Implement Your WhatsApp Marketing with These Tools

Almost 80 percent of Germans use WhatsApp, making it the most popular and widely used messaging channel in the country. No wonder more and more companies are jumping on board and expanding their newsletter marketing to WhatsApp. Reasons for doing so are numerous: for example, scatter losses are considered low and opening rates are particularly successful.

In this article, we bring you closer to the promising world of WhatsApp marketing. We show you what it's all about and what opportunities the messenger brings for your company and your target group. We also introduce you to the best tools that you can use to implement WhatsApp marketing directly.

What is WhatsApp marketing?

With WhatsApp marketing, you meet your customers where they spend a lot of time online. Because with more than 2 billion active users per month WhatsApp is not only one of the largest online communities in the entire social web, but is also more interactive than almost any other comparable social media platform. As the app is mainly used on smartphones, WhatsApp marketing is particularly useful for mobile target groups.

When it comes to content, many users expect more advice than played-out advertising from companies. Therefore, using WhatsApp marketing is particularly worthwhile for customer and advisory services as well as for personnel marketing. With these possibilities, WhatsApp offers you a new form of corporate communication.

The area around messenger communication, such as with WhatsApp, basically divides into these two areas:

• Push communication: Via this, you proactively send information to your users. This is particularly suitable for the areas of content marketing, CRM and advertising. One important prerequisite for this field of application is a prior GDPR-compliant opt-in in the Messenger Newsletter – similar to what you already know from email marketing.

• Pull communication: With this, you can use the dialog with your target group as another marketing instrument. Use this opportunity to position yourself as an expert or helper and thus offer added value for your customers. The most important prerequisite for pull communication is an external impulse. This means that only when your users report via the play-out of Instagram ads or audio spots can you start the dialog.

By the way, as a company, you use a different variant of WhatsApp than the one you know from your private communication. In the business and enterprise sector there are two official solutions from WhatsApp:

• WhatsApp Business App: This version is suitable for small businesses with up to approx. 5 employees. The app is free, but not completely harmless in terms of data protection, as the app can access your customers' phone book.
• WhatsApp Business API: This is a data protection-compliant software solution from official WhatsApp Business Solution providers / WhatsApp partners, which includes the mobile marketing software Sinch Engage.

These are the advantages and disadvantages of WhatsApp marketing

There is a wide range of possibilities for how you can use WhatsApp marketing. But is it worth it? One reason for using WhatsApp marketing is that you reach your target group via THE most used messenger platform. On the other hand, you should not lose sight of data protection. We have summarized for you exactly what the advantages and disadvantages of using WhatsApp marketing can be.

Advantages of WhatsApp marketing

• Direct customer contact: While a live chat is often a technical and complex hurdle, you can get your customers in customer service via WhatsApp faster. The direct communication is user-friendly, because your customers are familiar with the app due to their private communication behavior. This way, both sides, both your company and your customers, can communicate with each other without barriers.
• Higher opening rate: You may already know this from email marketing, where opening rates usually do not increase or newsletters quickly end up in the spam folder. Sending newsletters via WhatsApp can offer a more lucrative alternative, as both the opening rate and the reach is significantly higher than with other marketing platforms. The background here is also that a total of over 60 million Germans use the platform regularly. You therefore have a greater chance of reaching your target group even better than with traditional newsletters.
• Communication at eye level: In an increasingly digital world, personal contact should not be lost. You can reach your customers personally and individually via WhatsApp. If you use this opportunity and implement your marketing content accordingly, you have the chance of long-term customer loyalty.

Disadvantages of WhatsApp marketing

• No customer acquisition: The communication via WhatsApp goes solely from your customers. This means that customer acquisition for you via this channel is not always possible. However, you can reduce this disadvantage by combining various marketing channels: Once your users' interest is aroused, for example, over a social network, they can start the first communication with your WhatsApp service.
• Data protection: When you deal with WhatsApp marketing, you should also deal with data protection. If you opt for the app variant in WhatsApp marketing, WhatsApp accesses the data of your customers here. Tip:Tip:You can avoid this by using the official WhatsApp Business API, which is a software solution. handheld.What exactly this can be, we show you further down.

