There are more than 2 billion active WhatsApp users worldwide.
85% of consumer time is spent on five top apps, including WhatsApp!
The point is - consumers are already comfortable using WhatsApp. This makes WhatsApp broadcast messaging one of the most effective ways to reach the maximum number of customers for promotions.
Be it ongoing or upcoming sales, deals, discounts, or even announcements like a change in policies – brands can use WhatsApp broadcast for business to share all kinds of communication.
However, WhatsApp broadcast marketing campaigns work best only when you strategically combine all the features of the app’s API with marketing psychology.
Does this sound like rocket science?
If yes, don’t worry. You’re not alone. And we’ve found ways to help you out.
To make it easy for you to get your marketing campaigns started, here are some WhatsApp broadcast best practices.
While there is no one-strategy-fits-all approach to running WhatsApp broadcast marketing campaigns, here are some best practices you should be following:
The key to getting your promotional messages across on WhatsApp is clarity. If your messages aren’t clear, they’ll confuse your customers. And what do we do when we don’t understand something? We simply close the message and ignore it.
That’s why, to get your message across, you need to bring in clarity. Now, there are two aspects of clarity that you need to take care of:
- Clarity of message: Your customers might be receiving hundreds of marketing messages from different brands every day. To make sure your message cuts through the noise and makes an impact on your customer, it’s important to write your message clearly and simply.
- Clarity of purpose: This is directly related to your call to action (CTA). What is the action that you want your customers to take? For example, do you want them to check out your new collection or do you want them to participate in a contest? The idea is to focus on one objective. And that will help you draft your WhatsApp message with focus.
Here’s an example of a WhatsApp broadcast message:
Researchers have concluded that long sentences and big paragraphs aren’t welcoming to our eyes. Moreover, customers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing and promotional messages from many brands. They don’t have the time to read text-heavy messages.
In fact, it is proven that most people just scan whatever they’re reading – may it be a website, a newspaper, a newsletter or a promotional email.
Hence, when your WhatsApp message copy is broken into bite-sized pieces, it becomes easy to digest it. As author and writing expert Dianna Booher says, “Writing long sentences is like adding water to tea; the more words, the weaker the message.”
Here are a few tips to write short copy for your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns:
- Use short words
- Keep sentences short
- Use dashes to break long sentences
- Use bullet points
- Space out sentences and paragraphs
Most people access WhatsApp on their phones, which means on small screens. This makes it extremely important to make your messages visually appealing.
Apart from the way it looks, you also want to make sure that the most important words are highlighted, legible and easily noticeable.
In case, you have to share a long message, make sure it is well formatted. Here are some things to keep in mind for good formatting:
- Use short sentences
- Make paragraphs short
- Use emojis to break the text
- Space out sentences and paragraphs
- Use images if you can and need to
- Place your CTA button in the right spot
- Bold the most important words
- Use italics to emphasize important words
51% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands if they use emojis in their messaging. There’s a scientific reason for that: emojis are processed as non-verbal information and interpreted as emotions.
Moreover, the human brain processes images in less than 13 milliseconds! This means you can build connections faster when you have emojis in your messages.
For example, you can introduce feelings of joy, happiness, surprise, excitement and an overall positive and engaging interaction by choosing the right emojis.
WhatsApp is a chat channel. Most people use it to stay in touch with their friends and family and are used to casual conversations of which, emojis are a key part. As a brand, you can extend the same kind of vibe and feeling simply by using emojis.
Learn how to use emojis in WhatsApp marketing here.
If you thought you can only share plain text in WhatsApp messages, you’re wrong! There’s a lot you can do - bold, italicize, strikethrough, etc.
These formatting features can help make your text more legible, clear and attractive. Formatting text can help you emphasize information and important parts of the message.
For more tips on formatting text in WhatsApp messages, refer to this easy guide.
And now, some use cases for text formatting:
- For a discount, strikethrough the original price and show the revised price next to it
- To highlight important words such as ‘Discount’, ‘Sale’, or sale dates, use bold and italics
And here’s how it looks:
Unlike SMS, in WhatsApp, you can easily include images, GIFs and videos in your messages. The human brain has the ability to remember 65% of visual content, compared to just 10% of audio content.
And that makes it all the more important for you to have images or videos in your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns.
Today, with simple, easy-to-use, and free tools available online, marketers can create excellent visual media such as images, GIFs and videos for their marketing campaigns.
For example, say you’re running a back-in-stock campaign on WhatsApp. You can include a product image, video, or even a customer review in a video form as social proof in your message.
Need inspiration? Here’s an example:
We already know the importance of having short, crisp messages. But, as a brand, you also want to share as much information as possible with your customers.
One way to do so is by adding links in your messages. For example, say you want to share product recommendations along with your ‘Thank you’ message.
Instead of cluttering your message or seeming too pushy, you could add a link saying, ‘Based on your recent purchase, we’ve curated a special selection for you. Check it out here: link.’
There are many benefits of adding links:
- It can help you break the text visually
- Links help engage customers more as they offer something more to explore
Pro tip: Shorten your link with the help of a link shortener and also add tracking codes so you can measure the success of your messages.
Most times, the CTA button can make or break your conversions. Not only do you need to make CTAs look good and read well, but you also need to place them in the right spot.
So, instead of simply sending links to your website or product pages, you should make your CTA buttons interactive and intuitive.
Some CTA rules are simple:
- The copy should be smart, short and drive people to click
- The design should draw attention and invite people to click
- The shape, color, size and other visual elements should be thought-through
Here are some examples of CTA buttons for your WhatsApp broadcasts:
But, to be able to add these intuitive CTA buttons, you need to use a WhatsApp marketing solution that uses the official WhatsApp business API. One such tool, preferred by many brands is QuickReply.ai.
