Businesses are always looking to open new channels for attracting customers and facilitating sales, and modern communication tools including mobile apps like WhatsApp represent a new frontier.

Why it’s so important to use WhatsApp for lead generation

With over a billion users on a daily level, WhatsApp is a massive communication platform that covers the entire planet and reaches many diverse target groups. As such, it represents one of the most logical environments for practicing conversational marketing and fertile grounds for monetising a wide range of products and services. Most importantly, it’s an app that allows very personal contact and requires the customer to make the first step and initiate the conversation. Because of this, WhatsApp marketing has the potential to spur potential clients into immediate action, which is particularly important for sales-oriented campaigns. With this in mind, businesses in various industries have strong reasons to add WhatsApp to their marketing mix and thus strengthen their sales network. WhatsApp can be used beyond just another customer service channel.

Creating a sales funnel in several simple steps

In order to funnel potential customers through WhatsApp towards your end goal (capture lead info, send quote, app store click, website visit, etc.), you need to implement several operations. Most importantly, you need to drive potential customers to your WhatsApp funnel by including a wa.me link in your promotional content on other platforms, you can also use Facebook advertising to redirect users directly to your WhatsApp bot. This will allow you to collect leads, but there is still a lot of work to be done before any tangible sales results can be accomplished. Personalisation can help in this regard, as different customers may have different questions they would like to have answered. It’s crucial to provide answers in a timely manner and in a way that suits the person and the occasion. Establishing a connection with a potential customer is a precondition for the sales funnel to work as planned, gently moving the conversation towards commercial aspects. Finally, it’s necessary to close the sale and convert leads into buyers. This may require a persistent and precisely targeted effort, with links to the right product sent at the right time, possibly with a special discount.

The role of chatbots in WhatsApp sales campaigns

In recent years, chatbots are becoming more widely accepted as useful tools for conversation marketing, including on mobile platforms like WhatsApp. They can perform a variety of functions from content distribution and feedback collection to lead evaluation and e-product delivery. If used the right way, they can significantly improve the consistency and continuity of online presence, while their cost is practically negligible compared to impact on sales. There are several successful examples of established companies using chatbots to streamline their WhatsApp marketing including corporate giants like KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Vodafone Germany.

WhatsApp chatbots can be programmed to reflect the uniqueness of your brand and support your offering, and this process is so simple that it doesn’t require any coding at all.  It’s possible to task bots with end-to-end conversations, or to use them in combination with human operators. Even if the first attempt at improving sales doesn’t yield the desired result, bots can be easily altered based on the collected data so their performance can be elevated.

Looking to create a WhatsApp bot and communication strategy for your business? Learn how we’ve helped businesses like yours scale and take control of their private messaging channels.