Why WhatsApp marketing could be a powerful tool for e-commerce companies?
WhatsApp Marketing is the new kid on the block! We all know that WhatsApp has 2 billion-plus active users and has recently come up with the WhatsApp Business API platform. WhatsApp Business API has some great features which enable companies to engage with customers at scale and build strong relationships with them. In this article, we will explore how WhatsApp marketing helps businesses grow and how it improves the revenue of the business.
Contents:
- Why Should You Use WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business?
- Benefits of WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business
- WhatsApp Business API vs WhatsApp business
- How hello24 can help you with WhatsApp Marketing
Why Should You Use WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business?
There are numerous reasons why we recommend using WhatsApp as a communication channel for your marketing efforts. Here are the top 4 reasons we believe that are important to businesses.
1. Reach
WhatsApp has an enormous reach in terms of active users on its platform. It has over 2 billion monthly active users and is the most used app in the world! As marketers, we like to engage in platforms where our customers are active and we can stand out. With numbers like this, it’s clear that WhatsApp is a contender.
2. High Open Rates
When it comes to the message open rates, nothing can beat WhatsApp. While traditional channels such as email have 18%-22% open rate depending on the content type, WhatsApp has a phenomenal open rate of 99%. Literally every customer – you want to reach – sees your message! Insane! 🤯
Click-through rates are better than emails too! Largely thanks to features such as “call-to-action” and “quick reply” buttons in WhatsApp business API.
3. Better Customer Experience
WhatsApp provides a rich media and interactive platform which leads to a customer experience better than that of other marketing channels. Here are key features on WhatsApp Business API which make WhatsApp Marketing more interactive.
List: A interactive message with up to 10 options and additional context as required for each option (using the dedicated description line)
Quick Reply: A interactive message with up to 3 options. Each option is a button and enables users to make a selection with just one tap. Since the introduction, Quick reply buttons have become the key feature to reduce spam reports by customers. Adding a quick reply button – “Stop” to your marketing campaign messages and creating a local DND list is the key to keep the spam reports under control!
Call-To-Action: Companies can use call-to-action buttons to direct users to visit a website and/or make a phone call
4. Effective Communication
The traditional marketing channels are mostly one-way communications. One can argue that emails are indeed two-way communication. Ok! let me ask you a question – how many times have you replied to a marketing email? The answer mostly is “zero”. The reason being marketing emails are generally designed to prompt users to visit websites and not designed to expect a reply. WhatsApp marketing templates are different in this aspect. With aforementioned interactive features such as quick-reply buttons, marketing templates in WhatsApp are generally designed to initiate a conversation with the user. Thereby, companies get to communicate their message in a natural/interactive way leading better engagement and conversions from the campaign!
Benefits of WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business
1. Higher conversion rate
The perfect channel for initial contact with customers is crucial if you want to appease the customer. People become disgruntled or angry when interrupted by phone but are inaccessible through email or social media, so find out which works best and use it every time, so that WhatsApp comes in handy to nudge your prospects towards the purchase. Businesses say that customers answered 40% of their WhatsApp messages.
The messaging after initial contact with the right context can increase the conversion rate by 112.6%.
2. Strong relationship with customers
There are over 55% of people reported that they feel more connected to brands if the brands message using WhatsApp. It makes WhatsApp marketing a bulletproof strategy for building long profound relationships with customers and improving loyalty. Thereby reducing the customer acquisition and retention costs for the brands.
3. Lower cost of marketing
WhatsApp is an affordable marketing channel, that makes this platform enticing for small businesses. Hello24 helps your business to achieve more conversions, improves sales, allows you to build deep quality relationships with customers, and costs next to nothing in terms of marketing expenditures.
WhatsApp business API vs WhatsApp business
Now that we understand the benefits of WhatsApp marketing, you might ask why not use traditional WhatsApp Business app to do the job? Good question! Let’s analyze what WhatsApp Business API offers over WhatsApp Business and who should use it.
WhatsApp business
While using the WhatsApp business app, you can handle a maximum of 256 contacts only. So, the WhatsApp business app is best suitable for only small-scale businesses.
The disadvantage of the WhatsApp business app is that it sends messages only if the number is stored in your phone. This is fine if you are handling a few 100s but when your customer base runs into 1000s and 10000s it gets messy.
The WhatsApp business app is not a business-friendly option to handle several customers at a time. You can’t have your WhatsApp business app open on more than 5 devices which heavily restricts the volume of customer conversations one can have.
WhatsApp business API
WhatsApp Business API enables you to handle unlimited customers in a day. This feature is a big advantage when compared to the WhatsApp business app.
While using WhatsApp business API you can send messages to all of your customers. There is no need for customers to save your number. Further, getting a “Green-Badge” (WhatsApp Verified) will enable businesses to configure display names that their customer will see in their WhatsApp app.
WhatsApp Business API helps businesses to send personalized marketing campaigns to millions of customers at a time.
How hello24 can help you with WhatsApp Marketing
Hello24 is the conversational commerce platform which helps companies to do more on WhatsApp.
Automated Marketing Campaigns
With our marketing automation workbench, you can easily send WhatsApp messages to an unlimited number of customers with few clicks. Features such as contact management, attributes-based customer segmentation, and personalization of messages at the customer level will take your WhatsApp marketing to new heights!
Customer Segmentation
Companies will be able to capture customer details from various sources and manage them with proper tags. A tag can be utilized as a customer attribute or a segment to categorized customers into logical groupings for marketing outreach.
Intelligent Responses
As mentioned in the “Effective Communication” section, marketing can be done through conversation and Hello24 helps you to automate that!
Let’s take an example: Suppose you are launching a product; you want to reach out to all potential customers and take pre-booking from interested ones after clarifying their queries, our platform helps you do it in few steps as follows:
- Create a marketing template and get it approved by WhatsApp through our platform
- Identify the list of customers you want to send the message to
- Design a conversational flow in platform to take FAQ and prebooking from customers
- Hit send!
Campaign Analytics
Last but not least! Gain insights about your campaign performance using our “real-time” data analytics workbench. We present some of key metrics such as no. of responses/queries generated, click tracking, spending by customer 24/48/72 hours after the campaign, etc. These metrics help companies to assess the ROI for each campaign.
Sound interesting?? To know more about the possibilities of WhatsApp marketing, how it can help you grow your business and more about our platform, reach out to us for a demo!
