How to Use Whatsapp for Ecommerce and Leverage 2 Billion+ User Base
Understanding the importance of conversational marketing is vital for businesses that want to go digital.
Particularly in the Indian market, with the government initiatives like ONDC to promote Ecommerce in India there is immense opportunity for SME’s to leverage technological developments and grow their business.
Whatsapp is the most effective tool when we talk about conversational marketing strategy. It’s the most preferred social media or channel for the users, which is easy to access. It allows the customers to interact with brands whenever they are in need.
Hence, customers can easily connect with brands instead of waiting for the mail response, dialing a number or filling any forms.
More importantly, Whatsapp has committed to protecting user privacy with end-to-end encryption. It might be one of the reasons why WhatsApp is certainly a safe choice for customers who want to build strong relationships with customers.
Whatsapp has over 2 billion+ active users globally. And they were sending 65 billion messages every day. Isn’t that something interesting? Moreover, in the last few years, Whatsapp has updated its features to provide various opportunities for marketers to reach their audience easily without much effort. Whatsapp can help brands scale their customers and improve satisfaction, relationship, and retention rate. That’s something hard to achieve in this competitive market.
Whatsapp released WhatsApp business API and cloud API, with much more exciting features that help eCommerce businesses easily carry out their daily tasks.
In other words, it acts like a chatbot for your customers where they can solve queries or update customers but with more capabilities.
Chatbots have completely revolutionized how companies interact with customers and resolve their queries. They provide faster, quick, accurate, and personalized replies.
Whatsapp chatbot can cut the operational cost of an eCommerce store by 30%. The best feature of chatbots is availability to customers 24/7.
Let’s know how WhatsApp chatbots and eCommerce business work together
Use Cases Of WhatsApp For Ecommerce Business
As WhatsApp chatbot has many use cases, customers go through many different stages throughout their entire customer journey when we focus particularly on the eCommerce business. It helps the brands acquire new customers, retain existing customers, and many more ways.
Let’s understand some of the use cases of WhatsApp chatbot for your eCommerce business.
1. Automate Lead Generation
Lead Generation is the primary part of any sales funnel. Using a WhatsApp chatbot, you can collect the various details of the customer to target and help them later on.
For instance, sending notifications for offers, discounts, and many more for the products they are interested in getting more details of the customers helps the customer agents to understand better and target more specifically, in turn, more sales for fewer efforts.
You can place the WhatsApp chatbot widget on your website, apps, or other channels. Redirecting your website visitors to WhatsApp will help you build strong relationships with customers and provide personalized, quick replies to their queries.
Once a customer sends you a message. You will automatically gain the basic details of the customer. For further information, you can use a WhatsApp chatbot for their location, email id, etc.;
Once a customer connects with you via text, you can continue that session for the next 24 hours. For further continuation of communication after 24 hours, you need to get consent from customers
Most mobile shopping searches end up with the cart instead of converting into sales. That might be due to various reasons, such as customers finding other products worthy of yours overpriced, technical issues, and customers being unable to access it properly.
So in all such cases, you need to give a little push from your end to help your customer make the wise decision, most probably in converting to sales. Whatsapp chatbot can help you in these situations by guiding the customers.
2. More Conversions
Once the customer replies, you can easily communicate with the customer within a 24-hour window, and WhatsApp doesn’t need to approve the content you send during this time frame. Here it would help if you took care of not spamming your account by sending irrelevant or frequent messages that are restricted by WhatsApp policies.
You can still promote your services as long as there is a smooth conversation flow. When you have long conversations and frequent conversations with customers, there are possibilities of clearing doubts of the customers and converting them into sales.
3. Product Recommendation
The WhatsApp chatbot interaction will help the brands understand the requirements and the type of product or services they are looking for.
You can easily share product recommendations to the customers to get maximum hits on the WhatsApp chatbot based on that details. You can share a range of products by sending them carousel messages.
4. Whatsapp Shopping
WhatsApp comes with an attractive feature that allows the users to search for products, choose from catalogs, place an order, check order status and make payments by staying on WhatsApp alone (if you integrate WhatsApp chatbot with a stripe or another payment gateway) without the need to visit the website or download any app.
WhatsApp is the most convenient way of communication between brands and customers. As customers are more active on WhatsApp, just like the message to their kith and kin, they can easily connect with brands and share their concerns and thoughts.
5. Customer Support
During the entire customer journey, the WhatsApp chatbot will be very helpful for customers to get the current status of their orders.
Generally, customers don’t feel it easy to mail or call the brands when they have any concerns; instead, they hop to other brands with similar services or products. WhatsApp chatbot eliminates this waiting time for getting a response from the brand.
6. Helps in Returns and Exchanges
Connecting and interacting with brands is so easy with WhatsApp chatbots. Customers can easily send videos or images of the products and share them with brands to return or exchange them. Here there is no need to wait for a reply from a mail.
Also, it’s easy for the brands to check and analyze the customer’s issue with the product and take quick action. Brands can easily streamline the process and permit their customers to schedule returns or exchanges directly over the chatbot.
7. Feedback and Surveys
WhatsApp chatbots provide a platform for customers to share their reviews, feedback, and other opinions they want to share with the brands.
Brands can easily gain the entire experience and idea of where they’re lagging. Getting this information is somewhat impossible when you go with the traditional way of taking feedback, such as filling out long forms.
8. Reminders and Notifications
When it comes to the e-commerce business, you have so many things to update with customers daily, such as payments, returns, order status, new arrivals, discounts, coupon codes, offers, and many more.
For instance, if a customer is looking for a product out of stock, brands can send notifications upon their arrival more chances of getting sales for that product.
Sharing it on WhatsApp is very easy for the brands to gain their attention. The same notifications will go unnoticed if you send them via emails or messages.
9. Product Information
Even though you have mentioned the product’s complete information, there were still certain details that we missed on the website. WhatsApp chatbot can help in this; they can answer all the details customers ask.
10. Shipping Information
Tracking the status of the product is something customers are eager about. You can easily send order confirmation, shipping, transit, delivery, and return status to customers using WhatsApp message templates, and it eases the customers’ anxiety.
11. Campaign Ads CTA
You can use a feature of click-to-Whatsapp for paid campaigns that assist in acquiring leads. Whenever users click on Facebook or Google ads, they are redirected to WhatsApp conversations instead of on the landing page.
These strategies will help the brands to improve their interaction with customers and improves their loyalty.
12. Incentivized Sales
You can easily engage your customers on the WhatsApp chatbot by incentivizing your sales. You can do that in two ways:
- Engage users on chatbot by providing exciting discounts.
- Redirect customers from a coupon pop-up or landing page to the WhatsApp chatbot that will ask prospects a few questions to activate the voucher in question.
With this, customers no need to go through a long procedure of email verification and can get instant notifications with a few message exchanges.
You can even track who used the voucher and didn’t and other details from the WhatsApp chatbot and send them accordingly
Conclusion
WhatsApp chatbot is a great place for shoppers to get complete assistance without the need to shift to the website. While browsing, you can search for products, select, make payments, and even answer queries on the same platform.
WhatsApp chatbot for the e-commerce industry is a great help for the customers and even brands to automate the customer service processes.
Want to start using WhatsApp chatbot for your eCommerce business? If you have any doubts, you can contact our Smatbot team. We are glad to assist you in all possible ways. Even you can try our WhatsApp chatbot for a 14-days free trial.