As WhatsApp gains momentum and spreads rapidly across industries as one of the most promising marketing channels, it’s only obvious that the demand for expertise in setting up campaigns on this channel is on the rise.
In fact, many marketing agencies can be seen offering this much-needed expertise to help clients set up campaigns and improve marketing on WhatsApp.
But the fact that WhatsApp is still a fairly new channel remains. Many businesses and agencies are still not making the most of the WhatsApp Business API.
So in this post, we aim to outline strategies through which a WhatsApp marketing agency can leverage the platform effectively for their clients.
Top 4 ways to use WhatsApp for Marketing Agency
While there is no one said way to use WhatsApp and we do recommend experimenting with the platform’s capabilities based on the business goals you intend to achieve, here are some of our suggestions:
1. Acquisition
One of the very first things we recommend marketing agencies to set up for their clients, is an acquisition campaign. With Click to WhatsApp ads proven to deliver a much higher engagement and conversion rate, the strategy is bound to give a boost to your client’s customer acquisition rate.
We have also seen that setting up custom replies on WhatsApp for the traffic you bring in through CTWA ads, helps understand the end consumer needs, preferences and interests better. This can help your clients gather more information about their audience and qualify the leads they generate – which, in turn, helps you get better with ad targeting.
2. Conversion
By utilizing WhatsApp marketing tools agencies can assist clients in boosting conversion rates on their campaigns. This includes their WhatsApp Business profiles and the WhatsApp catalog they have set up on the platform. Agencies can focus on ensuring that the information provided to consumers on the profile and the catalog are up-to-date, and enable the interested buyer to make a purchase decision faster.
Similarly, with the WhatsApp Business API, marketing agencies can use solutions like Interakt to set up upsell and cross-sell automations based on purchase history. The contextual campaigns have proven to help businesses also boost repeat sales from customers.
Now as WhatsApp payment integrations with RazorPay and PayU gets possible it is easier than ever to convert leads into paying customers
3. Delighting
One of the primary methods employed by a WhatsApp marketing agency is assisting clients in delighting and satisfying their customer base. With WhatsApp Business API, you can enable your clients to do exactly the same, and provide support to their customers at scale.
From FAQs to addressing queries about shipping and delivery policies, and more, you can create a custom workflow to tackle incoming questions.
Marketing agencies can also collect feedback, reviews and ratings on the client brands from their customers with WhatsApp automated flows and further use it to better optimize the client’s marketing strategy to successfully delight and satisfy their customers.
In times when experiences matter more than the deals offered by brands, the shining reviews and NPS score can help set the brand apart.
4. Engagement
Customer engagement lies at the heart of building stronger relationships and being able to drive repeat businesses. With WhatsApp Business API, marketing agencies can help their clients segment their customers based on different parameters like last purchase, purchase spend, demographics and others to create targeted campaigns to keep them meaningfully engaged with the brand.
From setting up delay alerts for those reaching out for support, greeting messages for newly acquired customers and ongoing newsletters for segmented customer lists, solutions like Interakt can help marketing agencies run targeted engagement campaigns.
Benefits of using the WhatsApp Business API for your marketing agency clients
If you’re wondering why you should be adding WhatsApp to the marketing stack of your clients, let’s take a look at some of its benefits:
1. Higher Open Rates
Studies have found that a typical WhatsApp user accesses the app at least 27-28 times a day. This increases the chances of them seeing your message, which leads to higher open rates on campaigns too. We have found that WhatsApp campaigns typically see 98-99% open rates on most campaigns.
2. Higher Click through Rates
Owing to the active use of the platform, the delivery of the messages and the interactive formats you can leverage with the WhatsApp Business API, the campaigns also see higher click through rates as compared to other channels. We have found that a well-crafted WhatsApp message can help you clients see almost 47% click throughs to their promoted page.
3. Assist in Lead Qualification
The ability to automate conversations on WhatsApp also gives your marketing agency a way to help clients qualify the leads that come in. You can set up a series of questions to gauge consumer intent and interest in the product/ service offered by the client, giving them the ability to follow up with those who suit their ideal customer persona.
For example, Carigar Tools 200-300 leads on WhatsApp, and was able to qualify and confirm 20-50 orders a day with an automated workflow.
4. Enable Better Customer Support
WhatsApp can be used to help enable your clients to provide reliable 24×7 customer support with advanced automation to make it more effective. Automated WhatsApp support will also free up the client’s support team to deal with more issues that require manual intervention.
