Voice shopping is about providing your customers with exceptional customer service through convenience. Delighted customers turn into repeat customers and, ultimately, loyal, long-term ones. Customers are rapidly responding to the convenience of voice shopping, and retailers hesitant to deploy a retail voice app will lose money to those who are. It's that simple.
Voice apps allow your customers (and potential customers) to order across your product line without lifting a finger. They can order while multitasking. They can order as a need comes to mind and not wait and potentially forget to order later. They can come to rely on your voice app as their quick "go-to" for specific products.
Consider these statistics about voice commerce:
As if this data wasn’t a strong enough signal, there are hard dollars at stake.
ROI of providing a voice app for your customers, which include:
Technology reviewer Geekflare framed it nicely when they said: "Voice technology has become the most disruptive force to hit the world ever since the internet became a visual medium."
The writing is on the wall for retailers. Around 60 million U.S. adult consumers currently own a smart speaker, and of those that embrace voice shopping, 94% of them claim the option is simple, efficient, and improves their quality of life. By 2022, voice is expected to account for TEN PERCENT of the grocery market.
This technology is exploding with no end in sight. Much like same-day and next-day deliveries, consumer expectations are evolving with a razor focus on convenience. As the percentage of voice shoppers increases, if your brand can’t be found, you’ll lose customers, even existing ones, to brands that have a voice presence.
Customers order more long-term when they buy over voice apps, particularly on reusable products, such as food and grocery or health and personal care items.
Blutag’s findings across 500+ retailer voice apps shows that 30% of people who buy reusable products via voice repeat those orders.
Failing to enable voice ordering for your customers could result in a 30% loss on potential revenue.
Additionally, robust voice apps will suggest products when a customer is shopping based on the user's current interaction and purchase history, which leads to higher volume checkouts. In-person and online sales have long used this type of upselling as a successful sales tool, and voice app transactions add a convenience element to the tactic.
The cost of acquisition for DTC brands, and for retailers in general is going up again, after a short dip during the first months of the pandemic. Competition for Facebook and Instagram ads is creating astronomical bids prices. In fact the IAB is suggesting ad spend for digital media will be up double digits again in 2021. Coupled with the cookieless future, how is a marketer to compete?
The retail voice app market is wide open. Although some big box brands have been adopting voice app technology for a few years now, many retailers still have the opportunity to impress and win customers.
Besides acquiring a first time customer, inertia plays a huge role in voice app ROI. A customer that establishes a habit of reordering your product via voice becomes very sticky, and less likely to switch, increasing the lifetime value of each voice customer.
The situation in front of retailers regarding voice ordering is much like the early days of e-Commerce. Now is the time to optimize for voice before competition heats up. Retailers who hesitate to prepare will lose valuable traction with users and risk underwhelming customers with convenience.
There are three ways retailers can roll out a voice app, with varying degrees of success and cost.
You can either organize development in-house, hire an agency, or use a turn-key solution like Blutag. Blutag customers on average realize more than a 12x return on their investment.
Deploying a voice app quickly with a SaaS platform like Blutag is a low fixed monthly rate, regardless of the number of sales. There are no transaction fees, so as your sales increase, your ROI does too.
Blutag's turnkey solution allows retailers to skip high agency development and maintenance costs. Our retailers have access to a development team of experienced machine language engineers and natural language experts who create retail voice apps that resonate with customers.
Additionally, our solution incorporates a "network effect" as our artificial intelligence leverages information gathered across the thousands of retail transactions we process each day, a fact that our 90%+ customer renewal rate attests to.
We offer the only voice app on the market focused on retail and deliver engaging voice apps that let you increase sales and delight your customers.
Let us show you how! Contact our team to see how we can get your customers voice shopping!
And for more information on what is evolving in the world of retail voice apps, please check out our new guide: The Rise of Voice Apps Within The Retail Industry.
