Tag: messaging apps

Shopify’s latest acquisition will help business market their online stores with messaging apps.

The Canadian e-commerce company recently announced that it will be acquiring Kit CRM, a virtual marketing assistant that uses simple text messaging to assist businesses in accomplishing their marketing needs for their online stores. Businesses that connect Kit to their store can manage their social marketing with this virtual marketing assistant, which works with five online marketplaces. Acquiring Kit will give Shopify a notable conversational commerce opportunity.

This marketing trend could help business owners run their operations with greater effectiveness.

Conversational commerce is a major up-and-coming marking trend. According to Small Business Trends, it primarily pertains to using messaging and chat interfaces to interact with companies, brands, services, etc. that until this point have had no real place in the “bidirectional, asynchronous messaging context.” With the help of this marketing tool, end-users and customers are able to talk to brands via instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, and others.

The Chief Marketing Officer at Shopify, Craig Miller, commented on the recent acquisition announcement saying that Shopify believes messaging apps are the doorway for the internet on mobile and that conversational commerce represents a massive opportunity for their company.

Conversational commerce could change the way consumers make online purchase decisions.

In addition to acquiring Kit, Shopify has also been busy with developing commerce bots for Facebook Messenger that will enable business owners to have improved interactive and engaging communications directly with their customers.

In recent years, messaging apps have significantly increased in popularity to the point that in some cases they’ve become more popular than social media platforms. With this level of popularity, conversational commerce may end up proving to be a fundamental shift from standard commerce. It may also end up changing the way that consumers make online buying choices and even how they communicate.

“Kit addresses a real pain point for merchants and is one of our most highly rated apps in the Shopify App Store. We look forward to having the Kit team join Shopify and help us define the future of conversational commerce together,” Miller stated.

Multimedia messaging services may be the next big channel for communicating with consumers.

Though mobile marketing is still relatively new, there is already an image that comes to mind when the term is spoken, and it usually involves text messages and banner ads that are worked into sites and apps.

Some marketers are beginning to think that the future of this channel, however, is in MMS.

These predictions are not without grounds. The mobile marketing campaigns from large brands such as Kellogg, IKEA, Starbucks, and Bloomingdales, as well as television networks such as ABC, CBS, and Fox, have all included their own elements that include both SMS (text) and multimedia messaging services (MMS). It is the latter that is being viewed by many as the opportunity with the greatest potential and likelihood for growth.

Mobile marketing ads in MMS include any number of different types of content format, including video.

This mobile marketing prediction is causing many brands, companies, and marketers to begin to direct some of their investments and budgets toward businesses and techniques that involve the use of MMS. It is starting to open the eyes of advertisers to the realization that essentially every cell phone is assured to have at least two apps, which are texting and phone calling. This knowledge helps to provide the perspective needed to properly design campaigns in order to reach the largest number of people.

Regardless of the popularity of actual specific messaging apps, which are also being considered as potential avenues for advertising, MMS is growing faster for mobile marketing simply because it comes as a standard on all of these devices, regardless of model or operating system.

Data from the CTIA (the Wireless Association) has shown that there were 74 billion MMS messages sent by consumers last year. This figure increased at the same time that the number of text messages and talk minutes dropped. Even so, brands have not been exploiting MMS as quickly as was possible. This has left it primed for a sudden explosion in the near future, particularly after the outcomes of recent studies that are showing that this technique helps to effectively reach consumers.