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For marketers, three WhatsApp stats hold a lot of value –
These stats are staggering for an app initially developed as a tool for personal communication. They also indicate the reasons why businesses bet high on WhatsApp for marketing.
It’s a channel whose user base is growing leaps and bounds, making it a top channel for communication.
In addition, compared to other channels, there are various benefits of WhatsApp marketing that brands love to leverage. Using it, a business can successfully market its brands, engage with its audience, and sell products.
In this blog, we will discuss WhatsApp as a marketing channel, the benefits of using it, and the importance, and features among many other things.
Before moving further, let’s first understand the definition and meaning…
WhatsApp marketing is a strategy of using WhatsApp to engage with customers and promote products or services. It’s a type of messenger marketing that allows businesses to reach a huge audience across the world and build strong relationships with customers.
In this form of marketing, brands make use of WhatsApp app’s key features — such as text messaging, group chats, voice calls, video calls, and file sharing — to target their audience. WhatsApp marketing enables companies to interact with customers in a direct and personal manner.
Marketing through WhatsApp has become a trend because it feels less like marketing and more like a friendly chat between customers and businesses. The easy manner in which companies can share fun updates, and send product news or special offers makes this form of marketing special and unique.
Using WhatsApp for marketing is no longer just a fad thing. It has now become a necessity for businesses from across industry verticals. The kind of enormous global reach this channel provides is one of the main reasons why more brands than ever before now use the WhatsApp channel for marketing.
The key reasons to choose WhatsApp for marketing include –
By 2025, WhatsApp is expected to cross the 3.14 billion user-base mark. To simplify this further, if this channel were a country, it would be the most populous one in the world. This is as big an opportunity as it can get in terms of marketing. With that kind of user base, WhatsApp is where your customers are and you can reach them easily.
Unlike other channels, WhatsApp lets customers connect and engage with your brand intimately, personally, and at their convenience. More so, your target audience may like the real-time and one-on-one engagement that is available through this channel.
On top of that, marketing through WhatsApp allows for personalized interactions that can suit individual customer needs and preferences. It would not be unfair to say that if WhatsApp is not your go-to channel for marketing, you might miss out on a lot of opportunities for your business.
WhatsApp offers tons of marketing features any business can use them to take their messages to the target audience. Some of the top features include –
Using WhatsApp for marketing is more effective when done with proper planning. You can rely on some proven marketing strategies to make the most out of this platform.
Let’s look at some effective WhatsApp marketing strategies for your business –
Messages delivered on WhatsApp have an excellent open rate. So, you should consider sending more of them, but in a strategic manner. The channel provides you with a feature to send bulk marketing messages and offers to reach a wider audience. A brand can broadcast unlimited promotional messages to those users who opt-in for the same. Using the Broadcast Feature, you can send virtually everything be it discount offers, product launch messages, festival sales offers, and so on.
WhatsApp is a wonderful platform for one-on-one communication with your target audience. The platform also allows brands to send personalized messages to users. You can also make the messages fun and interactive by using rich multimedia features including videos, images, GIFs, PDFs, and more.
Many brands subtly use emojis to personalize the text. There is also an option to attach a clickable CTA to your messages. All the user data and information you thus collect can help you tailor your message and make marketing more effective.
What happens when all the visitors that land on your website are redirected to WhatsApp? This will help boost your conversion rate and also let you engage users better on the channel of their choice. All you need to do is, integrate WhatsApp on your website. The moment a visitor lands on your website and clicks on the WhatsApp button, they will be redirected to your WhatsApp channel. You can then serve them better, solve their queries, and ultimately increase the chances of conversion.
You can integrate a chatbot with WhatsApp and take your marketing strategy to the next level. Once integrated, the chatbot can add value to various aspects of your marketing, sales, and support tasks. Using the bot, you can automate routine customer queries, provide quick support, and help customers through problems. Adding a chatbot can make your WhatsApp marketing more interactive and responsive.
