What is WhatsApp Marketing?

WhatsApp is a social messaging tool that you can use for messenger marketing to help promote your brand through using WhatsApp. This channel has enormous potential and can help brands reach a vast audience, build strong relationships with customers, and increase sales.

Why Should You Use WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business?

Proactive WhatsApp Marketing Messages opens up a world of possibilities for the future of content marketing on social messaging

You're probably already marketing on Facebook with its 1.65 billion active users, Twitter with 310 million active users, and LinkedIn with 100 million active users. But are you on WhatsApp? WhatsApp is undoubtedly the most popular messaging platform in the world. In 2020 alone, its audience has grown up to 2 billion active users monthly. That's more users than Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest combined. This marketing channel is a must-have for businesses that want to connect with audiences on the channel that they're using the most.

Facebook owns WhatsApp, making the market share for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined accounting for 79% of the entire messaging market. That's pretty crazy. As a marketer, WhatsApp gives you so many ways to communicate to an audience with images, text, videos, voice messages there are so many possibilities.

Not only that, but it’s beating email marketing by miles. Email marketing may still be crucial and have relevance, but realistically your highest open rate is probably around 35-40% with the likelihood of most campaigns only getting an average open rate of around 17%.

The average SMS text has a 98% open rate. That makes WhatsApp the most engaging marketing channel on the planet. Add to that the fact that SMS usually has a cost component if the customer wants to message back, WhatsApp is essentially cheaper as it relies on data and essentially free wherever there is WiFi.

With more than half of WhatsApp users checking the app every day, this means WhatsApp marketing allows you to stay in touch with your customers and be sure they will get your updates, special offers or promotions. Your customers love and use this communication channel so it makes sense that they have greater trust in brands who have chat apps. More than 53% of people say they would buy from companies they can reach via chat.

So, Why aren't More Companies Using WhatsApp for Marketing?

Well, until recently, there just hasn't been a way for marketers to really use WhatsApp to it's full benefit. They were pretty strict about their advertising policy until the new changes around Proactive Promotional Messaging came into effect in July 2021 expanding the types of messages you can now send to your contacts who have opted-in to receive messages from you. WhatsApp Proactive Messaging allows you to send or initiate a message to your WhatsApp contacts, without it needing to be part of an existing 'transactional' conversation, although it must be done through a WhatsApp pre-approved template message. This is great news for marketers who can now send push notifications to their customers using WhatsApp.

Using WhatsApp for Business and the WhatsApp API does it have it's limitations, which is probably why you may not have seriously considered it before. There obviously isn't a pretty dashboard to view your results and see how your messages perform, you can't search and join groups to promote your stuff, and creating and sending the pre-approved template messages can feel a little complicated and overwhelming.

That being said, you do have the chance to win early on a highly underutilized platform and get an edge over your competitors by adding WhatsApp to your marketing strategy before everyone jumps on board.

Benefits of WhatsApp Marketing for Your Business

Using WhatsApp is a golden opportunity to improve your marketing strategy. There are four positive outcomes of using WhatsApp for the promotion of your business.

Developing Profound Relationships with Customers

Over 55% of people feel more connected to a brand if they use messaging apps. This makes WhatsApp marketing a bulletproof strategy for building long profound relationships with customers. Maintaining such a connection, in turn, helps brands cut expenditures as customer retention is 5-25 times cheaper than acquisition.

Right out of the box, WhatsApp provides your business with a robust set of opportunities for personalization. For instance, you can send personalized welcome messages, special offers, birthday congratulations, and more. Adopting this kind of approach keeps customers more engaged with a brand as over 70% of consumers say they engage only with personalized marketing messages.

Get Higher Conversion Rate

Making sure you choose the perfect channel for your initial contact with customers is crucial. People may get disgruntled with phone calls while staying inaccessible through email or social media. This is where WhatsApp comes in handy to nudge your prospects towards the purchase.

Better yet, messaging drives conversions. If you message your prospect after their initial contact, you can increase the conversion rate by 112.6%.

Increase Better sales

WhatsApp marketing can work as a sort of magic wand for your sales if you use it correctly. The simple trick of adding a WhatsApp phone number on your website may result in more sales leads because the opportunity to reach a brand through any messaging app alone seems to instill confidence in potential customers. At least 66% feel more optimistic about purchasing from a company if it is active on messenger apps.

You can even consider a dedicated standalone WhatsApp sales channel for your business as there is a  growing tendency for people to buy through messaging apps. Roughly 60% of consumers believe they will use messengers more to make purchases in the future.

Lower the Cost of Marketing Efforts

WhatsApp is still a very affordable marketing channel, which makes this platform enticing for growing businesses. All you need to get the ball rolling is to install an app and connect to the Internet in order to get the basic functionality of WhatsApp for Business. The chances that your message will reach the customer are sky high.

On average, a user checks WhatsApp over 23 times a day. WhatsApp marketing drives more conversions, improves sales, allows you to build deep quality relationships with customers, and costs next to nothing in terms of marketing expenditures.

Get Started Today

WhatsApp might be the solution you need for your next marketing campaign, and Sweesh is a great tool that not only gives you the functionality of WhatsApp Business, but gives you a platform where you can easily import and manage thousands of contacts, set-up targeted segmented lists, create engaging rich-media campaigns, and track the effectiveness of your campaigns all in one web-based tool.

There's a world of possibilities to use WhatsApp for your marketing communications, but we understand if it may feel a little overwhelming to get started. Get in touch with us to find out how Sweesh can help you kick your marketing into high gear without needing to develop any complicated tools or invest in expensive integrations.

The Sweesh platform offers an all-in-one WhatsApp messaging tool to help you streamline your marketing efforts, hit sales targets and build a memorable brand with your customers.

See Sweesh in action by booking a demo with one of our Product Specialists here.