Increase conversion with promotional messages on WhatsApp

Conversational Marketing during peak sales periods

Conversational Marketing is a dialogue-driven approach to marketing that focuses on two-way conversations with customers via the use of online chat tools, offering an alternative to the relentless flood of information that users are usually subjected to during peak sales periods. So, instead of just bombarding people via the usual channels, you should be thinking about how you can connect with your audience in a more personal and familiar way.

In practical terms, this means communicating via the channels they prefer to use, at the preferred time and most importantly with relevant offers based on their personal needs. This way, you're not only improving customer engagement but also increasing the chance of conversion.

Why use WhatsApp as a marketing channel?

Statistics show that WhatsApp is one of the few apps to have been downloaded over 5 billion times across iOS and Android, making it the most widely used mobile messenger app in the world by quite some distance.

Aside from its outstanding reach, WhatsApp has an incredible rate of usage compared to emails, given that it is primarily a mobile phone app. A recent survey of over 1,000 people found that sending instant messages is most cellphone users’ number one activity. Another showed that 90% of people admit to checking their phones within 30 minutes of waking up. Finally, statistics show that newsletters via WhatsApp have open rates of 98% and click-through-rates of 45-60%.

With this in mind, there's a strong argument to be made that if you're not already using WhatsApp Business for marketing, you could soon be playing catch-up with the rest of the world. However, it's very early days, and those who have adopted WhatsApp as a marketing channel remain very much in the minority; so now's a great time to become one of the first companies to start using it to take your eCommerce business to the next level.

How to use WhatsApp as a marketing channel

During busy sales periods such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you can program messages on WhatsApp Business to send out notifications letting customers know that sales have started. You can also use pictures and video messages, allowing for a more original and eye-catching marketing style that gets straight to the point of what you're trying to convey. In the short term, there's a high chance that you'll see an immediate response, with some companies already experiencing an increase in customer engagement of 35% compared to traditional email marketing.

Another upside that WhatsApp offers is the absence of that age-old graveyard of marketing emails, the spam folder. At least for the moment, WhatsApp has no spam folder to speak of, so there's very little chance of your message being unopened or unread. However, WhatsApp users can still block numbers from people or companies that they don't want to hear from, so it doesn't give you free rein to send out as many updates and messages as you want. Next to that, you need consent from the receiver to send out messages at key moments of the year and remember to keep your messages as short, as relative, and as informative as possible.

Here at CM.com, we make it easy for brands to get started with using WhatsApp to transform the way that you market your products and services, providing you with a unique opportunity to turn a simple WhatsApp message into a rich source of communication between you and your customers.