Today, most people prefer to use chat platforms to have conversations – may it be personal or professional. WhatsApp has made it much easier for customers and brands to stay in touch with each other.
According to Harvard Business Review, brands can scale relevant and personal interactions with customers with a combination of conversational messaging, rich visual interfaces and AI.
Considering the nature of this platform, conversational messaging is most suitable for it. But why does conversational messaging work?
- It builds relationships and creates authentic experiences with customers
- Most people use WhatsApp to have conversations and prefer a conversational approach
- Conversational messages help you engage with and understand customers
- It helps you gain new valuable insights about your customers
Your WhatsApp broadcast messaging campaign isn’t a one-and-done solution, it’s a process. To make your broadcast message campaigns successful, you’ll have to track and measure its performance.
But how do you measure the performance? For that you’ll have to set goals. Because unless you know what you want out of a campaign, you won’t be able to assess how far you’ve reached.
For example, if your goal from a campaign is to drive sales for your online store, you’ll need to measure how many clicks, leads, queries, and sales you generated through your WhatsApp broadcast campaign.
Next, you’ll have to optimize your campaign to boost results.
For example, if X number of people clicked and only few converted, you’ll have to try out new ways to increase conversions. And you don’t have to do this manually. You can use a smart tool like QuickReply.ai to help you with these data-related tasks.
When something is less, people want it more. When you have fewer products, your customers will want it more. Similarly, when you give a discount for a short period, customers will not want to miss out on it.
Understanding consumer psychology is critical to marketing. And you can apply it to your WhatsApp broadcast messaging as well. Here are some tactics to psychologically nudge your customers to react to your messages:
- Create FOMO: Another way to trigger reactions from your customers is to make them feel the fear of missing out (FOMO). You can do so by showing countdown clocks, telling them about the time-sensitivity, etc.
- Show scarcity: Combine scarcity tactics in your messages. For example, tell customers that something is selling out fast or that only a few pieces are left. When you include specific numbers, for example, ‘Only 3 left’, it has a greater effect on customers’ psychology.
- Show off social proof: Another psychological tactic is to show what other customers are doing, what they bought and how they’re enjoying using those products. When customers see that other customers have bought something, it has an informational social influence on them and they end up following those actions.
These tactics can help you get reactions out of your customers almost instantly. What is more, with customers being comfortable doing all tasks such as shopping, browsing products, etc., on their smartphones, these psychological tactics can deliver the real benefits of WhatsApp broadcast.
Many brands might be using WhatsApp broadcast for business. So, how are you going to make sure your customers see value in your brand?
The answer is simple: be yourself and keep the customer at the heart of your campaigns.
Here are WhatsApp broadcast best practices for customer experience:
- Send quick replies to customers: WhatsApp has an instantaneous nature and works well when you send replies quickly
- Use labels and segmentation: This way you can send personalized replies to make conversations relevant and contextual
- Set up automated away messages: By doing so, you can let customers know that you’re away and will respond when you are back
- Have adequate resources: Make sure you have enough resources to handle customer responses and queries on WhatsApp
Shareability is a key factor in today’s world. People like to share interesting messages, links, promotional messages, announcements, etc. over WhatsApp.
It’s no secret that sharable content can help you attract more customers through your existing customers. Given how noisy the marketing and promotions space is, it’s extremely difficult to create shareable content.
But depending on your campaigns, you can make your messages shareable. Here are a few ways to do so:
- Create attractive and catchy WhatsApp messages
- Offer deals and discounts
- Create unique and exciting marketing campaigns
- Run contests
Learn more about running WhatsApp broadcast messages.
WhatsApp has an instantaneous nature. And marketing on WhatsApp is all about timing!
From the time when you send a message to how quickly you respond to a customer’s query – timing plays an important role in the success of your campaign.
For example, if you’re running a campaign to get sign-ups and registrations for an event, by sending instant responses, you can engage and nudge more customers to sign up.
There are many benefits of real-time customer engagement:
- Helps you generate higher sales, sign-up, or any other campaign goals
- It enhances your credibility – your customer perceive your brand as communicative, responsive and easily accessible
- You can boost customer satisfaction by responding to them in a timely manner
- It helps humanize your brand – customers want to talk to humans not bots
- It offers you a competitive edge – not all brands have the resources or the inclination to engage with their customers in a truly real manner
If you’ve decided to get started with your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns, that’s great! But to be able to run a successful WhatsApp campaign, you will need an efficient WhatsApp marketing tool by your side.
A tool that uses the official WhatsApp business APIs is a must. QuickReply.ai is one such tool you can use. It brings together powerful marketing automation to help you successfully run your WhatsApp broadcast campaigns.
Install the QuickReply.ai WhatsApp marketing app today.
If you’re new to WhatsApp marketing and want to learn more, book a demo with us.
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Requirements for broadcast messages: Verify that every contact on the broadcast list has your phone number registered in their address book. You are allowed to build an unlimited number of broadcast lists. In each Broadcast list, only 256 contacts can be chosen.
With WhatsApp broadcast, you may instantly communicate with everyone. This functionality greatly simplifies and streamlines the process of sending bulk messages to a large contact list. You can send anything, including newsletter-style communications or promotional messages to advertise deals and discounts.
Private communication is used. The message's recipients are unaware that it was sent via a broadcast. Responses appear in the contact's regular WhatsApp chat. To receive the message, the recipient must have stored your number as a contact on their phone.
