12 real-life examples of how brands use WhatsApp to increase engagement, conversion and leads across the customer journey
How many people need to back a platform before it becomes a no-brainer marketing channel?
How about 2 billion?
That’s the case with WhatsApp, a messaging platform quickly becoming one of the most popular ways for businesses to connect with their customers. Companies can use this channel to send automated notifications along the funnel, re-engage with users, turn website visitors into customers, and more.
Here’s the crucial part: customers are already messaging businesses across all stages of the lifecycle:
81% message businesses to ask about products or services.
74% message businesses to make a purchase.
75% message businesses to get support.
Let's dive into some real-life examples of how brands use WhatsApp to increase engagement, conversion and leads across the customer journey.
Already convinced? Read on to calculate the ROI of WhatsApp Marketing.
Delight during discovery
If your ads and site visits are the bait that draws customers in, conversations are how you reel those potential leads into long-term relationships with your business. By engaging in conversation with your buyers, you can better understand their needs and speed up the buyer journey — even when they are just starting to explore what you have to offer.
Conversation-based marketing is one of the most effective strategies to maximize the impact of your digital advertising. Just ask Expert, an electronics retailer who converted 80% of inbound leads using WhatsApp.
Teach customers about your products
Why leave your (potential) customers to their own devices, when you can instead take them straight to a conversation that speaks to their needs and allows them to ask any last questions they have before completing their purchase? This helps give customers a personalized experience and increase purchase retention.
Expert focused on providing virtual sales assistants, guiding their customers along the purchase journey within their eCommerce store experience.
Using MessageBird's WhatsApp integration, customers now have an on-demand chat service that lets them ask questions about products directly through WhatsApp. Each product display page has a WhatsApp button, directing them to an Expert agent with one click. When customers click the WhatsApp button, customers get the same advice as they would in a store.
Optimize ad conversion
Rather than sending your customers to a landing page after they click on an ad, why not direct them straight to a personalized conversation that speaks to what you’re advertising?
To really hit it out of the park, drive those clicks from ads to tools like WhatsApp so people can quickly jump into a conversation with your business. You can personalize your process, by using a bot-run, message-based conversation to qualify leads before you direc them to a virtual sales agent.
(Side note: Amazon Prime Video took this exact approach when promoting a new show, helping them achieve a 97% click through rate.)
Learn more about your customers’ preferences
The discovery stage also allows brands to learn more about their customer preferences.
By giving them the opportunity to opt-in for notifications on valuable offers, restock alerts, new products, and more, you create an even better way to build relationships and increase customer loyalty.
This will help you deliver messages that are expected, timely, and relevant to their preferences.
Make purchasing easy
It’s not enough to just have great products. The entire purchasing process needs to be seamless, too.
And because 72% of non-baby boomers prefer eCommerce interactions over in-store shopping experiences, it’s important to create an effortless purchasing process. Conversations can help deliver that personalized and streamlined experience customers desire.
Here are a few ways you can harness conversational marketing tools like Whatsapp to make purchasing a no-brainer.
Re-engage potential customers
WhatsApp helps make buying easy. If a customer leaves a product in their cart or download an app without signing up, it may not be because they changed their mind.
It could be because they have a question that needs to be answered before they commit to the purchase, or they simply forgot to finish checking out. To account for cart abandonment, you can schedule reenagement messages to go out after a certain amount (say, 12 or 24 hours). By enabling WhatsApp, you give them the opportunity to ask questions and complete their purchase from the conversation instead of starting from scratch.
In a phrase, leaning on conversational marketing lets you bring your customers back to complete their purchases. Keep them hooked with:
fresh offers,
product restock notifications, and
abandoned cart reminders.
Offer point-of-purchase deals and discounts
There is a huge opportunity waiting at the point of purchase. Consider your offers, and leverage the checkout page as an opportunity to boost sales by offering:
bundle deals,
subscription packages, and
discounts for multiple items.
You can also use these offers as a follow-up to past purchases, increasing your customer’s lifetime value over time.
Create a “received purchase experience”
Congratulate customers on their purchase with engaging multimedia and interactive content.
