Learn about the WhatsApp marketing mistakes that can cost you sales and revenue.
50 million businesses across the globe use WhatsApp for marketing and sales.
WhatsApp is now a popular channel for marketing and sales, just as email and SMS are. eCommerce brands use it for promotions, marketing, sales, and customer support communications.
But although it holds a lot of potential, mistakes made on WhatsApp can cost businesses heavily.
After running thousands of WhatsApp campaigns, we’ve made this list of mistakes you should avoid at all costs.
Say, for example, you set up WhatsApp for your customer support. Customers start to reach out to you with queries about products, etc. But it soon turns into a one-sided conversation because you don’t respond to their messages.
Not only will you lose the money you spent on your WhatsApp setup, etc., but you might lose customers too.
Studies show that 52% of customers expect brands to respond to their queries within seven days. But in the world of WhatsApp, conversations happen in real-time, and customers have become increasingly impatient.
To avoid this mistake, you need to automate the process to ensure your customers don’t have to wait too long. Use a WhatsApp automation app to respond to their queries. It helps to provide them with quick support. It can add to their satisfaction level.
Automating your WhatsApp chats with an intuitive app can help you:
An average person receives more than 100 messages via different channels every day. In such a scenario, if you spam your customers on WhatsApp, it might backfire.
These are some things that could come across as spam:
According to psychological studies, spam can come across as pushy. It annoys people. And quite often, people either stop opening those messages or opt out of the list.
That is why you should ensure you don’t come across as spam. Here’s what you can do:
Sending promotional and marketing WhatsApp messages without customers’ consent is illegal. Consumers prefer to receive WhatsApp marketing messages only from brands they have opted-in.
And so, if you send messages without customers’ permission, you could get blocked, or put-off customers and they might block you.
To avoid the risk of getting blocked or reported, you should ensure you send WhatsApp messages only to customers who have opted in for your WhatsApp messages.
What do you do if your customers don’t respond to your WhatsApp messages? For example, they don’t open your message, don’t click, or don’t reply to your follow-ups
Do you continue sending them more messages? Because after a point, it’s futile and a waste of your time and money.
One of the best practices is to keep contact lists updated — remove wrong numbers, opted-out contacts, non-responsive numbers, etc.
By keeping your contact list updated, you can reduce marketing costs, avoid getting blocked by customers, and improve your campaign performance.
However, removing a contact from your list because they didn't respond to you isn’t the right solution. It’s possible that they’re busy or not interested in your messages during a particular period of time. And that they still want to be on your list.
An effective hack to tackle this issue is to have a WhatsApp marketing app that is smart enough to filter out non-responsive contacts. For example, when a customer doesn’t respond within a day, a week, a month, or to your last few campaigns, etc., the app will filter out those contacts.
80% of messages sent on WhatsApp are read within five minutes. Hence, untimely messages could hurt your campaigns.
Here’s why: say, for example, you send a promotional message at 11 am on a Monday. That’s the time when your customers are most probably going to be at work. So, they’re either going to miss reading your message, ignore it, or get annoyed with it.
Solution:
Say you have thousands or lakhs of customers on your WhatsApp list. And you’re running a promotional campaign for one product.
Every product in your store won’t cater to all your customers. It may be irrelevant to many. So, when you send a promotional message to all customers without giving it a thought, it could cause harm.
The solution: use a WhatsApp tool that helps you with segmentation. Segmentation is a critical step in marketing automation. If you want to approach your marketing plan with the right processes, segment your customers for WhatsApp marketing.
Here’s the truth – almost every other brand is now using WhatsApp for marketing and sales. And your customers are receiving messages from other brands too. In this overflow on WhatsApp, how are you going to make sure you stand out?
The answer: personalization.
90% of consumers find personalization appealing.
That said, today’s customers expect deeper levels of personalization — more than adding first names to your messages.
If you want to truly benefit from personalization, take it to the next level:
By personalizing WhatsApp messages, you can improve open and click-through rates. It also has long-term effects such as improved loyalty, better customer experience, word-of-mouth marketing, etc.
Here’s an example of a WhatsApp with links to personalized images and CTA relevant to the customer:
Are your WhatsApp marketing messages a mess? Are they text heavy and difficult to read? Are your messages bland and boring? Are they without emojis and visual breaks?
The above mistakes are a perfect recipe to make customers hate your marketing communication.
If you’re making any of these mistakes, your customers are most likely to:
A visually-appealing WhatsApp marketing message can bring you closer to your goal faster. Here’s how to get your messages right:
Learn more about formatting WhatsApp messages for marketing.
Reading is a complex activity for the human brain that involves more than just a few faculties. Hence, it is difficult to comprehend long texts.
Also, the human brain is wired to avoid doing difficult tasks. Hence, if we see a text heavy message on a small screen, we associate it as being difficult, and so we rather avoid it.
So, if you’re sending long paragraphs in your WhatsApp messages, you’re causing big damage to your campaigns.
Instead, here’s what you can do:
First impression is the last impression. So, what kind of impression are you leaving on your customers?
Say, you acquired a new customer. What is your immediate action? If you’re not making an effort to make your new customers feel comfortable, delighted, and valuable, consider them lost.
Skipping the welcome message might come across as a small mistake, but it’s one of the biggest.
But sending a welcome message manually every time you have a new customer is impossible. That’s why you need a WhatsApp welcome bot. The bot will do this job for you.
Moreover, it will send the welcome message in a timely manner soon after your new customer signs up to your list or makes a purchase on your site.
Are your WhatsApp marketing messages only text? Do you not include an image of the product when you send a back in stock message?
The human brain retains 65% of information when there’s a visual image paired with the information.
But, 23.7% of marketers say visual content is the biggest challenge for them. If you are amongst this number, it’s time to rectify this mistake in your WhatsApp strategy.
Do this:
Learn more about creating WhatsApp images that convert.
No matter how good you think your WhatsApp campaigns are, if you don’t monitor its performance, you will never know if it’s working for you or not.
That said, it’s also important to measure different metrics. Choose the metrics based on your campaign goals.
Once you measure these metrics, the next step is to optimize your campaigns. If you find that some messages aren’t driving results, tweak them. Try A/B testing to figure out what works. Use a WhatsApp marketing app that has ROI oriented analytics to help you out. If you don’t optimize your WhatsApp marketing campaigns, all your efforts and resources would go to waste.
Automation is key to ensure you don’t end up making WhatsApp marketing mistakes. Your WhatsApp automation bots will carry out all the repetitive and generic chat tasks for you.
The app can chat with multiple customers simultaneously. Respond to queries with relevant answers that help drive customers forward in their journey, and much more.
QuickReply.ai is the best WhatsApp Business API Solution Provider with 40+ chatbot workflows to cover all aspects of your eCommerce site.
Explore how you can put QuickReply.ai to work for your Shopify business. Click to Book a Free Demo!
Tool and strategies modern teams need to help their companies grow.
Leverage the untapped growth potential of WhatsApp marketing to acquire and retain customers.
The premise of WhatsApp is safe and private from unwanted access is one of its main advantages. Users can speak with one another in a secure environment without worrying that their data will be compromised
A type of messenger marketing called WhatsApp marketing is promoting a brand via WhatsApp. Brands can use this channel to reach a large audience, forge enduring connections with consumers, and boost sales. Like other forms of marketing. WhatsApp marketing is done like any other marketing.
A. Set objectives and KPIs.
B. Decide who your target market is.
C. Get the company app.
D. Make a brand persona for your target market.
E. Make a list of contacts.
F. Create your communication with your goal in mind.
