Are you struggling with dropping engagement rates? Did you know that the overall average open rate for email marketing campaigns is 39.7% with a click-through rate of only 1%?
If you are looking to reach a wider audience, achieve a higher open rate and boost business-user engagement, this article is for you.
WhatsApp marketing is increasingly becoming popular nowadays, offering a more direct and engaging alternative that outperforms traditional marketing methods like email marketing. Businesses of all sizes are shifting towards WhatsApp for its simplicity, vast reach and higher open rates. But what if you could take it a step further with WhatsApp Flows, the latest innovation from WhatsApp Business. This feature is designed to transform the way businesses interact with customers.
In this article, we will delve into the world of WhatsApp Flows, exploring its powerful benefits and a variety of practical use cases that can transform your business.
What is WhatsApp Flows?
WhatsApp Business platform introduced a new feature “WhatsApp Flows”. This feature is designed to help user interactions better by allowing businesses to design and deploy native and task-based workflows on WhatsApp quickly. This amazing feature aims to enhance interaction between users and businesses, reduce drop-offs and improve task completion.
Moreover, WhatsApp Flows allows businesses to offer interactive and engaging experiences within a chat. This feature transforms lengthy and boring conversations into fast and simple interactions.
Businesses can design multi-screen workflows, create straightforward input forms and build seamless data exchange endpoints for complex interactions. This whole approach ensures better engagement between customers and businesses.
The following sections will delve into the top benefits and use cases of WhatsApp Flows.
Top Benefits of WhatsApp Flows
- Dynamic Data Rendering
WhatsApp Flows also brings the benefit of dynamic data rendering. This allows businesses to customise the information they display to their customers based on their past actions, responses or preferences. This clearly means that businesses can adjust or personalise the content in real time to offer relevant information to customers.
Furthermore, WhatsApp Flows also solves the problem of lengthy text messages and back-and-forth interactions. It offers a structured way for businesses to collect user information.
Simply put, with this dynamic data rendering benefit, businesses are able to offer their customers exactly what they need more effectively. Moreover, by customising WhatsApp Flows, businesses can provide a highly engaging customer experience. It ultimately results in higher conversion and improved customer satisfaction rates.
- Functional with Chatbot
WhatsApp Flows work seamlessly with chatbots, enabling businesses to deploy chatbot-based interactive flows to automate tasks. These automated flows can handle various tasks such as answering FAQs, collecting customer details for specific use cases like feedback collection or appointment booking and guiding them through a buying process. Furthermore, these automated WhatsApp Flows reduce the burden on human agents by handling routine tasks, freeing them up for more complex tasks. This improves overall efficiency.
- WhatsApp Forms
WhatsApp Flows uses a form-like interface that makes it easy for customers to share required information and complete necessary tasks. This allows businesses to gather valuable customer data and preferences easily.
Through WhatsApp Flows, businesses can automate various tasks, including in-app shopping experiences, appointment scheduling and booking. Furthermore, during an appointment or restaurant table booking, customers can conveniently select their preferred date and time and enter necessary details directly within the chat. This interactive approach eliminates the need for back-and-forth phone calls or complicated scheduling processes.
Whenever a customer messages a brand to inquire about their new product or service, then a custom flow will walk this customer through a defining funnel which helps them find the ideal pick. WhatsApp Flows can also leverage customer preferences and purchase history to suggest relevant products or services. This helps brands provide their customers with a more personalised experience.
- Reduced Churn & Increased Cross-Selling
WhatsApp Flows also helps businesses reduce churn rates by providing end-to-end experiences. Besides this, cross-selling related products or services is much easier with WhatsApp Flows. This enhances customer satisfaction levels and boosts company revenue.
- High-quality Leads Generation
By offering personalised conversations, seamless sign-in processes, efficient registration processes and streamlined customer support service, WhatsApp Flows improves lead quality. Let’s understand with an example, you can design an automated flow to ask your customers about their budget and depending on their financial capacity, you can segment them into different groups. This makes sure that only the best and quality leads, sorted by the flow are given to a human agent. This way, resources are used efficiently and the focus is on the most promising prospects.
Now, after understanding the benefits of WhatsApp Flows, it is high time to move on to its use cases.
Use Cases of WhatsApp Flows
Here are the practical use cases of WhatsApp Flows for your business:
Ditch the Paperwork, Embrace the Future
Remember when finance companies had to handle endless loan applications and pyramids of paperwork? Now the time has changed because WhatsApp Flows are here to ease this work. With WhatsApp Flows, retail customers can easily scan QR codes placed at the bank or finance sector and simply fill in the form. After that leads can be instantly mapped to a salesperson through seamless API integration. This ensures prompt and personalised follow-up.
Moreover, businesses can design and program WhatsApp flows in such a way that it can reduce the time it takes for customers to reach them. This can make communication swift and efficient. Furthermore, by generating new inquiries effortlessly, Flows deliver a top-notch customer experience that truly sets businesses apart.
