WhatsApp for Business: How to Use WhatsApp for Marketing and Customer Services

WhatsApp for Business: How to Use WhatsApp for Marketing and Customer Services

It is not just a direct messaging app, but WhatsApp has become a part of our lifestyle, and nowadays, we can’t imagine life without it. From the name itself, it has created a sort of familiarity that immediately hooks us. But apart from our personal life, can it help out in your business marketing and customer services?

Well, this is exactly what we are going to find out in this post. Here we will look at a few tips and techniques that will surely help you deliver super-impressive customer care services and come up with effective and innovative marketing campaigns using WhatsApp.

It’s currently the most popular messaging app in the world, boasting a monthly active user base of over 1.5 billion across 180 countries. Just imagine the wonders only a fraction of this user base can do for your business!

Now, obviously, you are not the only one who wants to target this massive audience base; other businesses also will want to go neck-to-neck! Moreover, using WhatsApp for marketing purposes is very much difficult and limited at the same time. With its new features related to encrypted messaging and lack of using ads, you will have to think out-of-the-box to reap the benefit out of WhatsApp!

On top of that, the cost is also a huge factor as every WhatsApp business account holder needs to pay for every single message they send to their potential customers if the business is not responding within the first 24-hour window. Plus, the pricing will also vary based on the Business Solution Provider (BSP) you have partnered with for managing the WhatsApp Business API.

When WhatsApp Business API is designed to cater to the needs of large companies, WhatsApp Business App is perfect for smaller businesses, which is available for free in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Despite all these challenges, some companies managed to devise innovative marketing campaigns to reach new and potential customers through the WhatsApp platform. As a matter of fact, this messaging app can be very useful for better customer services, out-of-the-box marketing strategies, and especially one-to-one communication.

So, let’s look at the ways with which you can also make a fortune with WhatsApp marketing.

Why Should You Use WhatsApp for Your Business?

If you are fine with bearing the cost of using WhatsApp for Business,we have some great ideas for you. But first, let’s look at a few reasons as to why using WhatsApp for Business can be immensely beneficial for your company and customers.

Does your business have a presence in countries like Brazil or India? Then you should definitely look at the possibilities offered by WhatsApp for Business; since, in these two countries alone, the active user-base is around 120 million and 300 million respectively.

In countries in the EU, like Netherlands, Spain, or Italy, WhatsApp can give you over 85% market penetration. Even in the USA, you can get over 23 million active users. But these are just the stats, right? So what about the reasons for using WhatsApp for Business despite all its limitations?

• Firstly, WhatsApp Business is an excellent platform for providing excellent customer services. It will enable your community managers to connect with your customers without disrupting their comfort zone seamlessly. Plus, if you respond in less than 24 hours, then it becomes free!
• Next, WhatsApp for Business is exceptionally underrated when it comes to digital communication channels. Believe it or not, but WhatsApp Status alone has over 450 million users daily! You can use this to build a really strong brand loyalty.
• WhatsApp marketing can be very effective. You can send a paid notification directly to leads and incorporate other strategies to boost your conversions.

But my business is just a startup!

I know you are having doubts as to how effective WhatsApp can be for small and medium businesses! Well, don’t worry; here I am going to cover that as well. Below are some of the advantages that WhatsApp for Business can lend to small and medium-sized businesses:

How can You Use WhatsApp for Small Business?

The first piece of advice; if you are using WhatsApp Business App for your company, then there is no point in using a private account. It incurs the risk of losing the account, and you might also miss out on a ton of powerful features that it has to offer to a small business.

As I said, you can find the WhatsApp Business app on the Android and iOS platforms, and you can even access it online with WhatsApp Web. This allows you to use it on your desktop or laptop browser.

WhatsApp Business app is specifically built for small businesses. However, the features are a little bit limited compared to the WhatsApp Business API.

Features WhatsApp Business App Offers to Small Businesses

• Business Profile: Here, you can create a profile for your business, which will have all the information about your company, like email address, location, description, URL, hours, logo, and more.
• WhatsApp Business Statistics: This feature will provide you with the basic analytics reports about the activity of your account. You can get details about the number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received.
• Labels: Here, you will get custom color-coded labels to put on active chats with customers. This will make the entire messaging experience much more organized.
• Greetings: This feature allows you to set up a default greeting message for customers to know about your business.
• Away messages: You can pre-set the away messages to send to customers when you’re not online.
• Quick replies: This fantastic feature of the WhatsApp Business app lets you save frequently-used responses and send them quickly by typing short commands starting with “/”.

These features will make the operation of your small business much easier. You can also avail the auto-reply feature and response templates to handle your small customer-base.

But what if you have a medium or enterprise-sized company? This is where the WhatsApp Business API comes to your aid.

What is WhatsApp Business API?

WhatsApp Business API allows your brands to tap into WhatsApp’s code and get deeper insights about their product and also incorporate new features. However, only a handful of large organizations are currently using this version.