One of the basic purposes of marketing is to reach a wider audience and take the brand messaging to as many people as possible. Using WhatsApp, you can generate customer links and share them across channels to engage with users easily. Once the user clicks on those links, you can share business updates with them, start conversations, and strengthen your marketing strategy.
Explore more: 15 WhatsApp Marketing Strategies for Your Business
Your business stands to gain a lot when it uses WhatsApp for marketing. The platform not only opens the windows of opportunities but can also add a new dimension to how you connect and engage with your target audience.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of WhatsApp marketing –
On average, an Android user spends 18.6 hours per month on WhatsApp. ( Source )
What does this suggest?
It suggests two key things –
Brands understand this well so they always look to capitalize on WhatsApp marketing. If you run a business, not using this platform means you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. Most businesses however are already leveraging WhatsApp to connect with their target audience and establish a strong bond with them.
Unlike other platforms, using WhatsApp for marketing gives businesses a direct line to their audience. So, they can connect and engage with the audience easily and also expect a good response in return.
WhatsApp is available in around 180 countries across the glo
be with India, Brazil, and Indonesia making the top three in terms of the highest user base. (What’s the Big Data )
On top of that, around 25% of the world’s population is active on the platform daily. Both the data are huge considering how a platform can help brands reach far and off across the world.
Using WhatsApp for marketing can give your business a chance to engage and connect with people from all around the world.
This platform helps you –
What’s more, marketing on this channel costs almost nothing. So, you can leverage it to achieve amazing marketing ROI and results economically.
There are reasons why brands all over the world like using WhatsApp for marketing.
To understand the reasons, you first need to look at two key stats –
This kind of high open rate is not possible with conventional channels like email and SMS.
All the stats indicate one thing – sending messages on WhatsApp is certain to get some kind of response and that too, pretty quickly.
When the response and open rates are high, it almost always leads to better engagement, resulting in higher chances of conversion.
A Forbes survey found that 81% of customers prefer companies that offer a personalized experience.
Yes, customers love personalized experiences way more than you could think of. They can stick more with a brand that regularly offers them tailored experiences.
The WhatsApp channel also understands the value of personalization, so it allows brands to target specific consumer demographics through tailored messages.
Your business can personalize customer communications in two ways –
Both elements are key to enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing communications and giving a personalized touch to engagement.
Getting customer information and data is one of the key benefits of WhatsApp marketing. Based on that, businesses can better understand their customer needs and serve them efficiently.
More so, using WhatsApp for marketing can help a business know how effectively their campaigns are running and make smart decisions.
Data-driven decisions mean –
Customers love engaging with brands in real-time. They want the flexibility to connect and engage with service reps as and when it feels like. Above all, they want quick responses to their queries and complaints.
All of this is not possible with traditional channels and maybe that’s why WhatsApp is getting more popular as a channel for marketing.
This channel adds a new dimension to one-on-one communication. The real-time nature of communications means wait time is less for customers and they can expect quick responses.
This is why WhatsApp has become a popular channel for businesses to build trust and forge strong connections with their customers.
Customers always expect timely responses. They often engage more with a brand that is consistent with messaging and communication.
However, a business can’t be open all the time and, it has to deal with time-zone restrictions as well. All this could mean a lack of speed and consistency in customer response. Automation can help overcome this problem.
The powerful automation features of the WhatsApp Business App are key to engaging and interacting with customers anytime and from anywhere.
Using automated greetings and away messages, a business can ensure that it’s always reachable to customers, even when service reps are offline.
The automation feature is helpful for many reasons, including –
So, you can leverage automated interactions and add great value to customer engagement efforts.
WhatsApp marketing is just amazing for engaging with more customers without spending a lot. You can use this channel to maximize your outreach without much investment. This is why many small businesses include WhatsApp as a key component in their marketing strategy.
When you switch to WhatsApp Business, it means you take the right step towards economizing your marketing operations and minimizing your communication costs. With his channel, an internet connection is all that you need to get started and reap rich marketing dividends.
