WhatsApp Marketing is one of the newest and most effective ways of reaching customers. The messaging application has achieved the third rank amongst the world’s most widespread social media platforms. Thanks to its extraordinary growth and fame and the introduction of WhatsApp Business, the app has become a budding avenue for many brands to be engaged with their current customers and prospects.
WhatsApp initially started as a simple SMS platform and has grown up to the point where it is now being used by some of the most giant corporations to scale their customer engagement practices. So, if you also want to reach and boost your marketing efforts, WhatsApp is the most effective marketing tool. In this comprehensive guide, we aim to discuss the importance of WhatsApp Marketing and why you should consider using it for your business.
Importance of Using WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business
Broadly speaking, WhatsApp Marketing refers to any kind of promotional or marketing activities occurring on WhatsApp. It is deemed the leading mobile messenger application worldwide, with more than a whopping 2 billion monthly active users across the world.
In addition, WhatsApp also boasts up to 98% open rates, making this marketing medium a must-have for any business wanting to associate with its fellow audience in developed and developing countries.
For instance, India boasts over 487 million WhatsApp users every month, making it the highest-ranked country in audience size. This is followed by Brazil, having nearly 118.5 million users. Still, it’s one of the most ideal choices for promoting products in the US market. Approximately 68 million Americans turn to WhatsApp at least once a month.
WhatsApp marketing is profoundly effective for businesses as it allows them to interact and keep in touch with their customers – over half of the app’s users ensure to check WhatsApp on a daily basis. Even better, you can rest assured these customers will receive all your promotional offers due to the whopping open rate of text messages.
Most importantly, users (your customers) prefer this communication channel. Moreover, they tend to trust brands even more, when they have chat apps. According to statistics, 53% of people claim they would purchase products and avail services from companies that can be reached via chat/instant messaging.
Still, these aren’t the only reasons you must implement WhatsApp in your marketing strategy. In the next section, we observe the most significant benefits and reasons why you should incorporate WhatsApp marketing within your business.
Benefits of WhatsApp Marketing
As the world advances swiftly, consumers expect to get all they can get while engaging with any business. The use of chat messengers serves as a golden opportunity for companies to boost their marketing strategy. Having said that, let’s look at some of the biggest reasons and benefits of leveraging WhatsApp for effectively marketing your products/services and overall business.
1. Secure, Fast, and Cost-effective
In this rapidly advancing environment, people expect businesses to provide instant responses. WhatsApp Business is an excellent way of empowering companies to promptly respond to their customers. One of the app’s features is “Quick Replies,” which enables you to save and re-use the message you’re expected to frequently send to your clients/customers.
WhatsApp also has end-to-end encryption and authentication, which further ensures the protection and privacy of all your conversations. Creating an account on WhatsApp Business requires a verification process that further adds to your credibility.
With a verified business profile, your audience can rest assured they are communicating with an authentic brand. This further aids in improving customer loyalty.
Besides, investing in WhatsApp and incorporating it within your marketing strategy can all be done quickly and without breaking the bank because you can easily register on WhatsApp Business for free. All you require is a strong Wi-Fi connection, and you can kick start your business marketing on the app sooner before you know it.
2. Deeper and Stronger Relationships with Customers
More than 55% of people feel they are better associated with a brand by using messaging apps, making WhatsApp marketing a robust and foolproof strategy for establishing meaningful and long-term relationships with customers.
Maintaining such connections gives an added advantage to companies, as it helps brands to minimize expenditures as it is 5-25 times cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones.
3. Supports Engagement and Personalized Communication
One of the app’s best features is that it enables you to reimagine bespoke interactions with all your customers by offering you various communication options.
With WhatsApp, you can message and deliver multiple types of content like videos, images, PDF files, other documents, gifts, contacts, etc. In addition, it lets you segregate your audience into distinct groups based on their preferences, likings, and choices, boosting customer loyalty.
4. Broader Demographic Reach
WhatsApp’s users extend across 180 countries worldwide. It’s relatively straightforward functionality, and user-friendliness soars its demands within a vast age group. Using this app, you can connect with practically anyone, regardless of location, gender, age, etc. This ultimately allows you to take your business expansion game to the next level.
Besides, WhatsApp offers businesses a powerful set of personalization options. For example, you can send special offers, tailored greetings, and welcome messages, congratulate them on their birthday, and much more.
This approach keeps the audience highly engaged with their brands of choice – more than 70% of consumers claim they only engage with a business that sends personalized marketing messages.
5. Helps Gain Valuable Customer Insights
Having a healthy empathy with your customers requires knowing how your audience feels about specific products or services. This is precisely why in-depth customer insights are crucial in measuring your marketing efforts’ success rate.
The “Statistics” feature in WhatsApp Business gives you data on the number of messages sent, delivered, received, and read.
Furthermore, it lets you oversee the time-slots when consumers are highly active on WhatsApp so you can plan your promotional and marketing campaigns. This eventually allows you to better experience your customers’ experience and engagement.
