Learn strategies to recontact, re-engage and convert users through WhatsApp business automatization. 25 % of the world's population communicates via WhatsApp. According to Statista, the platform has 2 billion active users on the application today.
With that in mind, understanding WhatsApp's purpose is to be a means of mass communication that allows its users to establish contact in different ways, such as through messages, voice calls, and video calls. WhatsApp has gained popularity among millions of people, especially for businesses in Latin America.
We have written an article to help businesses and startups understand WhatsApp automation better.
When is it best to improve customer relationships and automate processes? We often assume that the goal is to automate everything, but that's not necessarily true. Automations should be customized to fit the company's needs. What does that mean? Let's find out.
To better understand the value of customer success for startups, we consulted Truora, experts in simplifying user integrations across digital channels, on when and how to automate processes via WhatsApp.
According to Maria Lleras, general manager of WhatsApp engagement at Truora, implementing WhatsApp should be a gradual process and follow the three stages of the funnel: crawling, walking, and running. Let's check each phase closely.
Start crawling when you already have so many customer insights to set up some initial automation, start testing, and get some experience. When the initial automation is understood, position WhatsApp as a channel to be sure that your users will not get lost in the experiences launched.
The only goal is to get as many insights as you can from your users, and for that, you should have direct contact as a founder with the users that are trying to use it. Speak with 100 or 200 users about your product. Thus, you will be able to understand which insights are being repeated the most.
Before automating a bot with frequently asked questions, it is worth at least acting as bots in some cases to understand the patterns and certain experiences of users.
You can hire someone for the task or do it by yourself. If you hire someone else, align both with the same insights because you are the one who understands your business very well, and you say where you want it to go. It should be mandatory that all founders do support tasks, at least at the beginning. The beginning of automatization is about understanding patterns and acting yourself as a bot.
After you understand this, you can go to the walkthrough. It is an initial scale approach, where you can quickly test the channel and know if it's a channel that makes sense to its users.
Imagine you want to get quick insights through a survey. You launch a WhatsApp survey that ensures a much higher response rate than email. A three-question WhatsApp survey has up to 60% response rates if you set it upright. Email response rates are below 5%.
Through walking, you can set use cases that embark into frequently asked questions that let you understand in detail the potential questions your users might ask. If users always ask the same five questions, you have a pattern and remember: being an entrepreneur is all about identifying patterns.
If the same five questions appear on a regular basis, there might be something going on with your product, and you have to make the necessary changes to the product.
When you have identified a series of leads that entered the funnel, users leaving their data but not converting into users or customers, you can do recontact campaigns to understand how many leads have been identified without turning into users or customers. You can set up cross-sell campaigns very quickly. This is what helps you to start understanding how WhatsApp automation works.
If users drop out of the funnel, you can follow up to understand their needs and try to convert them. In terms of WhatsApp automatization, this means recontacting and converting them into customers.
To optimize its effectiveness, WhatsApp should be integrated into an omnichannel strategy, including an application, web app, and physical stores.
There should be a total orchestration of all channels, and WhatsApp should be presented as a channel that gives customers more convenience, but it's also not the only channel where things should be happening.
For example, suppose you are a fintech user in Latin America, and you need to check how much money you owe on the credit you have. In that case, you should be able to get on WhatsApp as a channel, and with your ID card, they give you back the information of how much money you owe or if you made a purchase.
WhatsApp should be integrated as one more channel of your strategy as part of your product. There are some successful use cases, such as a fintech enabling accessible credits to farmers who didn't even download its application. Through WhatsApp automation with Truora, the startup could set up a whole process to qualify the lead, see how much money was to lend, conduct an identity verification process, and give him/her an amount.
WhatsApp is clearly connected to all the fintech services behind, validating with the client's conditions how much they were willing to lend to them.
The decision to implement WhatsApp as a means of communication should be based on the objectives of the company and the way in which you want to reach customers. Since WhatsApp is mainly implemented in businesses that have a constant dialogue with customers or offer products or services in a B2C way.
Startups implementing WhatsApp for businesses benefit by covering a larger market since many people know the platform and like to receive this type of attention.
It is also convenient since, with WhatsApp, you can provide information, send catalogs, talk about the product, or meet customer needs instantly and directly since customer service is provided in a personalized way according to their needs, concerns, or questions.
Finally, companies can also count on their metrics, which are given through the application based on the performance of the messages. Hence, it is much safer, and there is certainty about what works for customers, especially in Latin America.
Are you ready to automate your startup? If so, to what extent? If you have any doubts, check the full webinar "When and how to automate your business through WhatsApp."
