All about
Currently there are over $22B in voice sales, with the projections skyrocketing to over $164B by 2025. And there are 86 million active smart speaker homes in the United States.
Rep.Ai allows your customers to manage their relationship with you conversationally through their Amazon Alexa. In 2 sentences, a customer can easily reorder from you when they run out of your product and you can push reminders (sales or content notifications) to them through Alexa.
Their AI solution can even automatically detects customers that are about to drop off from the sales funnel, moments before they abandon the website, and offer them sales assistance to increase conversion rate. They claim to be the first-ever on-site sales assistant that adjusts itself to each customer in real-time.
After launching, you can add flows, which are unique stories that you want to share out with your Alexa audience. You can create content flows that lead directly to promoting and selling products.
Imagine an article about juicing and healthy living that leads into a “Would you like to learn more about our green juice?” and then converting a percentage of the readers to purchase from there.
They also have templated flows for "where's my order" and "repeat order", along with influencer flows. An influencer flow is where you can have an influencer send users to Alexa and use that influencers name or a specific call out and that will trigger a custom flow from that influencer all the way to purchase. And coupon offers as well.
You can also set up daily or weekly reminders that the customer can opt in to to get those updates.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Most other Alexa apps don’t allow the purchase and repurchase functionality, and that’s Rep.Ai's specialization, on top of the content offerings they have, such as audio explanations coming from blog posts or FAQs.
Mostly, an Alexa app doesn’t increase new customers, but focuses on increasing sales from existing customers by making the repeat purchase process easier.
It can be set up and ready to launch in 10 minutes, but you can of course make things more complex, set up multiple flows, etc., which would take longer. You’ll set which products you want available on your voice store, your basic store information, set up a test run before going public, and then publish.
Promotion is then largely on you. They have some links and functions to support you, but getting this in the hands of your customer is still on you. It needs to be vast, at first, such as an email blast, SMS, and on-site promotion, and consistent over time, to onboard new customers into the Alexa skill and get a strong adaptation rate.
They do have a widget you can add to your site to get users adopting Alexa straight from the site. The best place to put that is typically on your thank you page or order confirmation email.
Typically your head of marketing or head of Ecommerce will set this up and manage it. You may also want to chat with your customer service / experience team to let them know that many of their incoming tickets could be resolved automatically if the user was asking questions through Alexa. In that way, you can reduce your customer service inquiries, while driving adaptation of your Alexa skill/app.
I feel like this product is literally perfect for products you might use and consume in your home. Dog food, paint brushes, beauty products, all these things that the second you run out, you want to just shout, “Amazon, order me more X.”
Any established Ecommerce player should be considering testing and launching an Alexa skill, as it’s one more channel where your customer is that you could be engaging them, and it can increase Lifetime Value for a segment of your customers.
Small merchants likely shouldn’t worry about this channel yet. While it doesn’t require significant bandwidth, it is too much of a distraction from focusing on core retention components and straight up customer acquisition.
That said, if you felt like it was a really good fit for your business, maybe you sell green smoothies, which to me feels like the perfect product for this, then you could make the investment into Alexa early.