As marketing trends change and social media evolves, so do attention spans. In fact a recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. That’s shorter than some marine life.
This change in the way humans interact and consume products puts pressure on businesses to respond faster and satisfy the customer quicker. It’s the businesses that proactively adapt to these new demands are the businesses that survive.
Whatsapp Business now provides a widely used and understood way in which a business like yours can communicate efficiently and effectively with your customers. However, every business is unique, and so are their customers, so it’s worth finding the right incentive to adopt the new platform to ensure maximum return on investment.
Five reasons your business should use whatsapp for business are:
- Save time and money
- Increase conversion rate
- Improve customer service and loyalty
- Access to market size
- Access unique analytics and insights
It’s worth breaking those reasons down so you can fully understand why your business should invest time and money into Whatsapp Business.
- Save time and money
Not only is the platform readily available on a mobile device, but the integrated machine learning technology will save your replies and the kind of questions you use similar replies to. This gives you the opportunity to send a reply at the click of one button, cutting down admin time by up to 30% saving time and therefore money on admin work.
Not losing the human touch
The common flaw with AI chatbots online and the reason website bounce-rate can be stubbornly high is the lack of human voice and interaction.
To promise an immediate response with a human avatar on a website landing page insinuates a human response, which Whatsapp Business can deliver by memorising your speech style and sentence structure, your staff will come across as polite and charismatic as they would be over an SMS text conversation.
- Increase Conversion Rate
One of the greatest mistakes in social media marketing is not including a call-to-action which offers:
- A solution the customer is actively seeking
- A quick transition to a conversion page
Or even worse, simply not including a call-to-action within and at the end of posts can significantly impact sales. One study found that adding a call-to-action button to their articles increased conversion rate by 83%, and it boosted ecommerce conversions by 22%. The value cannot be understated.
This is one of the most valuable elements of Whatsapp Business, and the best news is that it applies to both service and ecommerce businesses. The platform allows you to integrate custom call-to-action buttons within the message itself. This easy call-to-action combined with fast responses offers a chemical combination to guarantee higher sales.
- Customer Service
In a world of uncertainty and lack of transparency, consumers are looking to find brands they can rely on and trust, this is why customer service is more important now than ever before. Similarly, increasing customer loyalty can literally keep your business alive during economic recessions with committed customers keeping their subscriptions or returning for another purchase even when times are tough.
Whatsapp Business offers three features which are guaranteed to improve customer service:
- Instant replies – from greetings to saved replies, Whatsapp Business offers quicker replies than email and phone calls.
- Human response – even when a staff member isn’t on the other end, your consumers will feel looked after.
- Total security – with end-to-end encryption, meaning you can share the most sensitive data like password resets and payment details.
- Market Size
One quick scroll through the sheer amount of phone numbers in your contacts which have Whatsapp message options should indicate exactly how popular Whatsapp is as a platform.
In fact the sheer size of the addressable market is phenomenal:
- 2 billion active users worldwide – that’s 6 times the population of the USA
- Ranked as the most used messaging app in the world
- Over 100 billion messages are sent over Whatsapp every single day
It’s not just the quantity of users on Whatsapp, but the active usership, something Whatsapp stands out for compared to its competitors. And that’s why it’s so useful for your business, having a direct communication channel which is checked and used by a fifth of the global population can be revolutionary for your marketing.
- Unique Analytics and Insights
Understanding your customer, how they think, communicate and interact is hugely valuable when it comes to designing and refining your communication strategy.
Gaining Data
Whatsapp Business combines the open and click rate statistics you would expect from an email marketing platform like Mailchimp with a much improved response and conversion rate.
The platform allows you to measure engagement through showing if your messages have been read, clicked or reported, and there are easy-to-use labels for managing your contacts in groups like ‘loyal customers’ for example.
Integrating Data
Equally, Whatsapp Business can integrate with a range of CRM (customer relationship platforms) which proves incredibly useful for call centres and sales teams. By integrating the data of your customers and leads, you can target and optimise your messaging to suit the target customer you’re looking to engage with.
In conclusion, the benefits of Whatsapp Business stretch far beyond simple communication. From statistics for your marketing team, to time saving time for your customer service team – Whatsapp Business is changing the communication landscape for the better.
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Written by Aled, on behalf of mobile market data providers MobileSquared. For more practical advice and personal development ideas, check out our insightful blog page.
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