How to achieve effective brand communication through WhatsApp business messaging

An upward trend can be found as shoppers favour brands that offer a frictionless experience. In fact, modern consumers are more loyal to experience than to brands. With WhatsApp’s astounding ability to offer unique experiences, brands have started to understand its potential. Over 2 billion users globally spend at least 38 minutes daily on WhatsApp, giving brands ample opportunity to engage and cultivate relationships with customers.

WhatsApp is by far the best marketing channel that businesses can leverage to earn the highest ROI on their marketing spends. Although there is high adoption of WhatsApp as a channel, brands need to be more tactful when it comes to sending marketing messages to consumers. If not, WhatsApp may become the next SMS, as brands start to overuse this channel for transactional and promotional messages.

Sending irrelevant and repetitive messages has resulted in higher block rates than expected. A brand needs to understand the importance of leveraging personalisation while sending promotional messages.

How can brands use WhatsApp effectively to move their marketing metrics?

Leverage behavioural insights of high-intent web/app visitors in real-time

In order to deliver a highly contextual and personalised customer experience, brands need to understand how their high-intent users on the web/app are interacting and engaging with the brand’s digital touchpoints. Using these first-party data insights allows the brand to understand where your audience is in their purchase journey and launch hyper-personalised campaigns to move the target audience down the funnel.

Uniquely designed journeys

Using omnichannel engagement platforms, brands can create unique customer journeys by leveraging behavioural insights about customers’ interests, preferences, and current state in the purchase journey. Brands can initiate communications by picking up right where they left off (such as product page, cart page, checkout page) and taking their journey forward on their most preferred channel of communication i.e., WhatsApp. These uniquely designed journeys allow brands to make every engagement relevant and personalized for customers. This makes customers feel heard and understood, ultimately allowing brands to foster loyalty.

CRM marketing campaigns

While traditional CRM marketing channels such as SMS and email have been widely used, they have not been able to deliver the desired results for many brands. The increasing saturation of these channels has led to declining open and click-through rates, ultimately making it difficult for brands to reach and engage with customers effectively. In contrast, WhatsApp has emerged as a highly effective CRM marketing channel, with the highest reach and engagement among all messaging platforms. By leveraging the power of WhatsApp, brands can connect with customers in a more personal and meaningful way, drive more conversions, and build stronger, long-lasting relationships.

Personalised recommendations

With omnichannel engagement platforms you can leverage data to send personalised recommendations based on their browsing/purchase history, spending habits etc. Sarah, a sportswear enthusiast purchased a pair of sports shoes during your summer sale. You can use this data to recommend other sports accessories such as tracking devices or gym bands to further drive effective conversations that ultimately incentivize the customer to make another purchase.

Discover and explore products through the WhatsApp catalogue

With WhatsApp's catalogue feature, customers can view products available in their local stores, learn more about the products, and make purchases without leaving the app. The brand's catalogue allows customers to browse the products and their details, such as descriptions, images, and prices. Omnichannel engagement platforms allow brands to bring customers from email/SMS to WhatsApp allowing them to discover and reserve hyper-local products, engage proactively with customers on offers at stores, new collection launches and reminders to drive walk-ins.

Complete the purchase journey online or choose try at-store option

Modern consumers love convenience. In fact, they are more than willing to pay more for it. Offering this option allows consumers to make purchases through an online platform, while also offering the convenience of picking up the item in a physical store. By using WhatsApp, customers can easily communicate with the retailer and receive updates about their order status, including when the item is ready for pickup. When using this method, customers can avoid the wait for delivery, save on shipping costs, and have the opportunity to inspect the item in person before making a purchase.

WhatsApp since its inception has been a customer-focused channel with trust and privacy as its key pillars. It has been taking conscious efforts on how they can prevent the misuse of WhatsApp as a marketing and engagement channel by ensuring that brands make every customer engagement on WhatsApp highly relevant and contextual. This would require brands to rethink and strategize how they can use WhatsApp effectively along with their current marketing mix and not make it just another blast marketing channel. This will help brands not only drive high engagement but also release the ROI of the channel.

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