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Explaining the Need for Conversational Marketing During 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 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 meeting people where they are on a platform that they feel comfortable using, thereby increasing the chances of engagement with the products that you want to promote.
Why Should You Be Using WhatsApp as a Marketing Channel?
Recent 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.
With this in mind, there's a strong argument to be made that if you're not already using WhatsApp Business for marketing in 2023, 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 still 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 Sales Periods?
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. Remember to send out information at key moments of the year and 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 product 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.
