8 WhatsApp Marketing Best Practices (With Example)
How to Get Started With WhatsApp Marketing Strategy
With a user base of 2 billion people, WhatsApp is channel marketers do not want to miss. Users check this app at least once daily, and messages here have a 98% open rate. Customers and potential customers also trust brands that are easily reachable through chat.
What and how you market on WhatsApp should be helpful, engaging, and relatable to your audience. A WhatsApp marketing strategy with well-defined and precise goals helps you do that.
8 WhatsApp Marketing Best Practices You Should Know About
There are some WhatsApp marketing best practices your brand should follow.
Some of them are listed below:
Determine Your Marketing Objectives and KPIs
A set of goals defined by you makes the basis of any WhatsApp marketing strategy. This helps focus on what is important. Revise your marketing funnel and look for any weak spots. Do your retention emails need to be opened more? With their consent, you should try reaching out to those customers over WhatsApp. In this case, the KPIs to pay attention to would be open rates, click rates, and customer retention rates.
Know Your Target Audience
Build a buyer persona. Segment your audiences and target them accordingly. Ask yourself why someone would be interested in your product, what value they would derive from it, and how that product helps them achieve their desired outcomes. At no cost should you rely on guesswork? Interview some recent customers. You could also conduct some surveys on social media. Spot the demographic and geographical characteristics that make up your audience.
Get the WhatsApp Business App
Marketing to your customers has never been easier. The standalone WhatsApp Business app is tailor-made for small and medium businesses. It allows you to create a business profile, showcase a catalog of your products, use labels to organize chats, and send automated responses to engage with your customers quickly.
Statistics for sent, delivered, and read messages are also easily available.
Focus on Direct Customer Engagement
Direct messaging is easier with WhatsApp. Customers expect real-time replies to their queries, and WhatsApp makes this possible.
Chatbots can be used to respond to frequently asked questions so that customers do not have to wait for the answers.
Pro tip: An FAQ page on your business profile will help customers save time.
Organize your Contact List
Contact lists are organically built over time using subscription forms on websites and any ads you may run. Using lead magnets such as discounts or freebies helps. Ask them what channel they would be most comfortable being contacted on. Offer them multiple options such as SMS, WhatsApp, and email. Here, ShopAgain’s truly multichannel marketing approach can help you.
Build a Brand Persona
An impersonal business without that much-required human touch is not one customers want to communicate with. What kind of traits, attitudes, and values does your brand possess? Are you empathetic? Is educating the masses your aim? Are you passionate about something?
Let your customers see that! They should feel that they are dealing with a person, not a robot that does not care about them.
Cross-Sell Products
Use WhatsApp to cross-sell products to your customers. The strategy is pretty simple: are you sending order confirmation texts on WhatsApp? If so, attach a few products there the customer may like.
This will get you more orders than you might imagine. It is a strategy that works!
Be Versatile With Communication
Irrelevant and poorly constructed content does not yield results. Design personalized messages to capture the attention of the recipient. Entertain and educate your audience, do not limit yourself to only promotional or advertorial messaging. Multimedia such as photos, videos, and GIFs help reinforce your messages.
Keep your communication to the point and simple. Adhere to the best practice of messaging your customers between 5-10 times a week, not more.
Handpicked WhatsApp Marketing Example
Netflix- Personal Recommendations Through Notifications
The objective behind getting users to sign up for WhatsApp communication was to keep in touch with them even after they canceled their Netflix subscription. Netflix is known for personalized content, and this practice extends to their notification as well. They recommend what shows or movies their subscribers should watch next, and also use these messages to incentivize former subscribers to return.
Adidas- Narrow Down Target Audience
The marketers at Adidas used WhatsApp to specifically reach out to amateur football players. They used WhatsApp marketing to target a specific audience in order to achieve the desired result.
Since football matches are unpredictable and players often have to drop out, Adidas offered to send replacements to those who communicated their concerns to them via WhatsApp.
Clarks- Creating Brand Awareness
Who does not know about this shoe company? Through WhatsApp, they allowed customers to interact with different characters from Clarks’ history and get an idea of how far the brand has come. Photos, videos, and text messages were shared. Clarks then used the data collected from these customers to reach out to new ones in future campaigns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it worth building a WhatsApp marketing strategy?
With 2 billion users all over the planet and a 98% open rate, it is absolutely worth it to build a WhatsApp marketing campaign and strategy.
How do I run a WhatsApp marketing campaign?
Download the WhatsApp Business app, and set up your profile and catalog. Use popups on your websites and in any ads that you run to gather subscribers who opt for WhatsApp as their preferred channel for communication.
Start with some welcome texts, update your subscribers on company news, any discounts or sales, and message them only 5-10 times a week, not more.