An overview of WhatsApp Marketing in 2022

It is a fact people have less attention span for lengthy communication that doesn’t deliver quickly the insights they are looking for. It is even more cumbersome for the new generation to use traditional channels as they see email and calling as we used to see fax machines and rotary phones. In every study, WhatsApp, Push notifications and texting in general score best at accessibility. Whatsapp as a marketing tool is excellent because of its reach. Its users include people of all ages, profiles, and socioeconomic situations. It is available in 109 countries in 53 languages and has massive potential as a marketing tool.

Whatsapp was launched as a primary SMS platform in 2009. It became an alternative to costly phone bills as it allowed Wi-Fi communication. Along with text messages, one could also make voice calls, send photos or videos globally. Due to its popularity, Whatsapp was acquired in 2014 by Facebook. Currently, there are three classes of WhatsApp — Messenger App, Business App, and Business API. Its interactive and highly personalized mobile messaging techniques can be beneficial to marketing.

Why WhatsApp?

Direct Response Marketing is a technique designed to encourage customers to take action to business offerings; in a personalized and much more convenient 2-way conversation with a business on WhatsApp.

• Till now, WhatsApp has been a relatively untapped marketing tool, yet the engagement rates on WhatsApp are distinctly high, with about 98% opening rate than any other marketing channel.
• WhatsApp over SMS offers abilities to those of rich media, Open, read, and call-to-action tracking from a business perspective.
• While Email/SMS have low response rates, WhatsApp is one of the few apps that has push notifications enabled on your customers’ phones.
• Many companies are adopting WhatsApp to implement cost-savings in customer support as it offers rich text messaging as well as supporting attachments. Most importantly, it is secure by design.
• It is helpful for marketers to even convey promotional content, brochures, catalogs, videos, etc., and attract customers to get them interested in your products by tapping on to the easy usability of the product.
• Marketing teams can conduct Surveys and polls with customers in real-time using WhatsApp.

Here is the List of companies exploring WhatsApp messaging—

• Netflix has a marketing campaign where they send suggestions over WhatsApp about the shows you’re not interested in watching. For this, the customer had to be registered with the same mobile number on both platforms.
• OpenBankSpain displays a WhatsApp customer service number. Customers can chat with the bank, ask queries, get their issues rectified, and make peer-to-peer payments with WhatsApp.
• BMW uses Whatsapp for Workshop Customer Service. Customers can request the repair status of their vehicle and other important information.

Whatsapp is an advertisement-free and international messaging app used by Companies as a part of their marketing, and it has benefited them to expand their reach to customers.

According to a piece by CNET,

“WhatsApp is the only widely used app we’ve ever seen with more engagement and a higher percentage of people using it daily than Facebook itself. WhatsApp’s engagement rate, or the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users, is an impressive 70 percent, whereas Facebook’s engagement rate is around 61 percent.”

Source: Hootsuite

Few strategies for WhatsApp Marketing

• Use Whatsapp Business Account and Add your business name, a profile picture representing your brand, brief description, website, email, address, hours, and select a category.
• Develop a marketing strategy — Start by exploring Whatsapp Business features. Decide the way your audience wants to interact with your brand. Manage the user messages and predict what could be the impact on KPIs and resources at scale.
• Decide Your Engagement strategy and explore mobile messaging — There are four ways to engage your audience. They include one-on-one messages, Whatsapp status, Broadcast Lists and, Group chats. Whatsapp allows creating a group of up to 256 members, and you can create an unlimited set of groups.
• Expand your audience — This can be done by adding contacts to your list. Use automated messages like Greeting messages, Away(unavailable) and, engage users using Quick replies(Up to 50 shortcuts to reuse on-brand crafted messages you send frequently).
• Do the Analysis and provide Customer Support — WhatsApp only offers metrics on how many messages were sent, delivered, read, and received. WhatsApp makes it simple for users to block or report businesses. These user feedback signals are inputs into your quality rating. Companies do not need to invest extra money to provide customer support, and it can be done by various options like text, video, audio, and a quick call to provide support.
• Earn Credibility and create Brand Awareness — The audience on Whatsapp is much smaller than other online platforms but can earn business credibility. They are more engaged with the content and more likely to subscribe than different audiences. It offers loyal customers and, opt-out rates are low. It’s easy to create Brand Awareness as people like the convenience of news coming through their phones.

Marketing strategies have evolved over the pandemic, and consumers’ are increasingly using Whatsapp. Whatsapp is famous because of its simplicity and now can be used for marketing with personal messaging. It has a high Return On Marketing Investment(ROMI). The key is to have quality interactions and track them to bring value to the conversation. Now, it is your time to experiment and make use of Whatsapp Marketing. As part of the new release, Unica 12.1.2, Unica Deliver provides an enhanced Whatsapp capability to send out messages to the customers, along with added PUSH support in Unica Journey to engage with customers on any channel. You can read all about the new Unica 12.1.2 release here.