You can use this content to:
share information about their product,
show them examples of how they can use it,
provide info for making returns, and
invite them to explore more items similar to the one they just received.
Instead of a one-off purchase, you’re creating a better experience for your customers after the purchase point, increasing the likelihood that they’ll purchase again down the line.
WhatsApp helps you complete the sale
For every ten potential customers, seven of them will leave without making a purchase.
How much would your revenues increase if you didn't lose those sales?
Complicating the purchase stage can have a severe impact on your bottom line, but coversational marketing makes it possible to increase your chances of converting browsers to buyers.
A couple of examples:
Matahari, the largest retail platform in Indonesia, used WhatsApp to reengage their over 1.75 million customers and increase conversion rates by 2.5x. They created promotional messaging that gave customers the option to respond in WhatsApp and immediately engage with sales agents.
Using MessageBird, Matahari was able to identify its most profitable customer segment and target them with exclusive offers in WhatsApp, with the option to start a conversational experience.
Domino’s, the largest pizza chain in the world, traditionally sent special offers to a list of 80,000 customers via email. When the company decided to run conversational marketing campaigns via SMS text messages, the team saw a sales increase of 40% and nearly triple the conversion rates that they had seen via their email campaigns.
Post-purchase relationship building
So a customer has made a purchase. Great! The next stage is just as important. It's time to delight and retain your customers, so they return.
Conversational commerce also helps ensure happiness and long-term relationships with your customers.
Sales are great. But repeat sales are even better.
And can see more of those by keeping in touch with your customers using personalized outreach via messaging and conversations.
With WhatsApp, you can even monitor the quality of your messaging outreach so that you preserve those valuable long-term customer relationships.
Here are a few ideas:
Send personalized follow-up messages
Show your customers you care by sending them thank-you notes, product reviews, surveys, and more.
Provide customer service
Give customers the ability to get help at any point in their journey. If they have a question or need help with returns, provide that support through WhatsApp.
Send shipping updates
Keep your customers informed of each step in the shipping process, from when they place their order to when it's delivered. This will help create a sense of transparency and reliability for your business.
Use conversations to maximize the value of your relationship
Once you've built a relationship with a customer, you’ll want to nurture it and get more value from it. You can do this by utilizing conversations for upselling and cross-selling.
Upselling means trying to get customers to buy more expensive items, while cross-selling is the process of selling related products or services.
By engaging with your customers through WhatsApp, you can suggest product upgrades and complementary items that may interest them. This will result in more sales and increased customer loyalty. Take this director’s perspective, for example, from a recent Meta guide:
With conversational marketing, you can use the information you’ve gathered about your customers to increase their long-term value.
Send back-in-stock alerts
Leverage your customers' purchase history to tell them about products that match their interests, or products they’ve previously inquired about.
Since you can connect your eCommerce store—on Shopify, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and more—with conversational marketing tools like MessageBird, you can automate this process. This simple step can turn what was previously lost revenue into a revenue opportunity.
Offer opt-ins for subscriptions and repeat purchases
Make it easier for your customers to repurchase your products on a regular basis and find value in maintaining the relationship.
Tailoring these messages to a customer’s actual buying patterns means your messages come off as less ‘salesy’ and more personalized to their experience.
Cross-sell products
Suggest related products and services to boost sales based on your customer’s purchasing information and past engagement with your content.
Again, integrating your conversational campaigns with your customer data means these messages won’t feel out-of-the-blue—they should make sense within the context of purchases the customer has already made.
What should your brand take away from this?
Today’s customers not only want a quick and easy way to connect with brands, but they also want to engage with businesses while they shop. While being able to connect with your customers on their terms in their preferred digital spaces can increase your revenue and customer retention.
Conversations via messaging apps offer both you and your customers flexibility, convenience, and the personalized experiences that we believe customers have come to expect in the digital age.
And, with an open rate reaching 75%+, conversational messages can give your business an easy way to provide value and assistance to your customers. All helping to establish a long-term relationship that keeps customers coming back.
MessageBird has helped thousands of companies across industries unlock the marketing potential of WhatsApp Business. The sooner your business optimizes for messaging, the sooner you may start to reap the rewards.
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you are looking for help setting up your use-case.