Top 5 Things a Brand Must do to Take their WhatsApp Marketing to the Next Level

Meet Prakhar – one of the founding members at LimeChat.

He has been deeply involved with day-to-day activities with LimeChat’s D2C clients right from the time WhatsApp started becoming a strong medium for consultative buying and retention campaigns.

Prakhar truly believes that consultative and personalised Ecommerce is the future and has seen brands deliver exactly that through WhatsApp.

Be like Prakhar. 

However, from his experience, he’s seen D2C brands repeat the same mistakes while planning and executing. 

He really wishes the marketing team would keep certain things in mind to ensure the brand can improve retention and offer great support while ensuring they don’t spam their audience. 

Take a look at them below.

Treat Whatsapp like your Homepage

Prakhar can only wish that he had a dollar for every time a brand wanted to hastily start with “abandoned cart” messaging before they even finished building their profile on WhatsApp. (Patience is a virtue!)

Here’s the thing, WA will be as important as your website not too long from now, the same way Instagram has become the new homepage. 

And nobody who wants to leave a strong brand impression ever rolls out a half-baked website, so why do it with your WhatsApp?

So make sure you fill the “About” section with the required details of the brand and use the “status” field to fill in key information like your business hours and average response time.

Whatsapp Marketing is more than just Cart Abandonment Alerts

Building on the point Prakhar highlighted in the last section, getting the right results from WhatsApp is a little more tricky than just enabling the abandoned cart recovery alerts.

Here’s the thing: WhatsApp has the power to more than 2x your retention if you play your cards right.

It comes down to three things-

Step 1- Understand the Tier System

If you’ve just gotten your hands on a verified WhatsApp business account, you’ll start with a daily outbound limit of 1000. Prakhar highly recommends starting with safe campaigns that will not get reported easily and gets you tier upgrades quickly. 

Safe campaigns include Confirmations, Shipment Alerts, and Out for Delivery notifications. These campaigns add value to the customers’ experience and require zero effort.

Step 2- Build your Quality Rating

Do not try to eliminate the possibility of you getting marked as spam or reported. Embrace the process; the key is to understand your customers and keep the negative reports minimal. 

The general rule of thumb, actively monitor your quality rating and stop all promotional campaigns if it touches yellow.

You can continue with experiential campaigns, like the safe ones.

Step 3: Make it THE Channel 

Make Whatsapp the main medium through which your brand reacts most frequently (more on this below).

Love and WhatsApp should both be Two Way Streets 

WhatsApp can be supremely powerful for you. 

Prakhar wishes brands don’t just use it for one-way campaigns- where your customers don’t get to respond. 

Think about it, when was the last time a customer responded to your email campaigns? 

But, in general, on WhatsApp, brands see a 30% response rate on their campaigns!

Also, these two-way interactions probably have THE most value for you as a brand owner. 

As you scale, you need a smart platform to understand and respond to these interactions and give you insights into what your customers are actually saying 

Key Takeaway

Let people know you’re open to interacting on WhatsApp. Have the confidence to entertain queries and interactions on WhatsApp and put a WA icon on the website. 

Prakhar and his team at LimeChat can help you if you fear that at your scale, incoming queries will break your team.

This will drive two key results for your brand-

• More 2-way interactions will result in better quality ratings on WhatsApp
• You get deep, granular insights into your audience’s needs and preferences while shopping online
• Step 2: Take things to the next level through 2-way WhatsApp campaigns

How to Run 2-way Campaigns for 2x Results

1. Brands that run campaigns with the customer in mind more than the actual promotion succeed (Prakhar thinks this is obvious, but many brands surprisingly don’t agree).
2. WhatsApp has the power to make your campaigns interactive. In a way, every campaign can be a campaign in which the customer decides the next step. 
3. Send a promotional campaign to your customers with certain quick replies, where you can configure AI-powered responses to each of those quick replies.
4. The same 2-way campaigns unlock for you 2-step campaigns like COD to Prepaid + COD Verification or NDR Automation + Product review campaign, basically, any campaigns where you want to take your customers through a 2-step funnel.

Don’t Forget to Leverage the New Features WhatsApp has to Offer

This year, key updates have happened in WhatsApp Marketing, like –

• pricing change that rewards conversations more than standalone messages
• rolling out of key product features like WhatsApp-based product catalogue

This shows Prakhar that the direction that WhatsApp wants brands and businesses to take is pretty straightforward, and that direction is personalised, conversational commerce.

Enabling your catalogue helps a customer buy from you on WhatsApp directly, and Prakhar thinks that that is how 50% of Ecommerce will start looking really soon.

He’s wondering, as we end this post, are you planning to be one of them or place all your hopes on your next SMS/emailer? 

If you want to get your brand to drive X3 more sales through Whatsapp, Prakhar and his team are waiting for your call!