling, where we deep dive into the current expectations and strategies some of the best D2C brands use and how to execute them in simple, actionable ways.