This article provides you with advice on appearance, integration, and effective use of conversation starters.
1. Conversation starters in a few words
1.1. Principle
Conversation starters, generated with generative AI, allow you to engage your visitors directly from a product page on your website or mobile app, with large-scale personalization and very little configuration.
🚀 New in 2025 :
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Sales Optimization: Since February 24, AI-generated conversation starters have been optimized. The most clicked questions and those leading to sales are automatically prioritized to maximize engagement and conversions.
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Starter Persistence: Since March 4, once a conversation is initiated, unclicked conversation starters remain visible, allowing online shoppers to select new questions if they have more. Additionally, if they navigate to another page, the questions dynamically adapt to the displayed product.
1.2. Why use conversation starters?
- Increase engagement rates by reinventing standard chat bubble notifications.
- Personalize your engagement at scale, offering unique questions tailored to product page or search contexts, requiring minimal configuration and fully integrated into your webpage design.
- Anticipate your customers’ specific needs related to a product or category.
- Facilitate access to conversations by providing multiple engagement methods: a single click is enough to send a question, saving users from typing.
- Stand out with innovative notification designs that are less intrusive than standard notifications.
2. Integrate your conversation starters directly from the iAdvize administration
Integrate Your Conversation Starters from the iAdvize Administration After requesting activation from your iAdvize contact, conversation starters will be enabled on your website. To integrate them, go to Engagement > Notifications & Chatbox :
You can now configure them. Select the Embedded conversation starter.
Go to the Style tab to customize colors and typography:
Tips: Do not hesitate to use a contrast checker like https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ or https://www.siegemedia.com/contrast-ratio to make sure the contrast is good enough in terms of accessibility. Accessible means compliant with standards such as WCAG but also means more visible/usable Conversation Starters that will be more clicked by shoppers.
In the Content tab, you can define the knowledge (product catalog via CSV or API only), titles, and labels of your conversation starters:
It is possible to choose an optional knowledge base, currently limited to the product catalog. Additionally, the title is customizable, offering greater flexibility in presentation. You can also select 2 to 5 starters to display according to your needs.
Furthermore, it is possible to manually create a starter by selecting the "custom" option:
It is important to note that if you add manual starters, they must be translated into each language used on the site. Finally, you can preview the AI-generated starters using the right side of the screen, where you can input a product based on its name or ID to simulate the user experience.
Lastly, the CSS Selectors tab allows you to define when and where to display the notification on your web page:
Tips: Selecting an area with less content improves visibility, and reducing the need for scrolling enhances performance.
You can also define margins between your Conversation Starters and the rest of the elements on the page (default is 10 px). You can preview the margins via the preview on the right of the screen:
3. Configure your Conversation Starters on your website with our integration tips
This technical section will help you install conversation starters on your website, focusing mainly on CSS selectors and custom data.
3.1. CSS Selector and Positioning
When creating or modifying an "Embedded Conversation Starter" in the administration panel, the last tab on the left panel contains the CSS selector configuration:
This is very similar to Custom Buttons. We have:
- A dropdown menu "show notification" which allows us to choose the position of the notification (inside, before, or after the HTML element).
- An "HTML element" input field which allows us to add a CSS selector.
Choosing the Right CSS Selector
We will use this HTML as an example:
To find the right selector, we can use this Chrome extension: SelectorGadget
Let's say we want to target the second block with the red background:
- Click on the extension icon in the top right corner:
- Click on the element you want to select:
- Copy the selector:
Here are some examples of positioning:
| Position | Selector | Render |
|---|---|---|
| Before | .my-class-2 | |
| Inside | .my-class-2 | |
| After | .my-class-2 |
4. Custom Data
If the client uses generative AI and has selected a knowledge base in the notification template of their "Embedded Conversation Starter" in the administration panel, then custom data must be present on the page.
How to Find Which Custom Data Needs to Be Present on the Page
It is the same as the one used by the bot, if applicable. It is linked to the knowledge base: you can find it in AI Copilot > AI Knowledge.
Here is the custom data (in this example, "product_id"):
5. Forbidden words
It is possible to define a list of words or expressions (which can be complete sentences) that cannot be suggested to your customers within the Conversation Starters. This option is available in the notification builder, in the "Content" tab at the bottom left.
You can directly enter the list of words or expressions to be excluded from the Conversation Starters by manually entering them and separating them with a line break.
Alternatively, it is possible to directly import the words you have chosen to detect from your bot scenario.
It is important to note that this synchronization with your bots is not automatic and is not reciprocal. Each time these words are updated on the bot side, you will need to do the same on the Conversation Starters side.
Feel free to check out our general advice on notification design before you start creating your conversation starter!
6. Integrate your Conversation Starter into your strategy
To be visible to your website visitors, your Conversation Starter must be integrated into your strategy. To do this, you need to declare this notification in one of your targeting rules.
NB: if, on a given page of your site, you wish to simultaneously display "classic" chat and a Conversation Starter, you'll need to create two separate targeting rules. These will have strictly identical criteria, with the exception of the type of notification and the title given to your rules.
7. Tips : how to create a good conversation starter
Les ingrédients clés pour créer un bon conversation starter :
- Concise for better readability.
- Relevant to capture the attention of your customers.
- Common inquiries about your products before purchasing.
- Use a direct and neutral tone to keep it simple.
- Avoid repeating product names in the question.
- If your target audience does not consist of customers with technical knowledge, avoid going into technical details about the product and instead focus on more general questions that appeal to all audiences.
- Offer questions that highlight the strengths and unique selling points of the product.
