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Wonder no longer. In this article, will unpack the black box that is WhatsApp marketing performance and provide you with the tool to assess its potential.
What we'll cover today
Should I run campaigns on WhatsApp? Seems like a simple back-of-the-napkin CPA calculation. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that straightforward so far.
Up until now, accurate data on open and engagement rates have not been accessible to the public.
And as you start putting things together, you’ll soon come to realize there are various factors that play a role in forecasting what you can expect. Are you running inbound or outbound campaigns? What countries are your subscribers in? And what does “quality” content mean?
Wonder no longer. In this article, will unpack the black box that is WhatsApp marketing performance and provide you with the tool to assess its potential.
We’ll cover four ways conversational marketing can help increase the returns on marketing investments:
Through expanded reach
By improving data capture for better personalization
By increased conversion and engagement rates
By facilitating expedited experimentation speed
We’ll further dig into specific examples, establish benchmarks to work off of, and provide a template ROI calculation to see if conversational marketing is the right investment for your business at this moment.
Let’s dive right in.
Expand your reach
While it does not directly affect your cost per conversion, we have to highlight the reach WhatsApp offers.
As the primary communication channel in many countries across the world, WhatsApp’s scale is unrivalled. Over 2 billion people across 180 countries use WhatsApp every month, with 70% of them checking the app daily.
WhatsApp offers great adoption across demographics and countries making it a great channel for all sorts of businesses.
Capture better data
Conversational marketing also helps you prepare for the future.
With Google planning to phase out third-party cookies, the way we are used to market will stop working.
By the end of 2024, most of the signals from third-party tracking will no longer exist. So businesses that rely solely on third-party cookies to personalize consumers’ experiences are at risk of losing their competitive edge.
So, how can companies continue their personalization efforts in a cookie-less era?
The answer is customer-first data, information collected directly from customers.
Through conversations, WhatsApp gives you a direct entry point to consumers’ mobile phones.
Marketers can ask questions and collect data directly from their customers. These can, for example, be qualification questions to better understand your customer's preference, but also opt-ins to ensure you can keep re-engaging customers with proper consent.
The details of the conversation can be further enriched with past consumer behavior like transactions and product usage to create a complete picture of the customer. With an accurate view of their customers at hand, businesses can develop better segmentation restulting in more relevant engagement and in turn higher conversions.
Aside from data collected in your conversations, WhatsApp provides all messages with read receipts. This means 100% accurate open rates directly from the source (unlike what you might be used to in other channels).
OVO Energy, one of the UK's leading utility companies, for example, increased their marketing opt-ins by 128% when prompting their customers after a good experience.
Increase conversions and engagement
Speed up experimentation
More than half of CMOs invested in long-form digital efforts like SEO, influencer marketing, and content marketing. While these channels can lead to long-term positive results, they often take time to materialize. Shrinking budgets mean marketers will also have to run experiments that show impact in the short term.
A big plus of conversational marketing is that building an MVP is straightforward. When you’ve come up with your idea, you can build out your first campaign in a couple of minutes.
And the results come in fast.
In the case of a broadcast campaign (where you send out a bulk WhatsApp campaign to a list of numbers), you can expect results to reach significance in the next hour or so. In the case of an automated ongoing campaign, it can take a bit longer, depending on the volumes.
On top of that conversational channels like WhatsApp offer a very low barrier to entry which makes them very suited for low-risk experimentation. You pay as you go, and it does not require complex setups or budget commitments.
How to calculate the ROI of conversational marketing
Get a custom ROI calculation and campaign advice
As you made it to the end of the article, you can see many things that influence the potential ROI of your WhatsApp campaigns.
If you are looking for some help navigating your ROI calculation or need inspiration on how to improve the quality of your campaigns, please don’t hesitate to reach out, and we’d be happy to plan a working session where we can answer all your questions.
