Using WhatsApp for Sales - Everything you need to know!

Can WhatsApp really be used to drive sales? Or is it just for customer service and notifications? The answer - yep, you can use WhatsApp for sales, it’s a particularly powerful tool for that. Let’s see why… and how.

Why use WhatsApp to drive sales for your business?

It’s pretty simple - WhatsApp allows you to engage in conversational selling far more effectively than other messaging channels can. People are just far more likely to open WhatsApp messages than they are to open emails. Around 98% of WhatApp messages are opened, and 90% of those messages are opened as soon as they’re received. It also makes it possible for you to speed sales conversations up instead of having them stretch on for days on end as an email thread (instant messaging for the win!).

You can use WhatsApp conversations to generate leads and collect lead information faster than ever before and even makes it possible for you to build and nurture better relationships with your customers than you could over email (emails just tend to be too dry and formal).

Studies have shown that businesses that use WhatsApp for sales manage to get 20% of customer interactions via WhatsApp to result in sales, boost their overall sales by 15%, grow new client contacts by 40%, and even expand their customer base by 10%.

How to use WhatsApp to drive sales

Build a product catalog

This one is possible in the WhatsApp Business App itself, so if you’re worried about your business being too small to invest in the WhatsApp Business API just yet, you can start off by building a catalog on the WhatsApp Business App. This catalog pretty much acts as a mobile storefront that your business can use to showcase your products. It’s far more convenient than having to send pictures of and information about your products repetitively. It’s also more convenient than making your customers wait till to get a response from you agents if you are not using WhatsApp automation.

You can add information about your products like the price, pictures, product name, description, etc. and your customers can actually make purchases directly from your catalog, on WhatsApp itself.

Notify customers and leads about offers

You can use WhatsApp notifications to drive your promotional campaigns and inform your customers about the sales that you’re running. The magical part is that you’ll be targeting leads and customers who are actually interested in the offers that you’re running because you can’t send a WhatsApp broadcast message over the WhatsApp Business API without collecting opt-ins. This means that you’ll only be sending these notifications to customers who are interested in your offerings and have a greater likelihood of going ahead and making a purchase.

To send these notifications, you’d have to make use of WhatsApp message templates. These are templates that you build out in advance and can personalize while sending them to your customers. These templates have to be approved by WhatsApp before you can send them out to your customers.?

The templates can even have CTA buttons that can take your customers to the product pages on your website to make a purchase.

Click to chat links and ads

To drive sales on WhatsApp, you need to get your customers to find you on WhatsApp. The only issue is that WhatsApp does not make it possible for customers to search for businesses on the app itself. So, how do you make it possible for them to reach you? Simple - you can use WhatsApp Click-to-Chat links that take your customers to a conversation with your business on the WhatsApp Messenger application, or if they’re using a desktop or laptop, to a conversation with your business on WhatsApp Web.

Share insightful content

Ask any salesperson worth their salt, they’ll tell you that winning the prospect’s trust is one of the most important parts of getting a sale. And if you’ve got to win your customers’ trust, you’d want to provide them with value on a consistent basis, even before they buy anything from you. Doing this establishes you as an expert, makes you an authority on the domain that you operate in, and even shows your customers that you care about them and are here to help them succeed, thus getting them to trust you and your business more and more.

It also earns your top of mind awareness, so the moment one of these customers needs something that you offer, your brand is the first to come to their mind, which substantially increases your chances of making the sale.

Speed up replies

Forrester Research reports that 53% of online shoppers end up abandoning their purchase if they have a question and can’t find an answer to it instantly. Using WhatsApp can help you answer their questions quickly and protect your business from unnecessarily losing sales. But if you want to cut down on cart abandonment to a greater degree, you’ll have to answer your customer queries faster. Customers don’t want to shoot you a message and then sit waiting till one of your agents gets around to answering their questions.?

If you want to really scale up, you’ll need to start using automation to deal with their questions. An intelligent WhatsApp chatbot can answer about 80% of your customers’ questions, letting your live agents concentrate on the remaining 20% - the questions that actually need their attention. They’re not wasting their time solving issues and answering questions that a bot can take care of.

Qualify leads

Want to drive more sales? Get your sales team to spend more of their time talking to prospects who have a greater degree of interest in what you offer (along with the capability to make the purchase). This isn’t possible if they’re spending a ridiculous amount of time having the first interaction with your prospects and trying to gauge how good of a lead they are. Instead, you could use a WhatsApp chatbot to carry out these initial conversations, ask qualifying questions, and score the leads before your live agents have a conversation with them. This would let your sales team use their time in a more effective and efficient manner, helping you make more sales. The other benefit is that doing this would not interrupt the buying experience for your customers since your agents can take over the conversation from your chatbot via live chat directly on WhatsApp itself.

Share product recommendations

You can use a WhatsApp chatbot to interact with your customers, understand their needs and preferences, and then show them which products would be best for them. This allows you to personalize your product recommendations at scale in a conversational manner which feels like your customers are getting the experience of having a digital personal shopper.

You could even store information about your customers’ preferences and use that information to send them notifications on WhatsApp whenever you’re launching a new product that they would be interested in.

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