Often overlooked by large companies, WhatsApp Business is today one of the most interesting channels to explore from a strategic and marketing standpoint: more than 2 billion users worldwide and an extremely high response rate are certainly an excellent calling card for catching the attention of those brands looking for ways to increase their prospects and grow interaction with their audience.
The WhatsApp Business app offers a great many tools and features developed to integrate efficiently into the running of a business, from the simplest, within everyone’s reach (WhatsApp Business for small businesses) to the more complex ones, to be integrated with the existing technology stack of large companies.
In both cases, the goal of the app at business level is to speed up and streamline communication with customers and prospects throughout the entire purchase process, engaging them, accelerating sales and achieving better support results.
Let’s take a look together at an overview of the main features that can be implemented with WhatsApp Business:
- Catalogue: to present and share products and services on the business account, highlighting their most important features such as price, images or descriptions
- Direct links: speeding up company–prospect contact through free entry points such as auto-generated direct links, QR Codes, short links or action buttons
- Messaging tools: message templates (such as automatic welcome messages or away messages) to create predefined conversations and earn prospects’ trust, providing useful information in a single channel
- Labels: organising and filtering conversations with customers by category (e.g. “New customers” or “Pending orders”)
- Share important updates with customers, send order confirmations and shipping updates, share appointment availability and other reminders
- Make promotions more personal and the funnel 1-to-1, increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities, re-engaging after cart abandonment and/or maximising the ROI of marketing spend with highly relevant promotions
- Build a friction-free purchase journey making it easier for customers to browse products and place an order, directly from WhatsApp
- Optimise, through integration with the most common back-end systems such as CRM and marketing automation platforms, support costs and increase efficiency by means of automated conversation flows to mitigate high-volume incoming support requests
