Currently, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform across the globe. It is a must-have platform for brands and businesses looking forward to connecting with potential customers in developing nations; for instance, India has the most monthly active WhatsApp users, i.e., 390.1 million. Besides, the platform is also a brilliant choice for Digital Marketing and promotions in the United States – 75.1 million Americans use WhatsApp at least once every month.
With WhatsApp Marketing, you can conveniently stay in touch with your target audience as more than half of the platform users check it every day. You can be sure that the users will get your brand messages and offers as text messages have a 98% open rate on WhatsApp.
The experts in the industry believe that people worldwide love this communication medium. They have more faith in brands with chat apps – as per various studies, 53% of people say they look forward to buying stuff from companies they can get in touch with via chat. All in all, the reasons to implement WhatsApp in your overall marketing strategy include:
- Higher Conversion Rates
- Better Sales
- Profound Relationships With Customers
- Lower Costs of Marketing & Promotions
Let us now make ourselves aware with a bunch of tips and tactics using which you can craft a robust WhatsApp marketing strategy and get excellent results.
1.Define Your Marketing Goals & KPIs
For starting working on your WhatsApp marketing strategy, you need to determine and define your marketing objectives. It shall help you focus your attention on meaningful activities and avoid unnecessary things. You can begin by revising your marketing funnel and figuring out your weak spots. You will be required to determine the business goals you can pursue with your WhatsApp marketing strategy. Additionally, you can pinpoint the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that shall help you comprehend whether you have met your marketing objectives. Let us understand these points with the help of an example. If your business is facing problems retaining customers, you can turn the situation by sending promotional messages to your target audience on WhatsApp. In this case, your KPIs could be clicks, engagement levels, and customer retention rates.
2.Use the WhatsApp Business App
For meeting the requirements of all business types and sizes, WhatsApp has a stand-alone app called WhatsApp Business. It has some extra helpful features and functionalities, including:
- Business Profile – Covers all the essential details of your business, such as the address, description, website, and contact info;
- Catalog – Showcases your business offerings (products or services);
- Labels – Organizes your chats with your already existing and potential customers; for example, you can label your conversations as per the stage of your sales funnel;
- Fast & Automated Replies – Helps stay connected with your customers and answer their queries quickly; and
- Statistics – Tracks sent, delivered, and read WhatsApp messages.
3.Form Your Brand Persona
People from any part of the world prefer communicating with other people and not impersonal businesses. Therefore, for having a successful WhatsApp marketing strategy in place, you need to pay due attention to forming your brand persona. In simple terms, a brand persona is a set of your brand’s traits, values, and attitude.
All the market leaders of different industries have set their brand personas right in place. For instance, Nike has an active, inspirational, cool, and exciting brand personality. Apple Inc’s brand personality is about lifestyle, imagination, liberty regained, passion, innovation, dreams, hopes, aspirations, and power-to-the-people through technology. Every brand has a personality; hence, you must explore your brand’s personality by spotting its most meaningful traits. Your brand persona shall underlie your tone of voice and communication with your target audience on WhatsApp.
As a brand, you should always look forward to creating a feeling that your customers are talking to a person only. You can also consider using a person’s name in your company as the signature as it works far better than a company name.
4.Create a Contact List
If your objective is to use WhatsApp more than a customer support platform, you need to create a contact list. The best method of doing the same is through subscription forms. You can place such forms on different pages of your business website and offer a lead magnet like some exclusive discounts.
Furthermore, you can consider opting for multichannel forms. Such forms enable your subscribers to choose the medium they wish to receive updates – through email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and so on. In this way, you can communicate well with your already existing and potential customers through their preferred channel, which, in turn, shall boost your engagement levels and conversion rates.
It is also essential to segment your target audience for sending them the most relevant messages and delivering personalized experiences.
5.Deliver Relevant & Compelling Content
Compared to other social media channels out there, WhatsApp messages have pretty impressive open rates. However, it is imperative to note that if you produce irrelevant and poorly written content, your marketing on WhatsApp won’t do any good for your business.
Begin by shortlisting your prime business topics and the messages you want to deliver. Try not to restrict your business only to promotional messages, as entertaining and educating your audience are equally important. Ensure keeping your WhatsApp messages short and sweet yet significant as people often check WhatsApp on the go and have no time to read long messages.
You can attach other multimedia files in your WhatsApp messages as well like animations, images, and videos. Emojis and gifs can be used immensely in WhatsApp marketing.
Another crucial aspect to consider in this case is message frequency. Kindly make a point of the fact that if you bombard your customers with messages every hour, they’ll end up getting annoyed with your brand or business. It is best to stick to the ideal practice of sending 5-10 messages per week.