There are many ways for an ecommerce brand to have successful marketing campaigns, but looking for unique marketing approaches can help you stand out. One underutilized avenue for marketing that many ecommerce brands can use would be using WhatsApp for their marketing campaigns.
With this article, we’ll cover some of the strategies and approaches you can apply on WhatsApp for your marketing there.
What is an eCommerce Brand?
Before we go over what Whatsapp marketing strategies you might want to try, let’s first go over what ecommerce brands are.
An eCommerce brand is a business that operates primarily through the Internet and uses digital technology to facilitate transactions. It can be anything from a small online store to a large international corporation. An eCommerce brand must have an effective strategy to maximize its success and reach its goals.
The critical components of any successful eCommerce brand are strong branding, customer service, product selection, marketing strategies, and payment processing.
By understanding these core elements, you can create an effective strategy for your eCommerce business to help you stand out from the competition and drive more sales.
One of the reasons why owning an ecommerce brand has become more popular is because of how easy it is to set up. You don’t need a physical or brick-and-mortar shop to start one, and with the help of different marketing techniques, you can also compete with more prominent brands in your niche as an ecommerce business.
However, since it’s so easy to start, the drawback is that there is still a lot of competition in the arena. Therefore, it will be harder for you to get a strong foothold and take off when you’re a part of the ecommerce industry. Those challenges are always going to present when you undertake a business. Thus, it shouldn’t discourage you from starting an ecommerce brand.
Now that you know more about what ecommerce brands are and what they go through, let’s move on to the prime Whatsapp marketing strategies that you as an ecommerce brand might want to incorporate.
1. Broadcast Promotional Messages on WhatsApp
When you’re a business on WhatsApp, you can use the Broadcast List feature. The Broadcast List feature allows you to send your promotional messages to multiple contacts at once, and it then appears as a direct message from you to them.
The only requirement for you to be able to send that message to a contact in your WhatsApp is for them to have added you as a contact in their phone’s address book.
WhatsApp broadcast messages are a great place to share discounts, offers, new product launches, and other promotional content with customers. It is a cost-effective way of reaching out to potential customers and engaging with existing ones. Additionally, it allows ecommerce businesses to track the performance of their campaigns in real time.
Broadcasting promotional messages on WhatsApp can help ecommerce brands increase brand awareness, drive sales, and boost customer loyalty. Providing relevant content and offers can also help them build customer relationships.
By leveraging the power of WhatsApp, ecommerce businesses can reach out to a broader audience and generate more leads for their business. Some specific contexts where you can use this promotional broadcast tool in WhatsApp would be:
- announcing an upcoming sale or discount
- event promotions
- time-sensitive promotions
- new products and services
- important news and announcements
With the help of the promotional feature on WhatsApp, you can send a message directly to your customers, which is a powerful tool. Therefore, it’s best that you don’t abuse this too much. Otherwise, your customers might opt out of receiving them, so ensure your message is as valuable and relevant to them as possible.
2. Use Automation to Inform Customers of Stock Changes
If you’re going to involve your business in WhatsApp marketing often, investing in a WhatsApp automation tool is worthwhile. You can make the most out of this tool in many ways, and one of them is by informing your loyal customers of any stock changes in your products in real-time.
With a WhatsApp automation tool, businesses can easily and quickly send messages to their customers when their products are in or out of stock. This ability allows them to keep their customers up-to-date with the latest stock information without manually sending out messages each time there is a change.
This automation tool allows ecommerce brands to save time and resources while ensuring that their customers are always in the loop about product availability.
You can also use these automation tools for WhatsApp to let your customers know which products are close to running out of stock. That way, if you have any products that you want people to pay more attention to, you can use automation tools to reach out to them and entice them to shop while supplies last.
If you have your best-sellers, there is constant demand for this product. That also usually means that they sell out fast, especially if you are a small business with limited supplies most of the time. In that case, if you want to let the customers who couldn’t get the product from the first stock know that those products are back, the automation tools can help.
Your WhatsApp automation tool should automatically send reminders or updates to your contacts that your popular products are back in stock. That way, they can accurately and in real-time notify your customers so that they can buy them immediately.
3. A Private and Secure Platform
Another factor that can help make customers trust you more is showing you care about your customers’ privacy and security. When you use WhatsApp or have an integrated WhatsApp marketing campaign, it helps customers know that you won’t take advantage of being able to access their personal information when they transact with you.
The reason why they will trust you more is because WhatsApp also prioritizes the privacy of its users. Not only does it not share its users’ information with third parties, but they also encrypt the messages of its users for a total privacy and security experience.
Another reason WhatsApp is a great platform is that it gives its users complete control over who can message them. Getting messages from someone you don’t know or didn’t actively consent to receive notifications from is always an unpleasant experience. Therefore, WhatsApp’s ability to help users block numbers is a welcome feature.