Additionally, if you use a WhatsApp Business API provider like Interakt, you can also benefit from the Shared Inbox. This inbox gives you a clear view of all the past, ongoing and incoming queries, helping your client understand their target customers better.
For example, Cell Bell uses automation to tackle the majority of their customer support queries. This has helped the brand focus on helping customers make informed purchase decisions and also improve the overall experience they offer.
5. Generate Reports
As a marketing agency, you have to create detailed reports on campaign performance for your clients. When you use a WhatsApp Business API solution provider, you get access to detailed analytics to measure open rate, click through rate, engagement rate, conversion rate, sales and revenue coming from the platform. This can also help your clients make informed decisions on their marketing budgets.
Tips for creating a successful WhatsApp Business strategy for your clients
There are many ways to approach a WhatsApp Business strategy. But here are some tips we recommend following:
1. Set clear business objectives and goals
Before you even begin setting up campaigns on WhatsApp, we recommend discussing your client’s goals in detail. This should include identifying what their biggest communication challenges are, what experience they want to deliver to their customers, what their key performance indicators would be, and how they add value to the overall business goal.
For example, improving turnaround time on lead nurturing so that the business can have a healthy sales pipeline.
2. Segment the WhatsApp list of your clients
Whether you are starting to build a WhatsApp list for your client or using a list that they already have, spend time segmenting their subscribers. These segments can be based on demographic data like gender, age, location, etc or their past purchases, purchase behavior, spend power and other parameters.
For example, some of the segments we recommend include – subscribers who have not made any purchase, first-time customers, repeat customers, loyal customers, churned customers. These may vary based on the industry your client is in.
3. Experiment with different campaign types
Make your clients see that it is not merely promotional campaigns that bring in revenue and contribute to business growth. To completely utilize WhatsApp for marketing agency, you need to run different types of campaigns for your clients so that it can contribute to driving all the key metrics.
For example, besides promotion one can use it for engagement, retention, cart recovery etc. By experimenting with different campaign types, you will know where the focus should be and plan accordingly.
4. Experiment with different WhatsApp templates
The kind of WhatsApp message template that you use can also impact how much your client will have to pay for marketing on WhatsApp. Therefore, it is important to educate your clients about the different kinds of WhatsApp templates and what they can be used for.
By helping them choose their WhatsApp message templates more carefully, you will be able to assist them in running their campaigns on WhatsApp in a cost-effective manner.
At the same time, using the WhatsApp templates created by Interakt can give you better speed at setting up campaigns. These are pre-approved templates that can be further customized based on campaign goals.
5. Focus on personalizing campaigns
Almost 70% of consumers expect businesses to now personalize their communication. In fact, personalized campaigns always see a higher engagement rate, leading to positive business outcomes.
As a marketing agency, encourage your clients to run hyper-personalized campaigns. While segmentation is a part of it, you can also personalize campaigns by first name, last name, last order and other parameters using a WhatsApp Business API solution provider like Interakt.
6. Leverage automation across the funnel
Automate as much and wherever possible. WhatsApp automation greatly reduces the weight on your client’s team and enables them to focus on the more pressing tasks rather than grinding on repetitive areas.
Automation can be applied in many aspects of the business. You can automate the process of lead generation and qualification based on customizable criteria, automatically send follow-up messages, offer automated customer support and a lot more.
By creating automated workflows, your marketing agency also gets an opportunity to optimize the allocated budget towards more experiments, campaign changes and other aspects that can improve the ROI you drive for the clients.
7. Monitor and Optimize
Many marketing campaigns fail simply because of the “set it and forget it” policy being adopted. The same holds true for WhatsApp as well despite the open and click through rates the channel delivers.
We recommend marketing agencies to keep a close eye on campaign performance to help their clients make informed decisions. This can include discussing what type of campaigns work the best for different customer segments, what promotions are the most fruitful and where the client should consider allocating more resources to follow-up with qualified leads and so on.
Does your marketing agency need to offer a WhatsApp business strategy?
The world is moving to conversational marketing with WhatsApp.
More and more consumers are inclined towards engaging with brands they can interact with. And WhatsApp offers the one channel that gives them a 1-on-1 platform to communicate with businesses.
As a marketing agency, it is important to not just catch up with trends, but also experiment with channels that can deliver favorable results for clients.
So if you ask us, the answer is YES.
And the good thing is that at Interakt, we are working with leading marketing agencies to help them set up WhatsApp campaigns for their clients.
In addition to helping your clients cut through the digital noise and succeed, we also partner with you to help you open an all new revenue channel for your marketing agency.
Want to know how?
