4 powerful ways your business can benefit from WhatsApp marketing
Customer Experience expert, Dan Gingiss, says that you need to engage with your customers on the channels and platforms on which they are active. With 1.5 billion users across 180 countries, WhatsApp is a channel you can’t miss out on. Here’s how you need to leverage it.
Hint:Use a bot…a WhatsApp bot.
Why WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is now the Go-To messaging platform for most people. It’s come to the point where we’re sending 29 million messages every minute. That’s about 65 billion a day.
This means that people are now more comfortable using WhatsApp than any other platform. So, it makes much more sense for them to be able to interact with you over WhatsApp, rather than forcing them to download your app (let’s face it, we don’t have the storage space or the inclination to get another app).
And interacting with them on WhatsApp has another benefit. The engagement rates are through the roof. While you’d struggle to get a 15% open rate on your emails, WhatsApp messages have an engagement rate of around 70%.
WhatsApp does have certain strategic advantages in some countries. In India, for example, WhatsApp boasts a user base that’s 200 million strong.
Businesses need to engage customers over WhatsApp
Great, but what would I use a WhatsApp chatbot for?
Glad you asked! Let’s say you launched a new product or offered a discount..basically, any major announcement. How do you plan on spreading the word to your customers?
Website announcements and social media posts can be effective, but not as much as WhatsApp.
1. WhatsApp Marketing
According to Harper Reed,
If you get a WhatsApp message, you’re probably going to open it.
So, let’s address the question you have on your mind — “how do I use WhatsApp for marketing?”
Reminders
With WhatsApp, you can send your customers and prospects reminders about events, sales, etc.
Promotional offers
You can use WhatsApp to share discounts and other promotional offers with your customers. You can even personalize these offers to their preferences.
Broadcasts and campaign messages
You can use broadcasts to send a message to all your customers or a campaign message to target specific customer segments with WhatsApp automation.
WhatsApp would send your customers a notification whenever you broadcast an announcement to them. That’s much more effective than posting a simple announcement on social media or even your website. It’s a more powerful way to drive action.
Conducting market research
WhatsApp empowers you to collect feedback from customers and understand their preferences. It’s much more effective than a survey form because it involves less effort.
Customers can just send their thoughts directly over WhatsApp without needing to fill a form over even navigate to another application.
Permission marketing
WhatsApp Marketing could very well be the gold standard for permission marketing.
Your bot cannot send messages to anyone who hasn’t opted into them. Additionally, WhatsApp bots can only send messages to users who have chatted with your bot recently. There are time limits in place here.
This means that every WhatsApp message you send is going to a user who has recently demonstrated interest in your business and offerings. You won’t just be spraying and praying.
It’s also more effective than emails because customers are more comfortable with WhatsApp. People might put off reading an email, but we humans are pretty much conditioned to read WhatsApp messages as soon as we get them.
It’s practically Pavlovian Conditioning for us to open a WhatsApp message as soon as we get the notification.
Analyzing campaign effectiveness
You can measure the effectiveness of your WhatsApp messages, with rich analytics, right on the Engati portal. Our dashboards give you all the insights you need to step up your WhatsApp Marketing efforts.
Now, you can do some of these things over email as well. So you might be wondering why WhatsApp marketing is essential.
Firstly, it’s because 2 billion people use the app globally. And they love it. People use WhatsApp much more than they use email.
Your customers have associated email with work and stress. They look at WhatsApp as a quicker way of communicating.
Instead of replying with a well-crafted email, they just need to shoot a quick text written in short-hand. Essentially, WhatsApp feels more convenient.
This means results in people checking WhatsApp multiple times throughout the day and only looking at their emails once in a while.
But let’s go back to something we already discussed. WhatsApp Marketing is important because of the way we are conditioned towards WhatsApp notifications.
While we might simply swipe an email notification away from our phones, we are far more likely to open a WhatsApp notification and read the message.
2. Customer Support over WhatsApp
Here’s another reason why you need it. When your customers need help, they don’t want to waste time calling someone up or navigating through your website to find a ‘Contact Us’ section. They want to have their issues resolved in the simplest way possible. If they’re on WhatsApp, you need to be there too.
3. Driving sales via WhatsApp bots
Simplifying sales processes has always been linked to higher amounts of sales generated.
Your customers want you to make it easier for them to buy your offerings. They want to buy your offerings; you’re just making it to hard for them to do it.
And how better to simplify the sales process than to empower your customers to make purchases over WhatsApp?
All you need to do is display your catalog over the bot and integrate your chatbot with Stripe or another payment gateway. Then as soon as they select the product, they’ll be taken to the payment page.
Customers are rapidly shifting towards conversational commerce. That leaves you a choice — adopt it now or get left behind.
4. Order tracking on WhatsApp
As soon as a customer places an order over an e-commerce portal, there’s one thought that constantly plagues their mind — “Will it be delivered on time?”.
Sure, they could track their orders by visiting your website or downloading your mobile app. But that involves too much effort. Besides, who has space for yet another app on their phones?
They’re already using WhatsApp…why don’t you just send them shipping updates right there?
It eases their anxiety with minimum effort on their behalf and creates a better experience for them. But that’s not all.
The transparency that you provide by doing this will even increase their trust in your business.
So, do you need to build a WhatsApp chatbot?
Even if you think you’re a smaller business and could handle your clients without a whatsapp chatbot, you do need to realize that customers today, are spoilt. We want what we want when we want it. We don’t wait for anybody.
So, if you’re unable to interact with customers at odd hours, you could lose out on their business. Besides, your time would be better spent doing something more productive than answering questions mechanically.
With Engati Live Chat, your bot can handle all the routine, monotonous queries and send only the complicated queries to the human agent. Essentially, your employees get to spend their time on more productive tasks that require an advanced, human intellect.
Making it even better
Engati even helps you create your WhatsApp chatbot at an unbelievable price! We’re providing amazing capabilities, detailed analytics, and smooth customer experiences at the lowest price.
Reach your customers on a platform they love and take your business to the next level, with the help of your very own WhatsApp bot.
Do check out our articles below.
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