You can also feel more assured for businesses who want to create an account on WhatsApp because WhatsApp screens the companies that make accounts on their app. It assures users that the business that claims they are whichever business is what they claim to be. Therefore, it is preventing scammers from victimizing their users.
You will then have an easier time advising users against scammers pretending to be a part of your business on WhatsApp.
4. Focus On Building Customer Relationships
Building customer relationships is essential these days and something you should take advantage of for your ecommerce brand.
It is essential to understand the needs and wants of your customers to provide them with a personalized experience. Building customer relationships can help businesses increase loyalty, improve customer satisfaction, and drive more sales.
By understanding their customers’ needs, businesses can create better products and services that meet them to address their needs and increase conversion rates.
Additionally, businesses can use customer relationships to gain insights into customer’s behavior, preferences, and buying habits. This data can help you improve marketing strategies and develop more effective campaigns that you tailor specifically for each segment of your customers.
WhatsApp marketing is a powerful tool for ecommerce brands to build strong customer relationships uniquely.
By leveraging the power of this popular messaging platform, brands can send personalized messages, offer exclusive deals, and provide timely customer service. WhatsApp helps brands create an engaging customer experience and build trust with their brands.
Additionally, WhatsApp marketing allows businesses to collect valuable data about their customers that is useful when it comes time to create better-targeted campaigns and improve customer loyalty.
As we mentioned, it’s also an excellent tool for customer service, another way to help you have more positive relationships with your customers. Since you’re using it for customer service purposes, it’s also a great way to turn what could’ve been a negative experience with your brand into a positive one for your customer.
It’s even more immediate and fast of a response than social media since it is a messaging app. Just make sure that you keep up with that responsiveness.
5. Keep Updating Your Catalog
If you’re going to bother creating a WhatsApp account that customers can reach out to, then make sure you have a way to show your product catalog there, too. Otherwise, it can be a missed out opportunity to market your products. Therefore, ensure you find a way to get your product catalogs to be easy to find on your WhatsApp account.
Some businesses often need to start an account on WhatsApp to use it as a marketing tool, but they need to remember it and update the information they put there.
You should be aware of how you use WhatsApp and other crucial business information on there so that a potential customer who wants to transact with you doesn’t get lost on the way to it.
Keep information about:
- Your website
- Your contact details
- Your product catalog
- Your product prices
… and so on, as accurately as possible and always up-to-date. Otherwise, it might deter your customers from transacting with you since they might think you’ve misled them, especially if you don’t have the correct prices for your product catalog. It’s a conversion you miss out on due to a simple mistake you can correct instantly.
6. Build Creative Engagement
Another way you can use WhatsApp is by coming up with ways to better engage with your customers. By leveraging the power of WhatsApp, ecommerce brands can create an effective customer engagement strategy that will help them build long-term relationships with their customers.
With its easy-to-use features, businesses can create personalized messages, send automated messages using templates, and even use WhatsApp chatbot to answer customer queries.
Moreover, it allows creativity with the content shared with customers by leveraging images, videos, gifs, and more.
You can even create fun contests and events that you host on the app only so that you can have giveaways. It can help keep your customers engaged, and hearing about it can also invite more customers to join you on your WhatsApp account if your event is successful.
The app itself makes it easier for you to organize these unique marketing campaigns. For example, you can start a marketing campaign that offers personalized product recommendations based on your customers’ answers when you ask them questions through WhatsApp.
Brainstorm some unique marketing ideas on WhatsApp that take advantage of the instantaneous replies you can schedule or program there. It will make for successful campaigns that will be memorable to your potential customers while still being able to sell your products as an ecommerce brand.
7. After-Sales Support
We’ve already mentioned multiple times how WhatsApp is an excellent way to offer customer service to your customers when they need them. With WhatsApp, you can respond faster to customers after they buy a product from you.
Your after-sales support can talk to your disgruntled customers before they get too frustrated with whatever issue they encounter.
It is vital to ensure that customers are satisfied with their purchase and can contact the company whenever they have any queries or complaints. It shows your customers that you aren’t just chasing after the sale and that you care about customers even after they’ve already purchased something from your brand.
If you want to reduce the negative reviews about your business, even though it’s a normal part of having an ecommerce brand, having responsive and good after-sales support is vital. It’s even more crucial if you’re selling niche products.
8. Maintain Healthy Customer Relations
You don’t want to overwhelm your customers with messages when you engage with them on WhatsApp. That’s why you want to message your customers as much as possible only when you know the information is vital to them. Otherwise, you are fostering unhealthy customer relations, which can lead to them disconnecting from you on WhatsApp altogether.
Again, it all comes down to the frequency of your messages and the relevance of your messages’ content.
Conclusion
These marketing strategies on WhatsApp can help your ecommerce brand have a more practical approach when you’re on this app. Not only is it a unique way to market, but it’s also a more direct way to approach your customers on WhatsApp. Therefore, if you are interested in breaking into this platform, use these approaches so that it’s easier to gain success from it.