6. Higher Conversion Rate
Choosing the perfect communication channel for initial contact with your customer base is crucial. People might get agitated and frustrated with phone calls while not being able to reach you via social media or email.
This is where WhatsApp is convenient in reminding your clients and nudging prospective buyers to make the purchase. Moreover, messaging drives conversions, and messaging after initial contact with your prospects can boost conversion rates by 112.6%.
7. Better Sales
On top of that, WhatsApp marketing also works remarkably for sales, and even results in 27% more sales leads by using a simple trick such as adding your WhatsApp phone number on your webpage.
It appears as if potential customers tend to feel more confident in reaching out to a brand via messaging apps. Around 66% of individuals feel better about buying from a brand that is active on messengers, and approximately 60% of consumers think they’ll use messengers for buying purposes in the future.
In addition, WhatsApp can operate as a stand-alone sales channel, especially with the increasing tendency for customers to purchase only via messaging apps.
8. Facilitates Automation & FAQ
With WhatsApp Business, you can effectively automate all your message flows and conversations, allowing you to respond to your audience promptly. For instance, some businesses in the service sector call for instant responses to general information, such as in the tourism industry.
Customers might contact your business to inquire about booking confirmations, flight timings, and other details. This is when automation plays a vital role. Creating a single response template is more hassle-free instead of creating new responses every time from the beginning.
9. Real-Time Customer Service and Support
The ability for businesses to make themselves accessible and available to customers is now more crucial than ever. WhatsApp Business messaging ticks all the right boxes by providing universal messaging that is efficient, quick, and reliable. It allows customers to contact a business for queries in a way they are comfortable and familiar with.
You can easily receive all your updates and notifications in real time. Moreover, all urgent inquiries or questions can be answered promptly and directly, and there won’t be any middlemen delaying the process.
10. Lower Cost of Marketing
Finally, WhatsApp is an incredibly cost-effective marketing channel, making it all the more appealing for small and medium-sized businesses. It only requires installing the application and connecting to the Wi-Fi.
In the meantime, the possibilities of your messages reaching the customer are pretty high because, on average, a user checks opens and checks WhatsApp more than 23 times a day. Besides, it costs practically nothing in terms of promotional expenses.
WhatsApp Marketing Strategy
Of course, integrating WhatsApp within your business marketing strategy requires a specific amount of planning. The more well-thought-out your strategy is, the more effective your marketing channel will be.
This WhatsApp marketing strategy lets you plan your steps accordingly and modify the paths if something doesn’t work out. With these tips, you can craft an effective marketing strategy and obtain remarkable results.
1. Define your KPIs and Marketing Objectives
Firstly, you must determine your marketing goals to help you concentrate on significant activities and eliminate unnecessary things. This involves revising your marketing funnel and identifying your weaknesses.
Think of those business objectives that can be easily pursued using a WhatsApp marketing strategy. In addition, identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll help you know if those objectives have been met.
2. Determine your Target Audience
Your target audience is the underlying cause of all your marketing efforts and the definition of their success. Hence you can experiment with different approaches to find out who your target audience is. No matter which approaches you choose to go forth with, do not speculate or do any guesswork. Instead, you must explore your audience.
One of these approaches can be to create a customer profile, so you can conduct surveys on social media platforms and include data from your CRM, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook, etc. These tools will help you identify your prospects’ geographic and demographic characteristics.
3. Get the WhatsApp Business App
WhatsApp Business is exclusively designed to cater to the needs of small and large firms. It works as a stand-alone application and is equipped with tons of helpful features like:
- A business profile with your business description, email address, website, and office location.
- Labels to organize customers’ chats and label them according to the sales funnel stages.
- Catalog for a virtual display of your products.
- Statistics to track sent, delivered, read, and received messages.
- Swift, automated replies to keep in touch with customers and provide prompt responses.
4. Create a Brand Persona
Most people prefer interacting with another person instead of an impersonal business. Hence, brand persona plays a vital role in undertaking a winning WhatsApp marketing approach. A brand persona refers to attitudes, traits, and values specific brand shares.
Your brand persona underlies your communications and tone of voice with potential customers on WhatsApp. So, focus on generating a feel that your customers are engaging with a real person.
5. Create a Contact List
You definitely need a contact list if you plan on using the app as more than just a customer support channel. The ideal way to get a contact list and establish new contacts is to use a subscription form.
You can add them to various sections/pages of your site and provide a lead magnet. You can opt for multichannel forms that enable subscribers to choose from various platforms they would prefer to get their updates (WhatsApp, email, Facebook Messenger, etc.). This ultimately results in higher conversions and increases engagement.
6. Design Your Communication
WhatsApp’s open rates are much higher than other social media channels. But, if you fail to offer relevant and good quality content, it would be pointless to use WhatsApp as a channel for marketing.
