Sassy Sauce Collective is a food brand that is bringing its own touch to the traditional, must-have across most cuisines – sauces. Their goal is to bring authentic recipes to the forefront to make day-to-day meals more exotic!
The challenge of keeping customers engaged
Sassy Sauce Collective started their online store soon after getting a lot of positive feedback from their friends and family on the recipes. Their goal was to make it simpler for people to buy their sauces, but at the same time also communicate with them to get to know the ingredients better.
At the start of it all, the brand chose to use emails for customer communication. From order confirmation to tracking, and then collecting feedback, they used emails across the buyer’s journey.
But as the store began to see an influx of visitors and business began to scale, the brand started to find it challenging to keep its customers engaged.
They noticed most of their email campaigns were leading to a mere 2-5% open rate, indicating that messages were going unnoticed.
That’s when the brand realized there was a need to bring in a communication channel that their customers actively used, on a day-to-day basis. After doing some research, the brand found that a majority of its target audience and customers make use of WhatsApp.
On exploring the capabilities of the WhatsApp Business API, they started looking for solutions that could help them implement a WhatsApp marketing strategy to keep customers engaged. That’s when they found Interakt on the Shopify App Store.
Using the WhatsApp Business API with Interakt
Getting started with using WhatsApp for customer communication, requires access to the WhatsApp Business API and integrating it with the backend of the storefront. The brand required some level of assistance and Interakt took on the role of helping them throughout the process.
“If you look around, everyone is on WhatsApp and is making use of the app every day. It was only obvious for us to put that channel to work to reach our customers. And the Interakt team helped us get all the basics in place. They were very helpful in the setup of the WhatsApp Business API and connecting it to our Shopify store.”
As the brand started to explore various use cases of WhatsApp Business API with Interakt, they discovered an opportunity to make the communication between them and the end customer much simpler.
The impact of using WhatsApp for customer communication
From using WhatsApp to run broadcast campaigns to promote their ongoing deals, discounts, offers, and new launches, to sending order confirmation, collecting feedback, and sharing product how-tos, the brand started to actively make use of the messaging platform.
The added capability to add tags to segment customers also helped the brand run extremely targeted and personalized WhatsApp marketing campaigns, leading to higher open rates, engagement, and even conversions.
“As of today, it has become so much simpler for us to communicate with our customers. But more importantly, we have become a lot more reachable too and that has helped us really understand our customer expectations to serve them better.
It has become so easy to talk to them that we can take detailed feedback on purchases, and even recommend products to them during the conversations. In fact, we’re seeing that a lot of customers actually prefer using WhatsApp to reach out to us.”
Using WhatsApp has also helped the brand improve the customer experience offered post-purchase. With automated alerts for order confirmation and shipping status, they’re able to not just keep customers up-to-date, but also give them the option to easily modify their purchases.
“We had an instance wherein a customer received an order confirmation message on WhatsApp. Owing to the high open rates, the message was instantly received and read, and the customer realized having placed a wrong order.
They were able to reach out to us instantly by replying to the message, and we were able to make the order change even before it got shipped out. The entire process was quick and seamless, and guaranteed that the customer got the products they wanted.”
The brand has also seen its CLTV triple from the time it started to use WhatsApp for customer communication.
They are also exploring new features from Interakt that include sending out product catalogs to customers on WhatsApp and also automating cart links to make the purchase experience much simpler.
“As an online business, it is important for a brand to proactively communicate with its customers. From sending reminders, tips, taking feedback to running promotions, there’s a lot that needs to be done to stay on top of a consumer’s mind.
WhatsApp is now that channel for us that helps us do it all. It’s widely used (in India especially) and hence makes for a more intuitive channel to strike conversations on. Brands cannot discount the importance of those conversations anymore!”
Ready to see how using the WhatsApp Business API with Interakt can help improve customer experience?
