{"id":1970,"date":"2018-09-04T21:05:30","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T14:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/appsynth.net\/?p=1970"},"modified":"2018-09-05T18:13:05","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T11:13:05","slug":"messenger-marketing-se-asia-ecommerce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appsynth.net\/messenger-marketing-se-asia-ecommerce\/","title":{"rendered":"How Messenger Marketing Is Changing the SE Asian Ecommerce Market"},"content":{"rendered":"
Despite its prominence in large areas of the Western world, the ecommerce industry is still relatively early in its development, with a huge amount of room to grow \u2014 particularly in the developing world.<\/p>\n
As technological standards rise on a global scale, more and more people are afforded the means, the infrastructure, and the awareness that make it possible and desirable for them to enter the convenient world of online shopping.<\/p>\n
And while there are plenty of ecommerce markets booming at the moment, Southeast Asia is really leading the way, with 330 million internet users \u2014 a number that will continue to grow \u2014 and a high ecommerce uptake.<\/p>\n
When such dominant organizations as Google have openly taken note of its staggering opportunities<\/a>, it\u2019s clear that the future is bright.<\/p>\n But with such rich online retail opportunities in the region, how is the marketing industry adapting?<\/p>\n Well, it\u2019s rapidly embracing the power of conversational commerce in moving towards flexible cross-platform sales funnels that take advantage of the immense saturation of messaging channels to reach prospective customers and turn them into loyal advocates.<\/a><\/p>\n This messenger marketing method isn\u2019t just proving a valuable addition to advertisers and retailers in the Southeast Asian ecommerce industry \u2014 it\u2019s outright changing the market.<\/p>\n In this piece, we\u2019re going to take a closer look at how messenger marketing works, what makes it so useful, and why it\u2019s such a strong fit for this particular region. Let\u2019s begin.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Traditional approaches to marketing have been seeing diminishing returns for some time now, and the slide is only going to get worse.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve become inured to standard advertising techniques, accustomed to ignoring media spots and scrolling past (or actively blocking) digital banners and pop-ups.<\/p>\n The practice of putting up a few posters for a product and yielding numerous conversions is dead in the water for any brand that doesn\u2019t already have massive public recognition.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, social media ads have already been found to be strongly effective in areas such as Thailand<\/a>, with advertisers spending more on Facebook ads than on any other digital marketing \u2014 giving a clear glimpse of the direction in which things are going.<\/p>\n Messenger marketing goes even further in neatly side-stepping ad resistance by offering different messages in different contexts. Instead of leaning on generic promotional elements in generic media, it provides targeted utility through personally-affecting channels.<\/p>\n Since we have such control over the content of our chat applications (and use them primarily for conversing with friends and family members), we view them with affection instead of indifference, and are thus much more vulnerable to suggestion from chat-based recommendations.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s compare two basic examples. In the first, you see a banner ad for a product \u2014 it\u2019s from a brand you like, but it was placed there for a wide audience, so there\u2019s a decent chance it falls outside of your range of interests.<\/p>\n If it does interest you, then you must either plan to visit a corresponding store or take out your smartphone and make a search (perhaps not tremendously likely since we\u2019re lazy creatures at heart).<\/p>\n In the second example, you see a notification from a brand you follow through a chat application \u2014 it\u2019s a new product recommendation based on your order history and your indicated preferences.<\/p>\n Because it\u2019s hyper-relevant to your interests, and you can take action directly from the messaging app, the conversion process is incredibly quick and easy. If you want it, you can get it with just a few taps, then move on with your day.<\/p>\n In the Western world, the influence of computer technology grew incrementally, and the internet was rolled out slowly over time.<\/p>\n Dial-up connections through unwieldy desktop machines introduced the concepts, and years passed before the ecommerce world achieved anything close to the level of slick convenience it offers today.<\/p>\n As a result, the technological distribution is still very scattered there. Retailers must not only contend with the lingering significance of legacy software and hardware (old versions of Internet Explorer, for instance, or sluggish elderly laptops) but also understand that awareness of digital technologies varies hugely.<\/p>\n For example, there are consumers in the West that remain very reluctant to embrace smartphones. Having slowly become accustomed to the early approach to internet access, they recoil from the prospect of once again dropping what they know and picking up new skills. Some even view smartphones as wastes of time or even distractions from reality.<\/p>\n In the developing world, and particularly Southeast Asia, technological adoption was quite different. Instead of being slowly introduced over time through unintuitive desktop operating systems, the online world first achieved public awareness in many areas through the provision of smartphones.<\/p>\n As a result, generations of all ages (but particularly children) are extremely comfortable with using mobile platforms for all facets of online activity.<\/p>\n And because the smartphone has been so ubiquitous and influential in the technological development of the region, social networking has taken on a very different shape than in the West \u2014 as we\u2019ll see next.<\/p>\n In markets such as the US or the UK, social media \u2014 mainly introduced through MySpace and subsequently made dominant through Facebook \u2014 preceded extensive mobile connectivity, and when smartphones came along and started growing in popularity, the existing networks began making their operations more mobile-friendly.<\/p>\n In Southeast Asia, however, the relative lack of access to the internet and internet-enabled devices in the early years meant that social networks didn\u2019t rise to prominence in the same way, and when the smartphone hit the scene, it was the configurable chat applications that started bringing people together \u2014 establishing the kinds of connections that were borne of Facebook and similar platforms in the West.<\/p>\n Today, there are several massively-popular chat platforms<\/a> fighting for dominance in the region, with LINE out in front (and now the second-largest chat app in all of Asia).<\/p>\n Back in 2015, Thai ecommerce retailers already knew the promotional significance of chat engagement, using LINE conversations<\/a> to follow up on Instagram leads, and things have only grown since then.<\/p>\nWhy Messenger Marketing Is So Powerful<\/h2>\n
A Smartphone-Led Digital Revolution<\/h2>\n
The Dominance of Chat in Southeast Asia<\/h2>\n