WhatsApp is the ideal tool to reach your audience, build a connection, promote your brand,  product, service, and communicate with your audience in real-time. On top of that, it is cost-effective, and you can get started quickly, so what are you waiting for? Give it a try and start engaging with your customers and leads in a whole new way. 

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in the world. In 2020, its audience has grown up to 2 billion active users monthly. 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. WhatsApp marketing drives more conversions, improves sales, allows you to build deep quality relationships with customers

Why Should I Use WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business?

1. Build Relationship with Customers

WhatsApp provides business 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.

2.  Higher conversion rate

Businesses say that customers answered 40% of their WhatsApp messages.

3. Better sales

The simple trick of adding a WhatsApp phone number on your website may result in a 27% more sales leads.

4. Lower cost of marketing

WhatsApp is still a very affordable marketing channel, which makes this platform enticing for small businesses.  

Steps To Creating Your WhatsApp Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Decide Your Engagement Strategy

There are four ways to communicate with your audience in the WhatsApp Business App.

One-to-One Messages

 Inevitably, user-initiated messages will arrive in your chats. You can also initiate personal conversations. These one-to-one scenarios are highly time-consuming and fall into the realm of CRM or personal selling more so than marketing.

Group Chats

 In group chats, all messages are seen by all members. Use this when you want your audience to interact with each other, more so than you. Group sizes are capped at 256 participants unless group members share the invite link, in which case, groups can grow up to 3,000.

Broadcast Lists

Broadcast lists allow you to send the same message to everyone, but each individual list member does not see that someone else got the same message or any replies. Think of it as bcc on email. This additional level of privacy avoids the need for moderation and GDPR complications. WhatsApp caps broadcast lists at 256 members, although you can have unlimited lists. This means if you do achieve scale, there is a fair bit of manual labor to send messages.

WhatsApp Status

You can share text, image, and video updates with all your contacts who have your number saved in their address book, which are live for 24 hours.

Step 2: Create A WhatsApp Business Account

WhatsApp for Business is an app that brands can use to create a business account on WhatsApp. With the account, you can include company information, website links, and a product catalog on your WhatsApp profile and gain insights on audiences that interact with you.

Download the WhatsApp Business app for Android or iPhone.

Fill in the business profile. Add your business name, a profile picture that represents your brand, brief description, website, email, address, hours, and select a category.

If relevant, create a WhatsApp Catalog. Accessible through your profile, a catalog is a virtual showcase of up to 500 items that your audience can browse and message to buy without leaving WhatsApp, reducing barriers to sharing and shopping. This can also be linked to and powered by your Facebook shop in select countries.

Step 3: Setup Automated Messages

Three key automations to engage users on WhatsApp are:

Greeting messages: Set expectations immediately upon a user’s first message or when they re-engage after being inactive in their chat with you for 14 days. It’s useful to customize this message based on whether the contact is in your address book.

Away message: Let customers know you aren’t available and when they can expect a response.

Quick replies: Up to 50 shortcuts to reuse on-brand crafted messages you send frequently.

Step 4: Fill Up Your Contact List

If you’re going to use WhatsApp as more than a customer support channel, you need a contact list.

Building an audience on WhatsApp is not as easy as other social media channels because:

·         There is no recommended content.

·         You can’t gain visibility with hashtags.

·         There is no “share this post” button.

For your audience to be aware you’re on WhatsApp, you need to tell them.

Step 5. Expand Your Reach

 At a minimum, add WhatsApp to your site as an integrated button that starts a conversion, a linked phone number, or a subscription form. Test which format works best.

• But don’t stop there. Drive discovery with other channels such as:
•  Posts and stories on other social media platforms.
•  Short link in your email signature or newsletters.
•  Articles on your site or a media site (to rank when people Google your brand name + WhatsApp).
• Facebook ads that click to open a chat in WhatsApp.
• Short-linked mobile targeted remarketing display ads.
• A QR code on product packaging.
• WhatsApp phone number on business cards.

Consider connecting the mobile device with the WhatsApp Business App installed to an email address to automatically sync and back up contacts when they are added and chats.

Step 6: Analyze Your WhatsApp Marketing Strategy

WhatsApp gives you and your business a platform to connect and interact with customers outside the business website. As millions of consumers use the messaging app daily, WhatsApp proves to be one of the best marketing tools for any business. While many social networks provide in-depth analytics, WhatsApp only offers metrics on how many messages were sent, delivered, read, and received.  

When using the WhatsApp Business API, these can be broken down by dimensions of phone number, country, and message type (notification messages or customer support messages).

Now that you’ve got an idea of the possibilities of WhatsApp marketing, it’s time to get creative with your own strategy! Businesses of all sizes can benefit from using WhatsApp for marketing purposes. The channel can help build lasting customer relationships, improve retention, and ultimately drive sales.