Begin by identifying, and most essential topics and messages you aim to deliver to your audience. Moreover, you mustn’t restrict yourself to just promotional messages. Focus on educating and entertaining your target audience and keep your messages concise and sweet.
The majority of people use WhatsApp on the go and cannot afford to read through detailed messages. However, you must also not constantly bombard them with messages in short intervals as it can decrease their interest and engagement levels in your brand. It is recommended to send no more than 5-10 messages weekly.
Finally, you can make your messages more effective and powerful by using animations, videos, pictures, or gifs. It is also appropriate to use emojis in WhatsApp marketing.
7. Deliver Excellent Customer Service
Finally, delivering superior customer service is the essence of WhatsApp’s marketing strategy. This is a crucial feature because almost 28% of customers expect to get a response within an hour. In comparison, 18% wish to receive an instant response.
With the help of a chatbot, you can provide customer support 24/7 on WhatsApp and respond to the most commonly asked questions. This approach aids in minimizing customer support costs by 30%.
Most Effective WhatsApp Marketing Tips
Now that we’ve seen tricks for creating an effective WhatsApp marketing strategy, here are 4 more specific approaches worth exploring.
1. Create Broadcast Lists
Broadcast lists serve as an ideal feature for sending relevant promotions to your contacts, and they can be used to engage and retain your customers. They comprise a cluster of recipients gathered together. Your contacts cannot see each other and will receive messages individually, just like you can segment your recipients in your mailing lists.
2. Use Group Chats
Group chats enable group members to see each other and express their opinions to all those in the group. They are especially convenient when you want to stir up a discussion between your audience, e.g., by creating a group to warm up participants prior to a webinar or an offline event.
It is also helpful in engaging clients in making buying decisions, especially amongst businesses that deal with expensive and elaborate products.
3. Craft and Develop A Product Catalog
A product catalog is one of WhatsApp’s most remarkable features, enabling businesses to display all their products to their contacts. Up to 500 items can be added to the catalog, and your existing and prospective customers can browse through, ask questions, or share links to some products. Catalogs are handy for budding entrepreneurs or small businesses with no webpage.
4. Employ WhatsApp Statuses
This particular feature lets you share multimedia files and texts with all WhatsApp contacts and receive their feedback. Anyone in your contacts can view your WhatsApp status for 24 hours, after which it expires. You can even use this incredible feature to share product updates, new product reveals, special offers, promotional codes, etc.
About SocialEpoch
All of this is now possible with SocialEpoch, a WhatsApp Business Integration Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool with a centralized management system and multi-agent support.
At SocialEpoch, you can benefit from full-fledged global leading social marketing solutions, which we specialize in. Some of our products and services include WhatsApp marketing, WhatsApp CRM, marketing training, social fission, social eCommerce platform, etc.
With over 300 team members, we have the right amount of industrial experience and hands-on operating technologies, which help us serve many international clients, including FinTech companies, retail brands, eCommerce platforms, gaming apps, and many more.
Our target audience is mainly retailers, eCommerce businesses, and all kinds of B2B businesses, and two of our most popular products are:
1. SocialEpoch WhatsApp CRM (WaChat App is the mobile version for Android)
Here are the key features of SocialEpoch WhatsApp CRM:
- Bulk Message Sender
- Free WhatsApp Business API
- Data Synchronization
- Multilingual Support
- Group Management (group broadcast and group member export, allowing you to reach your target customers as accurately as possible)
- Contact Management (easy import/export of customers and efficient way to organize customer tags and persona)
- Multi-account Login (ability to operate up to 10 WhatsApp accounts at the same time)
- Customer Journey (track customers’ behavior and document the process of acquiring leads)
- Create and edit user personas (categorize your customers with tags and personas for personalized marketing)
- Professional Support
- Task assignment (assign clients or tasks to your teams as per need to provide timely services)
- Follow-up sessions (follow up with customers and share all the data with your team)
- WhatsApp Marketing Toolkits (create your own site within just minutes, choose from an array of free content templates, and customize your e-business card as you want)
- Smart Chatbot (gather information automatically from potential customers and solve customer problems round the clock)
- AI Exploring for Prospects (empowered by AI and big data, explore your prospects on WhatsApp and reach out to them instantly)
2. SocialEpoch Facebook Lead Generation Tool
This product offers Bulk Facebook Accounts and Account Marketing Solutions. Its key features include:
I. Management Center
- Automatic Data Backup
- Bulk Account Management
- Facebook Audience Insights
II. Marketing Center
- Bulk Share to Groups
- Bulk Comments on Group Posts/Page Posts
- Auto Join Groups
III. Facebook Data Scraper
- Active Users
- Friends
- Groups
- Pages
- Marketplace Sellers
Using the latest private social marketing technologies, we aim to provide our clients with extensive lead generation approaches. Hence, if you share the same vision, we look forward to working together with you and achieving a win-win solution!