So what’s the alternative?

Well, you can use a third-party tool for WhatsApp, which already has access to the WhatsApp Business API. But make sure that this tool is a certified WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP). The certified tools will let you use all the features of WhatsApp Business API without much hassle.

Now, it’s always prudent that you don’t use your personal WhatsApp account as your WhatsApp business account. If you don’t want to use it, you have three options to go with:

• Firstly, you can use the WhatsApp Business App (ideal for small businesses).
• Else, you can try and get access to the WhatsApp business API (perfect for big enterprises).
• You can also buy or partner with a third-party solution tool from a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (the best for the businesses who want a substantial presence on the web).

What Techniques Can I Use for Providing Excellent Customer Services Using WhatsApp?

For most of the brands out there, WhatsApp is the first and foremost channel for customer services. If you use it as the primary medium of digital communication, you will find it really convenient to answer all the business-related concerns of your customers on the go!

The best part is, it’s quick, easy, and the customers won’t have to stay stuck on hold for hours. Below, I am listing a few tips that will help you turn this platform into the perfect channel for reaching out to your customers.

Always Respond Within 24 Hours

It may come across as very much obvious and almost a no brainer, but trust me, quick replies can take your business a long way. This is one of the key indicators of excellent WhatsApp customer service.

Around 42% of people expect a response in under an hour. Plus, if they get a quick reply, then the customers are likely to pay without hesitation for the products.

Furthermore, if you can reply within the 24-hour window of the last customer-message, it will become free.

Use Different Messaging Formats

In WhatsApp, you get a ton of features that can make your communication with the customers much easier and effective. Like, for example, you can send product photos, demo videos, exact locations, GIFs, PDFs, or even voice messages.

This variety of formats eliminates the limitations you might have while responding to your customers’ inquiries. Apart from texts, you can send video tutorials or even PDF guides to help them out solve many complex problems.

This will also allow your brand to deliver a fun and positive customer service experience. Just throw in some funny GIFs, and your customers will feel good instantly!

Consider Using WhatsApp Chatbots

This is a very powerful feature to use if you have a WhatsApp Business API. Just add the WhatsApp chatbot to answer all the common questions from your customers automatically. Needless to say, this can save a lot of your time and energy, plus, you will never fail to send a reply within 24 hours.

But, it’s ill-advised to leave everything on the chatbot. This will reduce the human touch, and that can, unfortunately, create an adverse effect. So make sure you have some personalized responses as well.

Publicize Your WhatsApp Customer Service Number

What’s the point in offering customer service on WhatsApp if no one knows about it! So once you have a WhatsApp business account set up and ready, make sure to hire a dedicated person to manage all the customer inquiries and also do publicize the account. Feel free to add a link, button, or phone number to your social media accounts, websites, business cards, etc.

Manage Replies via WhatsApp Web (or a Third-Party Tool)

Do you wish to respond to a large volume of WhatsApp customer messages on your phone? Well, you know, it is not only difficult but unrealistic as well. So, it’s time to bid goodbye to this time-consuming and tedious practice and embrace the WhatsApp Web.

WhatsApp Web lets its users send and receive messages through their laptop or desktop browsers, making your customer service workflow much faster and more efficient.

How to Use WhatsApp Web?

WhatsApp lets you use your account on your browser. This will allow you to serve your customers even more quickly and efficiently. You can also add labels on your frequent chats and make the whole customer service and messaging process much more streamlined.

So these were a few tips to improve your customer services using WhatsApp. But what if you like to go beyond this and use the WhatsApp platform to do much more pro-active marketing for your business?

Here are a few tips for you:

WhatsApp Marketing Strategy Tips & Techniques

WhatsApp can definitely work as a great marketing channel. Indeed, there are a few barriers while using it; like, you cannot start a conversation with a customer without sending non-promotional notifications, you cannot advertise to users, and biggest of all, you need their phone numbers in the first place to contact them!

But despite all these limitations and hurdles, there are many upsides as well. Most important of all, although the current WhatsApp user-base is somewhere over 1.5 billion, only a tiny percentage of it are using the platform for business promotion and marketing. This means the competition is not much cut-throat, and the customers will be less agitated to find your messages.

On top of that, these limitations will compel you to be much more creative and try out new techniques to get your marketing objective achieved.

So, here are a few tips that you can use to engage your audience better on WhatsApp:

Use WhatsApp Status to Tap a Large Audience

The WhatsApp status is WhatsApp’s own version of the Stories format. Currently, it has over 450 million daily users, which beat the numbers that of Facebook Stories and Snapchat as well.

So, if you are not yet using WhatsApp status to connect better with your contacts, you are surely missing out on a huge platform for promotion. But what type of content you can use for your business?

Well, for that, you can use entertaining, human stories. This can be good for building brand awareness and customer loyalty. You can treat it as a continuation of your marketing strategy on Facebook and Instagram stories.

