70% of global customers prefer brands that engage with them proactively. Any good customer relationship is built on trust, and proactive communication creates the groundwork for a long-term relationship with your consumers thereby driving repeated sales.
But remember that it’s not just you who aims to communicate with customers proactively. You’re competing with businesses across the world. Using channels such as SMS and Email is no longer sufficient.
Why? Because customers receive hundreds and sometimes even thousands of emails and SMS every day and it’s tough to stand out.
These channels are crowded, and your message is likely to get lost. Instead, you’ll need a more personalized and direct communication channel that lets you interact with customers one-on-one. It’s at this point when WhatsApp marketing comes into play.
What is WhatsApp marketing?
You spend hours writing the perfect promotional email, fixing the design, and so on, only to discover that it was never opened or read. How does it make you feel? Shattering, right? Then why not send that simple, nice little message over WhatsApp, which has a high chance of being read?
WhatsApp marketing is basically promoting your product/service and communicating with your customers through WhatsApp – a popular messaging/ chat app platform, in a similar way as SMS and email!
Just with a 99% open rate!
Why use WhatsApp marketing for your Shopify store?
How are we so sure that WhatsApp Marketing is the best marketing channel for your Shopify store? To answer this, we have some statistics that prove WhatsApp’s potential to help your business grow:
- WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users worldwide (2021).
- The average user accessing WhatsApp using an Android device spends approximately 38 minutes on the app every day.
- WhatsApp has an open rate of 99% higher than any other communication channel.
- The average click-through rate for WhatsApp messages stands at 30%
- WhatsApp messages see conversion rates as high as 9.1%.
- WhatsApp is the most popular among ages between 26-35. Not just them, in fact 13% of WhatsApp users are also between 56-60 years.
Source : Neilpatelblog
WhatsApp’s larger demographic makes it simple to communicate with people of all ages. Additionally, when compared to other communication channels, WhatsApp messages have a 99 percent open rate, which means they are more likely to be read. Now combining this with the fact that 56 percent of customers prefer messaging over calling for customer care, WhatsApp can be an excellent chat support platform for your business to answer your customer queries faster!
If you’re still reading this, we expect that you’re looking to introduce WhatsApp marketing for your Shopify store. But how? Let’s understand.
How to put WhatsApp marketing to work for your Shopify store?
Learning about WhatsApp marketing isn’t enough; you also need to understand how to apply it to your Shopify store. So here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use WhatsApp marketing for your Shopify store.
Step 1: Install a WhatsApp business app
The first step is to install a WhatsApp marketing app. Ensure that this WhatsApp marketing app is a WhatsApp Business API partner. This will enable fasten the process of setting up your Whatsapp business account.
You can easily set up basic automations like welcome messages for your new subscribers, setting up a sequence for your cart recovery messages, and basic customer support messages that can be sent while you’re away.
Quickreply.ai, is one such platform that not only allows you to easily set these up but it enables sending upto 100K personalised broadcast messages.
Using a WhatsApp marketing app that is a WhatsApp Business API partner also improves the chances of conversion by placing a CTA button at the bottom of your messages that can redirect customers back to your store pages. [Add an image of such a message template below] A feature that your third party apps don’t provide you with which is why you’ll have to provide links at the end of your message that hardly get any clicks.
Step 2: Segment your subscribers
Not all the visitors on your Shopify store will be the same. Some may have been passive subscribers who never bought anything, while others may have purchased something once, twice or even multiple times. You cannot have a unified strategy for all of them.
As a result, segmenting your subscribers is critical. Once you’ve segmented your subscribers, you can tailor a marketing approach for them that will result in more conversions. Like on any other platform, personalizing your message on WhatsApp is also crucial. You can personalize your message based on your subscribers’ activities once you know which segment they belong to.
Step 3: Set up all basic automations
WhatsApp marketing is more than just sending promotional messages. You can provide immediate assistance, send cart recovery messages, inform customers about payment confirmation and order status, respond to FAQs, send back in stock notifications and much more.
What if you had to do this manually? Sounds exhausting right? Your customer service team already has a lot on their plate, but automating all of this can help them engage with consumers more proactively and increase conversion.
Sending automatic messages to your customers to keep them updated at every step helps keep them engaged and build trust over time. This will not only help you increase new conversions, but it will also result in repeat sales. More than half of your customers (57 percent) will boost their spending with a brand if they feel connected to it.
Step 4: Plan out to marketing campaigns
Similar to your weekly or monthly newsletters, you must run weekly broadcast campaigns on WhatsApp too. This helps keep your customers informed about your brand sales and promotional activities.
Running an online promotion or discount? Simply create a WhatsApp broadcast campaign and notify your existing customers and subscribers about it. If you’re looking to create WhatsApp broadcast campaigns, where you may deliver personalized messages to thousands of clients at once, reach out to us at quickreply.ai to help you with the same.
Step 5: Monitor and optimize
If you don’t track and optimize your marketing campaigns, they won’t be effective. You can track your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns as you do with your email and SMS campaigns.
To calculate your ROI, look at key indicators, including how your subscribers react to different campaigns, click-through rate, open rate, and conversions. You may quickly tweak your campaigns to improve your performance once you have the metrics.
Should you use WhatsApp?
Which is the one app that you use on a regular basis? Our guess is that it is WhatsApp! Right? Because majority of our personal and professional communications take place through WhatsApp and it’s difficult to ignore the notifications that pop up.
Most businesses nowadays compete to stay on top of their customers’ minds, and WhatsApp helps them stand out with its simple yet exciting features. WhatsApp allows you to communicate with your audience in real time, promote your business, build connections, and engage with them.
Also, by offering one-on-one conversations you make your customers feel more connected to the brand and drive repeated purchases. It’s time to leverage WhatsApp marketing to provide excellent consumer experiences if you want to outperform your competitors.
About the author
This article is contributed by Himanshu Gupta, the Co-Founder of QuickReply.ai, a WhatsApp marketing app for Shopify eCommerce businesses. You can connect with him here.
