15 June 2022

WhatsApp Marketing Campaigns: A Simple Guide To Ace Them

WhatsApp marketing can take your business to greater heights — if you do it right. In this article, we share 7 tips on how you can ace your WhatsApp marketing campaigns!

Benard Kiplangat

Content Writer

Reading time: 5 minutes

WhatsApp marketing is exactly what it sounds like — marketing your business on the most popular messaging app, WhatsApp.

But you might be wondering how exactly do you market your business on WhatsApp? You can’t run paid ads on the platform like you can on Facebook, or do keyword optimization like on Google.

Well, WhatsApp marketing is like chat marketing, where you use messaging channels to communicate and engage with your customers, ultimately driving traffic and sales. You can send abandoned cart recovery messages, promotions, and even shipping updates to keep your customers in the loop.

If you’re new to all this — don’t worry! In this article, we’ll discuss why WhatsApp marketing is effective and how you can ace your WhatsApp marketing campaigns.

Let’s dive right in!

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Why should you consider marketing on WhatsApp?

A high number of active users

Any marketing campaign won’t be successful if you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s essential to figure out whether a marketing channel gives you the required closeness with your target audience.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about this with WhatsApp.

The messaging platform has over 2 billion active users every month and almost 8.2 billion messages are exchanged daily.

It was reported that in 2020, India had more than 390 million WhatsApp users per month, while Brazil has over 108 million users. US comes in 3rd with over 75 million users.

This means that if you’re expanding globally or are a business owner in these regions, you should definitely invest in marketing your business on WhatsApp.

Has a high conversion rate

Compared to emails or phone calls, WhatsApp has a significantly higher conversion rate.

Though this is not to say that messaging is outrightly superior to calls — you can still sell over the phone like a pro — but Facebook found that nearly 60% of people feel more confident messaging a business than making a call.

Furthermore, WhatsApp messages have a 99% open rate and a 40% response rate. While this doesn’t necessarily mean they immediately convert into paying customers, contacting your customers through WhatsApp can increase your conversion rates by about 112%.

It is comparatively cheaper

WhatsApp Business is free to download and use — no strings attached and no hidden fees. The Business app is built for small businesses to support customer communication, so you should definitely maximize your use of it.

If you’re a medium to large business, you can opt for WhatsApp Business API. Though the cost of WhatsApp API greatly depends on the provider you decide to choose, many WhatsApp BSPs have reasonable pricing plans with added features to support your needs.

Besides, once you pay for acquiring WhatsApp API (or download it for free), you don’t have to pay any additional costs for running ads or doing search engine marketing — because you do all the marketing via chat messaging.

An extra marketing channel

Of course, when you use WhatsApp to communicate with your customers, this adds an additional touchpoint for your customers.

Because WhatsApp has so many users, you can take advantage of this to promote your business, share discounts, and create discussions among your community. Furthermore, WhatsApp is available in 180 countries and 60 languages — which means no one gets left behind in your marketing efforts.

7 powerful tips to build a winning WhatsApp marketing campaign

It takes a well-thought strategy to come up with effective marketing campaigns. Having a strategy for your marketing is also crucial in enabling you to clearly define your marketing goals, results, and the necessary steps towards achieving the goals.

Here are the 7 powerful tips that can enable you to create an effective WhatsApp marketing strategy for your business.

Define your goals

All successful businesses reach the top because of being goal oriented. As mentioned earlier, you need to set goals for your WhatsApp marketing campaign so you know what your KPIs are and how you can achieve them.

You can do the goal-setting in three steps:

Analyze the market: Do thorough research about your market, industry, and customers that you’re already in or planning to venture into.
Identify weaknesses: After analyzing your marketing, you’ll be able to identify the challenges and pain points that you’ll be able to solve.
Address the weaknesses: Using WhatsApp, address the gaps to reach a solution.

Identify your target audience

Before you start marketing your brand on WhatsApp, you have to know your target audience inside and out. Naturally, if you understand your customers well, you’ll be able to develop an effective and well-targeted strategy to address your customers’ goals and challenges.

It’s important to craft an ideal customer profile (ICP) — and you can do this by looking at past sales data and ad performances. You can also connect with your existing customers through interviews or surveys to gather as much information as possible.

Build a relevant contact list

To ensure your WhatsApp marketing campaigns are successful, you need a relevant contact list. What’s the point of doing such thorough research about your customers, only to have contacts that aren’t even interested in what you have to offer?

The best way to collect contact information would be through website widgets, online forms, or lead magnets.

Keep in mind that you want your customers to willingly give you their contact information because you need to have your customers’ consent before sending them any sort of WhatsApp message. If you fail to do this, there’s a high chance you’ll get blocked or flagged as spam before you can even execute your campaigns properly.

💡 Additional read: WhatsApp Broadcast Best Practices and FAQs

Craft eye-catching message content

WhatsApp has impressive open rates, but that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a positive yield. As with many marketing strategies, the content of your campaign is extremely important.

That said, avoid irrelevant content, beating around the bush, or messages that have no clear CTA.

Here are some tips to make your content more eye-catching:

Always send short and clear messages
Use multimedia files like pictures and videos
Use emojis sparingly
Avoid spammy content (e.g. too many exclamation points, overusing capitalization, etc)

Don't want to think of message content from scratch?

We got you! Check out our message template library for over 100+ templates you can just use for WhatsApp.

Use the product catalog

To allow sellers to showcase their products, WhatsApp launched the product catalog feature in 2019.

An example of a WhatsApp Business business catalog. Source: WhatsApp

The WhatsApp product catalog can hold up to 500 items so that customers can access them easily by browsing through and sharing links to some products. Also, customers can ask questions regarding the products.

If you are operating a small business with no website, the WhatsApp catalog feature will be your best option. Through it, you can share the links to the products added to the catalog to your contact lists so that customers can follow the link back.

Set up a feedback mechanism

You may be performing your marketing for different reasons, such as increasing sales, brand awareness, or customer support. Whatever the case may be, customer feedback is still the best mechanism for improvement.

You will be able to identify what’s missing or what’s not being done correctly and act appropriately. In general, customers’ feedback is essential because:

Customers can help you to rate your efforts
You’ll be able to identify customer complaints and act accordingly
It’s a good measurement of customer satisfaction
You can identify which areas you’re working best

You can use WhatsApp message templates to collect feedback to make your business decisions.

Acquire the WhatsApp Business API

Although you can use the WhatsApp Business app, it’s only ideal for businesses that don’t have a high volume of customers. That’s because there are certain limitations:

It only allows one agent per WhatsApp Business account. This can be a massive hindrance to larger businesses that want to onboard reps from multiple departments to handle customer queries (eg. marketing, sales, customer support).
It does not have advanced features. If you’re planning to do more with WhatsApp, then just using the WhatsApp Business app is not enough. It also does not integrate with other essential tools that can help automate processes.

Due to these limitations, we recommend that you use WhatsApp Business API over the WhatsApp Business app. Paying for WhatsApp API will bring more value to your business with message templates, chat labels, broadcast messaging features, and more.

Conclusion

Being the most popular messaging platform, WhatsApp can be resourceful in marketing your brand.

It is a golden opportunity for you to reinforce your products and build lasting relationships with your customers. Note that WhatsApp messages’ high open rate can help you reach a maximum number of customers and start your conversations.

All you need is to set up appropriate goals and everything needed to succeed, as discussed in this article.