Another option could be using WhatsApp Status only for promotion. Like, for example, you can try posting images or videos that highlight flash sales and temporary discounts on your website. The Status will anyway disappear after 24 hours, so this can create an effect of FOMO and make your customers intrigued about your products.

Engage Users through WhatsApp Groups

Creating a community around your brand can be a great way to promote your products or services – for that, WhatsApp groups can be super-effective. Here you can add 256 people and talk business with each other.

However, you need to stay aware that these groups can only be used for customer services. As per WhatsApp’s guidelines, you are forbidden to use these for advertising, marketing, or promotion unless authorized by WhatsApp itself in writing.

To an extent, you should consider these groups like brand channels where anyone can join and ask questions about the business, products, or services. Thanks to their size, they can have a sense of exclusivity, plus, since you can add 256 people together, you can take advantage of this feature by giving them various special offers.

WhatsApp Groups could also be perfect for content marketing. Since WhatsApp allows you to share images, videos, links, etc., you can set up a newsletter-like content distribution model where people will sign up and get notified of your latest blog posts, video content, infographics, etc. However, you should consider WhatsApp policies and guidelines for promotional messaging; seek consent in advance if you know your messages aren’t compliant.

Trust me; this is definitely worth giving a shot. With this, you can reach out to an audience who are already familiar with your brand and services.

Go for Nontraditional Campaigns

In the WhatsApp Business platform, you need the customers to message you first. So since you can’t make the first move, you need to think ingeniously.

Remember, the key to successful WhatsApp marketing is swaying the users to message you and share their phone numbers to add them to your WhatsApp Groups. To make it worthwhile, creativity is a must.

Like one fashion brand could use their e-commerce landing pages to show their WhatsApp number with a promise to give away valuable coupon codes to anyone who would text them the word “Send”.

They could even use mock screenshots to make the entire thing much more compelling and realistic. This will indeed make others all the more intrigued about the whole thing.

Similarly, one food and beverage brand may use the platform where they could use WhatsApp marketing campaigns to give away tickets to a movie.

So as you can see, with a bit of knowledge about the platform and some creativity, you can actually come up with great marketing campaigns on WhatsApp.

The Future of WhatsApp Marketing!

All the tips and techniques mentioned above will help you use WhatsApp for your marketing campaigns. But, what about the future? If you are willing to take this idea forward, there is certainly some good news for you.

With the current trend, it is safe to envisage that advertising will become a part of WhatsApp very soon. According to insiders, they are already beta testing the WhatsApp Status Ads.

Needless to say, when this feature will be available to the public, it will bring a huge benefit to everyone. This will give all the brand owners advertising access to 1.5 billion people who were untouched previously. All the companies that will jump ahead and embrace the WhatsApp ads will surely acquire great benefits with relatively less competition. So, if you want to plan WhatsApp marketing for the future, then this is the time. Think about how you can use the strategy of Facebook and Instagram Stories for WhatsApp as well.

Speaking of this connection, as you can already see, both WhatsApp and Instagram have come under Facebook.  While they function separately, the intermediate string is now stronger than ever. So, it’s safe to say; the future holds endless possibilities.

One can guess that once the ads are available on WhatsApp, they are very much likely to be launched by Facebook Ads Manager. Moreover, there will be easier processes for integration since all the platforms will be interconnected. Business owners, who are already running ads on Facebook and Instagram, will perhaps easily add their ads on WhatsApp as well.

But I guess we all need to wait for sometime before any of these predictions materialize. Only then we can see the true nature and function of WhatsApp ads.

Final Thoughts on WhatsApp Marketing

So with that possibility, we have come to our final thoughts on this topic. Frankly, the release of the WhatsApp Business API means more and more third-party WhatsApp tools (aka WhatsApp Business Solution Providers) will be available in the coming years – for your brand, this is a real good news. Because the more tools there will be, the pricing will be more competitive and better promotional services you will receive. Plus, you will get even more advanced analytics and powerful features to manage your customer service and marketing communications on WhatsApp. It might also lead to a situation where third-party advertising tools will streamline your WhatsApp ad campaigns.

At the same time, all the brands should prepare themselves for new and advanced customer service and marketing options on WhatsApp. With Facebook entering the equation, the picture is very simple. They will surely do their best to monetize the platform and integrate the entire WhatsApp system with the products and business as smoothly as possible.

So, it’s time for you to think and act! If your business is already on WhatsApp, you should start brainstorming ideas and think about how to improve your customer services. You need to develop some astute marketing campaigns, prep for Status ads, and consider the possibility of using a third-party WhatsApp tool.

And if your brand is yet to join WhatsApp, it is definitely the best time to make the jump on the bandwagon and explore the potentials. The possibilities will definitely be endless; you just have to figure out how to use the current in your favor!

So what are your thoughts on WhatsApp marketing for your business? Let us know in the comments section below and keep the discussion going on. Your insightful inputs can be of immense help to all our readers and various companies around the world. Till then, cheers!