With 2 billion users in 180 countries, WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging app. No surprise it quickly became a major customer care channel for businesses that adopted it.
Until now. We believe that the future of WhatsApp Business lies in marketing use cases. WhatsApp Business pricing suggests exactly that.
Why? Because it’s getting more and more difficult to engage customers. And one-sided conversations certainly won’t help to do that.
What customers want is a convenient, engaging, and fun shopping experience from the brands they’re interested in. You can achieve this with marketing-driven WhatsApp use cases.
With marketing use cases on WhatsApp, brands can use the opportunity to create highly engaging conversations that drive valuable actions. Each initiated conversation is an opportunity to learn more about your customers' needs and preferences, and better target them.
What are marketing use cases for WhatsApp?
Plot twist. It’s not customer care.
It’s all about engaging your customers via personalized, one to one conversations.
In this article, we’re breaking down the top WhatsApp use cases you can use to start monetizing your messaging audience on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Use Cases: Send Personalized Deal Alerts
Don’t just blast a single promo message out on WhatsApp. Why would you deliver a one-way promotional update on a channel that is built for two-way communication?
Create an interactive conversation. After all, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging channel for a reason. It offers fast and free messaging with the biggest global reach. Its messaging user interface is well-designed. And it allows you to learn more about your audience and use that data for one to one personalization.
Offer a more personalized experience and give your customers a reason to stay connected with you on WhatsApp. Exclusive offers and special discounts will be the perfect reason. This is how you can make WhatsApp your strongest retention channel.
If you have physical stores, for example, you can grow your audience by placing QR codes in the store and sending one to one messages via WhatsApp to re-engage store visitors. You can send prospects a special discount coupon, personalized offers, content digests, and so on. This brings your offline customers online and builds a new channel to engage and convert them.
Automate Mobile Push Notifications
What else can help you keep customers connected with your WhatsApp channel? If you automate your WhatsApp mobile push notifications. It helps you stay connected better than any other channel. This is how you can encourage customers to keep engaged with your brand. Not just coming back to your WhatsApp channel every once in a while.
According to push notifications statistics from 2021, the average opt-in rate for push notifications on Androids is around 81%. That’s pretty impressive and certainly better than the average open rate of 21% for emails.
But notifications are only useful if they drive an outcome. Notifications enable you to first-hand inform customers about new product launches, sales, and shopping events. This is how you can stay on top of their heads while talking about topics they actually care about instead of spamming them.
First, you need to make sure your customers are aware of your WhatsApp channel. Using organic, owned, offline, and paid entry points is an efficient way to grow your WhatsApp audience. For more info on this, check out this article introducing each entry point you can use to grow your WhatsApp audience.
One particularly popular owned entry point is in app promotion. If your business has a custom app, you can create an overlay screen within the logged-in customer experience to encourage customers to opt in to receive notifications via WhatsApp with a clear call to action button. This way, you can start nurturing them with regular updates about the topics they are interested in.
Offer 24/7 Customer Care
We bet your business also receives the same questions over and over again. On your WhatsApp channel as well. Any team on its own would struggle to respond to all of these incoming conversations.
By integrating a chatbot into your WhatsApp channel, you can completely automate your FAQs to educate customers about products and services.
With an automated customer journey, you can guarantee 24/7 availability to your customers. You can engage them in real time, as opposed to 85% of brands that do not respond to requests in 5 minutes.
And this is just the beginning. With automation, you can take things one step further and create sales opportunities while helping your customers. This is how your customer care turns into a marketing engine.
Online shopping often starts with a search engine. When prospects are searching for a solution to their problem, they’ll probably have questions they want to ask about your products. At the same time, they might be looking at your competitors’ offerings as well. That’s why it’s vital you answer their questions as soon as possible. And as convenient as possible. This is where your WhatsApp channel comes in handy.
You can run paid text ad campaigns in Google and build awareness of WhatsApp as your new customer care channel. This is the perfect opportunity to drive prospects into a private WhatsApp chat experience in their ready-to-buy moments, where your automated marketing chatbot can answer their questions and provide personalized offers.
Your chatbot also gains valuable insights from the conversations and use this information to offer products based on preferences and retarget customers with automated remarketing campaigns. In case you don’t know, messaging as a retargeting channel is the world’s most effective re-engagement channel.
You can also accelerate sales on your website. Display a WhatsApp entry point on your website to encourage customers to ask their questions in a private WhatsApp conversation. Or, include your WhatsApp number on your home page, customer support page or contact page.
WhatsApp Use Cases to Capture Zero Party Data for Better Targeting
A successful WhatsApp use case is more than your open and click rates. Conversation completion rate and declared data points captured should be at the core of how you measure engagement on WhatsApp.
Collect declared data on customer preferences from your WhatsApp conversations to improve your customer profiles and increase sales with personalized offers. These are the data customers directly share with you in chat conversations. Check out this article for more insights about collecting declared data!
Then leverage the customer intent data from these 1:1 conversations to gain insights on customer needs and develop brand-specific conversational AI. Last but not least, build custom and lookalike audiences that improve performance by using segments built on declared data from chat.
Explore the top WhatsApp use cases with a product specialist and discover the opportunities WhatsApp Business unlocks for your brand.
How to use WhatsApp for eCommerce?
- Launch a conversational chatbot on WhatsApp:
Customers love messaging brands on WhatsApp because it’s as easy as talking to friends. Send prospects into a one to one conversation on WhatsApp and engage them when they are ready to purchase. Launch an automated chatbot experience on WhatsApp to ensure you’re available to customers even when your business is sleeping. Invest in an AI-powered conversational chatbot and engage customers with personalized offers based on their preferences.
- Use online and offline entry points to send more leads into your WhatsApp channel:
Once your chatbot is up and running, it’s time to acquire more leads via WhatsApp. You can use a great variety of online and offline entry points to direct more prospects into a chat conversation on WhatsApp. Click-to-WhatsApp ads, QR codes, website widgets, just to mention a few. Learn about each entry point leading to WhatsApp in this article.
- Re-engage opt-in customers with regular updates:
When you start talking to prospects via WhatsApp, always aim for long term customer relationships. Encourage your customers to opt in to receive notifications via WhatsApp. This way, you can start nurturing them with regular updates about the topics they are interested in.
How do chatbots work for WhatsApp?
A chatbot on WhatsApp is an automated, one to one customer experience powered by conversational AI. Once a prospect sends a text message to a company via WhatsApp Business, the automated chatbot picks up the message and starts engaging customers. This includes answering their questions and sending personalized product recommendations.
How do I use a chatbot on WhatsApp?
You need to build a chatbot and connect it with your WhatsApp Business channel. You can choose from a great variety of conversational commerce platforms that enable you to build a chatbot. When you choose the right platform for your business, make sure to choose a platform that builds AI-powered chatbots.