With WhatsApp, you can do a lot without worrying about costs, such as –
All this is the reason why businesses on low-cost or tight budgets find WhatsApp as the best tool for marketing.
Data privacy is always a big concern for customers. They often feel apprehensive about engaging with brands that have no security measures in place for data protection. All this can change when WhatsApp Business is used – its secure platform avoids risks of data breaches and makes communication as secure as possible. And when communication is secure, it leads to trust building with the target audience.
The two key security features that WhatsApp channel provides include –
The encryption features ensure that the messages are accessed by the intended recipient only. This makes users gain more confidence in your brand and feel fearless in sharing information with you.
When you set up a verified account, it gives customers the impression that they are engaging with a reliable and trustworthy source.
Both features are key to building trust with your audience and gaining their confidence in your business.
WhatsApp is much more than marketing through texts. You can use the channel to send videos, photos, documents, and voice messages as well. All this can make customer communication more interactive, resulting in improved conversions.
Using WhatsApp, a business can –
This is why the benefits of WhatsApp marketing are manifold in terms of visual engagement and interactions with the audience.
Learn more: How to Do WhatsApp Marketing: 8 Simple Steps
Every channel is unique in terms of how a business should approach it and use it for marketing. The same also holds true for WhatsApp – it gives the best results when you follow the structured guidelines of the platform.
Let’s look at some of the WhatsApp marketing best practices –
It was the year 2017 and Netflix was dealing with an exodus of subscribers, which worried the company. It decided to do something to stop the slide and win back customers. The company created and launched a WhatsApp campaign focusing on incentivizing customers to re-subscribe to the platform. The campaign allowed users to stay in touch via WhatsApp and get timely reminders and updates. As and when a user clicks on “I’m In”, they would get new notifications and suggestions on what to watch. This campaign was well received by users and helped Netflix get back most of its existing customers.
Tanishq is a brand that understands the value of using videos in WhatsApp campaigns to better engage with the target audience. It subtly used high-quality product videos in its WhatsApp marketing campaign. The goal was simple – to visually highlight the products and services and simplify the sales process for buyers. The result was excellent as the company saw more people inquiring more about the product.
Customer retention is a big differentiator in the online travel space because it leads to increased retention. Klook realized this early, so it decided to build its marketing strategy around a channel that gave more opportunities for personalized engagement. It chose WhatsApp and focused on sending updates and notifications about bookings. As part of its marketing campaign, it invited app and website visitors to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications and updates. The campaign was a big success as it not only boosted the opt-in rate but also contributed to the retention rate.
Feedback collection is a key element of customer engagement. The leading travel and tour agency Goibibo realized this and built its WhatsApp marketing campaign around gathering feedback. The company got feedback in real time and worked on implementing suggestions. The marketing campaign also helped it grow the user engagement which ultimately resulted in an uptick in the conversion rate.
WhatsApp ranks among the best channels for marketing. More companies now look to leverage the conversational nature of the platform and drive engagement.
At REVE Chat, we also realize the value of the WhatsApp channel in achieving marketing goals and driving conversions.
With us, you can add an AI chatbot to your WhatsApp marketing campaign and deliver value to customers in quick and real-time.
The chatbot integration will open up endless possibilities for your business and ensure great marketing ROI and results.
So, you can sign up with us and see how our platform and other engagement tools can add new meaning and direction to your WhatsApp marketing.
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Praveen Singh is a content marketer, blogger, and professional with 15 years of passion for ideas, stats, and insights into customers. An MBA Graduate in marketing and a researcher by disposition, he has a knack for everything related to customer engagement and customer happiness.
As a writer and analyst, he pours the heart out on a blog that is informative, detailed, and often digs deep into the heart of customer psychology. He’s written extensively on a range of topics including, marketing, AI chatbots, omnichannel messaging platforms, and many more.
Mr. Singh also has a passion for subjects that excite new-age customers, be it social media engagement, artificial intelligence, machine learning. He takes great pride in his learning-filled journey of adding value to the industry through consistent research, analysis, and sharing of customer-driven ideas.
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