This is how you use WhatsApp marketing

If you are wondering what possibilities you can use in WhatsApp marketing, then this section is particularly interesting for you. We now show you exactly how you can implement WhatsApp marketing via a WhatsApp Business API:

1. Send important information via WhatsApp notification

Just about a year ago, WhatsApp expanded the types of messages that companies can send to their customers. Before that, you could still use the WhatsApp newsletter until the end of 2019, but it has not been allowed since then.

With the WhatsApp Business API, you can now again proactively share your offers, product recommendations, or other relevant news via WhatsApp message. A prerequisite for this is and remains the opt-in. 

2. WhatsApp offers and content marketing to retrieve

One of the principles in WhatsApp marketing is the restricted push communication of companies: You can only provide your customers with news and information if they actively request it. A helpful function is the Messenger Information Assistant – if you advertise promotions via advertising or content marketing and provide the appropriate codes, then users can retrieve the information in WhatsApp using these.

3. Messenger Newsletter via WhatsApp

Newsletter as push communication is still very popular with companies. WhatsApp also offers the possibility to implement these for your marketing. The advantage: You bring offers, deals, and news directly and without an algorithm to your customers.

4. Engagement campaigns and sweepstakes via WhatsApp

WhatsApp marketing is also suitable for sweepstake formats nowadays. Instead of setting up separate landing pages where your customers have to register, they can upload their input directly in WhatsApp. Many radio stations, for example, use this possibility and encourage their listeners to participate.

5. Click-to-Chat and Click-to-WhatsApp campaigns

With Click-to-WhatsApp advertising, you can add a "Send message" button in your ads on Facebook or Instagram, which opens a conversation in WhatsApp. This way, your customers can start a WhatsApp chat with your business with one click on the button in your ad.

This is useful, for example, when orders or appointments need to be coordinated, a consultation should be started directly, or you want to conduct simple surveys or lead generation via chatbot.

These tools support you in WhatsApp marketing

So you can implement the mentioned possibilities in WhatsApp marketing directly, you should use a suitable software solution that supports you in exactly this.

To show you what you can expect in a mobile marketing software, we will give you a deeper insight into the software solution Sinch Engage.

Sinch Engage

Sinch Engage is a Messenger Communication Platform that enables you to conduct professional customer communication via WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, Messenger from Facebook, Instagram, Direct Messaging, Telegram, Viber, Notify, and Webchat.

Sinch Engage is an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider and was one of the first players in the WhatsApp newsletter business (started 2015) to have implemented the possibilities in its Messenger Communications Platform so that companies can get started immediately.

With the solution from Sinch Engage already world-wide over 2,000 companies – among them approx a third of the DAX corporations – and over 20 million end users have used the advantages of WhatsApp and Co. as a communication medium between companies and customers.

The platform offers a ticket system developed specifically for messenger communication, which professionally and scalably enables 1:1 chats between companies with the necessary features. A chatbot builder is also integrated. With the software solution, you can implement marketing campaigns across all relevant messenger apps.

These are the advantages of Sinch Engage

• The first professional software solution for messenger communication with an intuitive user interface offers all relevant functions from target group selection, integration of multimedia content via statistics to marketing automation and chatbots.
• Unified Messenger Solution: Companies can also use other messengers for their marketing and manage them centrally (one mailbox).
• GDPR-compliant solution for using WhatsApp.

Other tools for your WhatsApp marketing

On OMR Reviews, you will find an overview of suitable tools and the appropriate reviews in the Category Mobile Marketing. These tools are u. a. with:

Superchat

Mateo

hello again

Contentsquare

Braze

Adjust

Firebase

ChatWerk

Chatarmin

Conclusion

WhatsApp marketing offers you and your company an uncomplicated and flexible possibility for direct communication with your customers. Especially small or medium-sized companies can use the solution for local customer communication or as a customer service.

A major advantage of the messenger platform WhatsApp for you is that most Germans are familiar with the solution and also use it in their private environment. Communication via the private channel thus enables a very close and personal relationship between the customer and the company. However, you should bear in mind that you cannot write directly to your customers, but rather animate them via other marketing channels to join your WhatsApp channel.

In the future, advertisements via status messages will also become more important, offering further possibilities for monetizing the messenger. It is therefore worthwhile to keep an eye on WhatsApp as a marketing channel for your company.