What is WhatsApp Marketing: Guide

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In this era of accelerated digital transformation, the concept can feel like a thing of the past. The truth is, it’s not gone; it’s just changing shape. Stand-out customer experiences still hinge on creating that sense of understanding and personalization. Now, marketers can pull it off at scale with 1:1 messaging tools, like WhatsApp.

What is WhatsApp Marketing: Guide

What is WhatsApp Marketing: Guide

Why Should You Use WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business?

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in the world. In 2020, its audience has grown up to 2 billion active users monthly. This marketing channel is a must-have for businesses that want to connect with audiences in developing countries. For instance, there are 340 million monthly WhatsApp users in India and almost 100 million in Brazil.

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However, the platform is also an excellent choice for promotions in the US market – 68 million Americans access WhatsApp at least once a month.

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WhatsApp marketing allows you to stay in touch with your customers – more than half of WhatsApp users check the app every day. Better yet, you can be sure they will get your offers, as text messages have a 98% open rate.

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The last point is that your customers love this communication channel. They trust brands with chat apps more – 53% of people say they would buy from companies they can reach via chat.

However, there are more reasons to implement WhatsApp in your marketing strategy. Read on to learn a few more benefits of this marketing channel.

Learn More About Whatsapp Marketing

As of 2021, WhatsApp is the most popular global messenger app worldwide. With over two billion active users, WhatsApp is more than likely where your customers connect with family, friends, and maybe even your competitors across the globe.

Marketing with WhatsApp can modernize your approach to customer care, helping you create stellar experiences that people remember and repeat. Keep reading to learn more about WhatsApp marketing and its role in your social media strategy.

Profound relationships with customers

Over 55% of people feel more connected to a brand if they use messaging apps. It makes WhatsApp marketing a bulletproof strategy for building long profound relationships with customers.

Maintaining such a connection, in turn, helps brands cut expenditures as customer retention is 5-25 times cheaper than acquisition.

Out of the box, WhatsApp provides businesses with a robust set of opportunities for personalization. For instance, you can send personalized welcome messages, special offers, birthday congratulations, and so on. Such an approach keeps customers more engaged with a brand – over 70% of consumers say they engage only with personalized marketing messages.

Higher conversion rate

Choosing a perfect channel for your initial contact with customers is crucial. People may get disgruntled with phone calls while staying inaccessible through email or social media.

Here is where WhatsApp comes in handy to nudge your prospects toward the purchase. Businesses say that customers answered 40% of their WhatsApp messages.

Better yet, messaging drives conversions. Namely, messaging after initial contact with a prospect can increase the conversion rate by 112.6%.

Better sales

WhatsApp marketing works as a sort of magic wand for your sales. The simple trick of adding a WhatsApp phone number on your website may result in 27% more sales leads.

It seems like the opportunity to reach a brand through any messaging app alone instills confidence in potential customers. At least 66% feel more optimistic about purchasing from a company if it is active on messengers.

Better yet, you can consider WhatsApp a stand-alone sales channel for your business. It’s possible with the growing tendency for people to buy through messaging apps. Roughly 60% of consumers believe they will use messengers more to make purchases in the future.

Lower cost of marketing

WhatsApp is still a very affordable marketing channel, which makes this platform enticing for small businesses. All you need to get the ball rolling is to install an app and connect to the Internet.

Meanwhile, the chances that your message will reach the customer are sky-high. On average, a user checks WhatsApp over 23 times a day.

WhatsApp marketing drives more conversions, improves sales, allows you to build deep-quality relationships with customers, and costs next to nothing in terms of marketing expenditures. Read further to learn how to build a WhatsApp marketing strategy.

WhatsApp Marketing Strategy

1. Define your goals and KPIs

To get your WhatsApp marketing strategy started, determine your marketing objectives. This step will help you focus your attention on meaningful activities and draw the line on unnecessary things.

Start by revising your marketing funnel and finding weak spots. Try to think of business goals you can pursue with your WhatsApp marketing strategy. Pinpoint the KPIs that will help you understand whether you have met these goals.

Here is an example to help you get your head around this scheme: If your business has issues with retaining customers, you can tackle them by sending promotional messages through WhatsApp. In this case, your KPIs might be clicks, engagement, and customer retention rates.

2. Pin down your target audience

Knowing your target audience underlies all your marketing efforts and defines their success. You can try several approaches to determine your target audience. A classic one is customer profile creation.

Another way is to use the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework. If you decide to stick to this one, ask yourself these questions:

• Why do people use your product?

• What value do they want to get from it?

• What outcomes do they want to achieve?

Whatever approach you choose, avoid guesses and speculation; explore your audience instead. To start with the JTBD framework, interview 10-15 of your current customers who made a purchase lately.