Recharge Promotions and Re-engagement
Another amazing use case of WhatsApp Flows is that businesses can recharge their promotions and re-engagement strategies. Businesses can employ WhatsApp Flows to share promotions, reconnect with customers and collect valuable feedback. Examples include happy hour reminders, flash sale promotions and feedback surveys.
Offer a Hassle-free Registration Process
Want to make your event successful? Then prioritize a seamless and efficient registration process. A hassle-free registration process is key and WhatsApp Flows can be a great implementation to assist users sign up faster.
Brands can promote their event directly on WhatsApp to encourage quick and easy sign-ups by employing WhatsApp Flows. For online events, Flows can even verify user information or deliver login details directly within the chat, boosting registration rates.
Seamless Appointment Scheduling
It is quite impossible to run a business without scheduling meetings. Especially, if your brand relies mainly on offering products or services to customers through appointments. And we all know that the appointment scheduling process can easily get complicated, especially if you are handling it manually. That’s exactly where WhatsApp Flows play a crucial role by streamlining the appointment scheduling process.
For example, WhatsApp Flows are a boon to the healthcare industry which consistently faces challenges in gathering patient data and scheduling appointments. Flows transform how patient details are collected and automate various tasks that traditionally require manual efforts. With WhatsApp Flows, patients can easily book and schedule appointments, complete health assesments and provide feedback all within a familiar chat interface. This approach makes the whole process more efficient and user-friendly for both healthcare providers and patients.
This use case is also very beneficial for other businesses including restaurants, beauty salons, fitness and event booking.
In-App Shopping Experiences
With the integration of Flows, shopping has gotten smarter. Just imagine browsing your favourite shopping store’s WhatsApp, where the WhatsApp Flows help you find your desired item or even better lets you discover hidden gems all within the chat interface. With Flows, brands can offer personalized shopping experiences. Based on past purchase history, action or preferences, brands can guide their customers through product selection, upselling and cross-selling. This personalised shopping experience not only engages customers but also boosts conversions.
In addition, if you belong to the travel industry, sending booking confirmations and timely reminders to your clients directly through WhatsApp is easy with Flows. This simplifies the complete travel procedure from pre- to post-journey, minimises errors and keeps all trip details at the customer’s fingertips. Moreover, you can also send reminders to clients to check visa requirements or share local airport details to ensure a stress-free and smooth journey.
Real World Examples
- Lenovo
Lenovo Indonesia is one of the real-world examples of integrating WhatsApp Flows into its existing WhatsApp Business channel. They are using Flows to enhance their customer support experience. Lenovo wanted to streamline its appointment booking process for product repairs. Therefore, they encourage customers to self-manage their appointments via WhatsApp Flows.
This step of integrating WhatsApp Flows into their workflows aimed to provide relief to customers by eliminating the need to wait in long lines at retail stores.
Now let’s have a look at the Lenovo results after employing Flows:
- 44.5% jump in customer engagement on WhatsApp.
- 8.2x higher conversion rate for appointment bookings through the WhatsApp Business platform compared to their website.
- Lenovo earned industry recognition including the prestigious “2023 Service Quality Index Diamond” Award.
After receiving these impressive results, Lenovo now plans to employ WhatsApp Flows for more countries. Along with this, they are also looking to explore other functionalities such as allowing customers to effortlessly register their accounts and make purchases directly through the WhatsApp platform.
- Sefamerve
Sefamerve is another brand using WhatsApp Flows. It is a women’s fashion brand based in Turkey. Sefamerve leveraging Flows to transform its customer service into a seamless shopping experience. With Flows, they automate various functionalities including account creation, product search and add-to-cart. You will be surprised after seeing the result:
- 158% boost in conversions.
- 2.6 times increase in revenue.
- 80000 products were displayed for purchase directly through WhatsApp within just 4 months.
With this strategic move, Sefamerve improved overall customer satisfaction by streamlining the entire shopping experience with the WhatsApp chat.
Bottom line
WhatsApp Flows is a game changer and a big update for business communication. It has the potential to manage complex tasks that are hard to handle with text. WhatsApp Flows streamline the process of scheduling appointments, sharing feedback or purchasing desired products or services all within the WhatsApp platform. This update greatly helps businesses connect with their potential customers on the platform where they are most active.
Build a Powerful WhatsApp Flows with SmatBot
Imagine interacting with customers 24/7 even during non-business hours, answering their queries, guiding them in buying and allowing them to book and schedule appointments. All these can be achieved with the most popular messaging app and a convenient chatbot-building platform like SmatBot.
SmatBot is a user-friendly, no-code chatbot-building platform that empowers businesses to automate and streamline workflows and boost engagement rates with automated WhatsApp Flows.
With our intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, even a non-techy can build and customize interactive chat flow. You can choose from different ready-made templates for common flow like FAQs. In addition, you can also design your own flow with a variety of blocks like menus, text, buttons, media elements etc.