In a highly competitive market with an endless number of businesses joining the game, only brands that focus on superior customer engagement stand a chance. Customers can easily go to your competitors if you fail to engage them and keep their interest in your brand alive.
Timely customer engagement can do wonders for your business.
40% of customers agree that their future buying choices are influenced by positive customer experience and hence customer engagement becomes in promoting repeat purchases and boosting retention.
And with all its benefits and business features WhatsApp can be the ideal channel to achieve better customer engagement.
In this blog, we will talk about how to boost customer engagement on WhatsApp.
Tips to retain customers on WhatsApp
Focusing on better customer engagement on WhatsApp can have a seriously positive impact on customer retention. Here are a few tips for retaining customers through the platform:
Add a responsive chat widget to your website
WhatsApp’s convenience and accessibility are what make it a preferred channel for customers to communicate with businesses. And to leverage this you can simply add a responsive chat widget on your store website easily with Interakt.
Your store visitors will be instantly informed about your presence on WhatsApp, allowing them to reach out instantly and communicate with you on a more convenient platform. You can further customize your WhatsApp Chat widget to fit your brand identity and personality.
Send personalized automated messages
Personalization can take your customer engagement on WhatsApp to the next level. Beyond simple first-name addressing, you can take it up a notch by using customer data on preferences and behavior to send highly engaging personalized and automated messages and quick replies.
By leveraging the WhatsApp Business API, send out different types of automated messages such as welcome messages, personalized recommendations, reminders for abandoned carts, follow-ups on queries and purchases, or even feedback or review requests on products or support.
Use interactive WhatsApp messages
Another major strength of WhatsApp as a platform comes from the dynamic message types you can share. And WhatsApp interactive messages are one such kind, that allows for superior engagement on WhatsApp.
Using a solution like Interakt, set up interactive messages with prebuilt response buttons that customers can simply tap to answer. Besides this, you can share list messages and share catalogs that make browsing for products and finding their choices a breezy affair. You can also include upto 10 intriguing Call-to-Action buttons to engage customers and encourage desirable action.
Leverage bulk notifications
WhatsApp has one of the largest user bases on the planet in comparison to other popular messaging platforms. And hence reaching more audiences becomes easier through the channel.
Leverage bulk messaging campaigns to promote your products and services to a larger audience. With end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication, your campaigns are safe and secure too. Personalized bulk messaging, enabled by a solution like Interakt allows you to engage customers with your content at scale, be it for welcoming new customers, promoting sales and discounts, or for the essential feedback collection.
Automate customer service
Customer service is the cornerstone of any business and to keep customers satisfied and loyal, WhatsApp by nature is a great channel for this. By further automating this crucial aspect of your business on WhatsApp you have a better chance of retaining customers.
As a significant portion of customer queries can be routine and repetitive, you can simply set up automated replies on WhatsApp to lighten your support team’s workload. And when customers receive instant replies and resolutions, they are more likely to prefer the brand over others.
3 ways to use WhatsApp business for customer engagement
These are three major ways businesses can use WhatsApp Business for customer engagement:
Offer shopping assistance
Generally, customers tend to have a lot of apprehensions and doubts regarding purchases, and when finding the right product or navigating through the funnel becomes difficult, they are likely to bail. This is why offering shopping assistance to customers who need it and ensuring engagement through the course of their journey is a necessity.
CellBell, the ergonomic furniture brand, wanted to address the many numbers of pre-purchase queries they received from newer customers as these queries were generally difficult to choose from.
CellBell, partnered with Interakt to automate the whole process, which resulted in improved turnaround time and better conversion rates. With WhatsApp, CellBell was able to tackle more than 250 customer conversations a day and offer timely shopping assistance to its customers.
Drive repeat purchases
Rather than spending fortunes on customer acquisition, it is more practical to invest in retention, as repeat business is generally more profitable in the long run. Hence driving repeat purchases and ensuring engagement throughout the customer’s time with the brand, is a more ideal way to go.
House of Mangalam, a popular camphor-based product brand, recognizes this and sets a very good example of this use case.
This brand, with the help of Interakt, uses WhatsApp as a unified platform for not just engaging new leads but also for existing customers. With the bulk notification feature, they were able to engage their existing customers with effective promotional messages, offers, product launch announcements and more.
Pro-active communications beyond simple follow-ups
Post-sale support and query resolution aren’t about mere follow-ups. Brands have to proactively communicate and understand customer preferences and pain points to address them better.
Sassy Sauce Collective wanted to know their customers better, to ensure that their products align with the tastes and demands of their customers.
By segmenting customers better and using relevant tags, they were able to personalize the campaigns at a much-improved level, thus increasing engagement, open rates and conversion.
With automated updates and proactive shipping and delivery alerts, they were able to keep the customers up-to-date and onboard. The brand was even able to accommodate any last-minute changes customers had to make to their orders.
Conclusion
WhatsApp is a great platform whose communication capabilities can help businesses across industries to improve engagement. But for timely engagement, you need to take a few more steps and leverage automation and personalization.
In short, improved engagement via WhatsApp simply comes down to leveraging the WhatsApp Business API. And you can do this seamlessly with the help of a competent solution like Interakt.