For customer profile creation, you can conduct surveys on social media and add data from Google Analytics, your CRM, Facebook and Google Ads, and so on. These tools will help you spot the demographic and geographic characteristics of your typical customers.

3. Get the business app

To meet small and large firms' needs, WhatsApp launched a stand-alone application, WhatsApp Business. This tool has some helpful extra features, such as:

• A business profile with essential information: your address, business description, email address, and website.

• Catalog – a virtual showcase of your products.

• Labels to organize your chats with customers. For instance, you can label conversations according to the stage of the sales funnel.

• Quick and automated replies to stay in touch with customers and provide answers immediately.

• Statistics to track sent, delivered, received, and read messages.

4. Create a brand persona

People prefer to communicate with other people, not an impersonal business. Thus, to undertake successful WhatsApp marketing, you need to form your brand persona. A brand persona is a kit of traits, attitudes, and values your brand shares.

Your brand probably also has some personality; try to explore it and spot the most meaningful traits. This persona will underlie your tone of voice and communications with prospects on WhatsApp.

5. Build a contact list

If you’re going to use WhatsApp as more than a customer support channel, you need a contact list. The best way to get one and grab new contacts is to use subscription forms. Place them on different pages of your website and offer a lead magnet – such as an eBook or discount.

Consider going for multichannel forms – they allow your subscribers to choose where they want to receive updates – via email, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and so on. This move lets you communicate with customers through the channels they prefer.

Remember to segment your audience to send the most relevant campaigns and deliver personalized experiences. Follow our guide on mailing list segmentation – though we’ve created it with email marketing in mind, you can apply the same tactics to WhatsApp marketing as well.

6. Design your communication

WhatsApp messages have impressive open rates in comparison with other channels. However, if you offer irrelevant or poorly produced content, your marketing on this channel will be dead in the water.

Start by pinpointing your main topics and the messages you want to deliver. Try not to limit yourself to only promotional messages; remember to entertain and educate your audience. Keep your communications short and sweet – people often check WhatsApp on the go and have no time to read long messages.

Reinforce your messages with multimedia files, such as videos, animations, or pictures. Emoji are also appropriate in WhatsApp marketing. If you want to play around them, choose smiley faces or people rather than business-themed objects.

Another point to consider is message frequency. If you bombard your readers with messages every hour, chances are it will make them annoyed with your brand.

7. Deliver great customer service

Most customers use messaging apps to get brand support. 59% of people believe they get responses faster via messengers, and 50% find better advice and care in this communication channel. Here is the point where WhatsApp marketing comes in handy.

WhatsApp allows your brand to get queries immediately and provide customers with real-time support. This feature becomes crucial, as long as 28% of customers expect to get help within an hour, and 18% anticipate an immediate response.

Keeping such a pace seems arduous, but WhatsApp allows you to provide customer support around the clock. All you need is to employ a chatbot and feed it typical questions and answers to them. Such an approach may help you cut customer support costs by 30%.

To sum it up, creating a WhatsApp marketing strategy encompasses setting goals, exploring your audience, delivering great content, and maintaining good relationships with your customers.

4 WhatsApp Marketing Tips

Create broadcast lists

In a nutshell, a broadcast list is a group of recipients gathered together. Сontacts can not see each other and receive your messages separately, which makes them similar to segments in your mailing lists.

These peculiarities make broadcast lists the perfect feature for sending relevant campaigns. For instance, you can gather all your VIP customers in one list and send them exclusive offers or ask existing clients for referrals, and so on. Use this feature to retain and engage your audience.

Use group chats

This feature resembles the previous one at first sight, but there’s a difference between them. Unlike broadcast lists, group chats allow members to see each other and share their opinions with the whole group.

So, group chats may come in handy if you want to encourage discussions between your customers. For instance, you may set up a group to warm up participants before some offline event or webinar.

Another case is when your clients make purchasing decisions in groups. It’s a common practice for businesses with elaborate and expensive products, such as IT solutions, industrial equipment, and so on.

Employ WhatsApp statuses

If you're familiar with Facebook or Instagram stories, WhatsApp statuses may ring a bell for you as well. This feature allows you to share text and multimedia files with all your contacts and receive their feedback. While publishing the update, you may also share it on Facebook. The status expires in 24 hours.

Craft a product catalog

In 2019, WhatsApp launched product catalogs that allow you to showcase your products. The feature has great potential – even Instagram launched an analogous tool called the Instagram shop.

You can add up to 500 items to your WhatsApp product catalog. Your possible customers may browse through it and share links to some products or ask you questions about them.

You may also send catalog items to WhatsApp users or share a link to the whole showcase anywhere online. Catalogs are extremely helpful for small businesses or desiring entrepreneurs with no websites.