A new way of messaging: How to engage with modern customers

The webinar focused on developing cross-channel communication strategies for businesses that feel their customer experience and engagement are disconnected and need improvement. 

In this article, I’ll walk through the key points we covered, including the challenges faced by current marketers, strategies to defy the odds and engage your customers, and a deep dive into how Insider’s WhatsApp solution is a vital tool for customer loyalty (complete with a real-life case study from Blibli who used it to skyrocket key metrics).

Omnichannel marketing and communication challenges

I started the webinar by outlining some of the most common omnichannel and communication problems marketers face. The challenges faced in 2023 are vastly different from ten, even five years ago, largely due to the rising expectations of customers. 

When global players like Google and Amazon prioritize building the tech and resources to create consistent, personalized customer experiences, it’s little wonder tailored messages and cohesive journeys become a fundamental customer expectation.

To meet those expectations, marketers need to identify where their current strategy is failing. Common issues include:

• Fragmented solutions: Businesses struggle with using multiple disconnected solutions that don’t integrate well with each other, leading to a disjointed customer experience.
• Lack of customer behavior data: The absence of comprehensive data on customer behavior makes it difficult for businesses to understand and anticipate customer needs effectively that leads to basic communication yielding decent ROI
• Disconnected experience with other communication channels: Many businesses face challenges in creating a cohesive brand image due to a disconnected experience between WhatsApp and other communication channels.
• Relying on manual workload for WhatsApp: While manual management of WhatsApp may provide ROI, it’s still time-consuming and prone to errors, making it an inefficient channel.

Omnichannel marketing shouldn’t require multiple tools. Marketers need a comprehensive solution that can provide a consistent, personalized customer experience. 

The cross-channel marketing solution should also include (yes, you guessed it) WhatsApp capabilities. Why? Because WhatsApp is one of the most-used apps in the world—more than 2 billion people use it monthly, sending over 100 billion messages every day. So, a no-brainer, marketers need to tap into the power of this channel.

Strategies to defy the odds and engage modern customers

We then took a top-level look at three key strategies to help increase customer engagement in 2023. 

1. Identifying customers through in-depth segmentation

Arguably, the most important strategy is to identify customers through segmentation. For this, you need a deep understanding of different user personas. 

By segmenting customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and demographics, marketers can then tailor messaging and offers to individual needs. 71% of consumers prefer personalized communication because it fosters a sense of exclusivity and makes customers feel valued, enhancing their loyalty toward the brand.

2. Creating and distributing WhatsApp strategies

If you’re not using WhatsApp properly, you might as well not use it at all. Like all conversational commerce, to effectively engage with customers on WhatsApp, marketers must develop and implement specific strategies for various types of conversations. 

For example:

• Utility conversations provide valuable information and assistance, while authentication builds trust and security. 
• Marketing conversations focus on delivering targeted promotions.
• Customer service conversations offer support and resolution.

By creating and distributing WhatsApp strategies across these key conversation types, businesses can ensure relevant and purpose-driven interactions that customers will remember. 

3. Seamlessly fitting conversational messaging into the customer journey

Nobody likes forced conversations that start abruptly at the wrong time. For a truly effective engagement strategy, its crucial to seamlessly fit conversational messaging into the customer journey. 

This means integrating WhatsApp conversations at different touchpoints, ensuring a cohesive and connected experience. By aligning messaging with the customer’s journey, businesses can provide timely and relevant information, create a seamless transition between channels, and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

WhatsApp marketing

Having addressed the challenges and strategies to successfully engage customers, we turned to the importance of using WhatsApp as a marketing tool, including how (and why) to leverage it.

With its vast user base and powerful features, WhatsApp presents a unique opportunity for businesses to connect with customers in a personalized and impactful way as part of a cross-channel journey. Here’s how to maximize its efficiency in your marketing efforts.

To maximize the potential of WhatsApp marketing, businesses should map out the customer funnel for each stage of the customer lifecycle. This involves understanding customer touchpoints and crafting tailored messaging for awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. 

Much like specific messaging for each purpose, businesses can nurture leads, drive conversions, and cultivate long-term customer loyalty by aligning WhatsApp messages with specific funnel stages.

Optimize customer revenue mix

One of the key benefits of WhatsApp marketing is the ability to optimize the customer revenue mix. By analyzing customer data and behavior, businesses can identify high-value customers and target them with personalized WhatsApp messages. 

This tailored approach allows for strategic upselling, cross-selling, and retention initiatives, maximizing customer lifetime value and revenue generation.

Leverage WhatsApp’s vast features

It’s no surprise the world’s most popular messaging app offers a range of features that businesses can leverage to enhance their marketing efforts.

• Bulk and segmented messages enable businesses to reach a wide audience or target specific customer segments with relevant content. 
• Triggered messages can send automated responses or notifications based on specific actions or events. 
• Transactional and reminder messages provide timely and personalized information to customers, improving engagement and driving conversions.

By using WhatsApp’s features strategically, businesses can create highly targeted and impactful messaging campaigns that resonate with their customers to drive engagement and boost conversions.

Overcoming data silos with Insider’s CDP

I have one big question for you: How can you effectively segment and target your audience if your customer data is all over the place?

I explained in the webinar just how important it is to have a comprehensive customer data platform (CDP) as the foundation of your new modern marketing strategy. 

With Insider’s CDP, businesses can build comprehensive user profiles enriched with real-time data from various touchpoints. By collecting and ingesting data from 12+ channels, plus APIs, Insider’s CDP ensures a holistic view of customer behavior and preferences. 

The CDP’s capability to unify and resolve user identities across different channels and devices enhances data accuracy and minimizes gaps. Using the power of segmentation and analysis, Insider’s CDP enables businesses to gain valuable audience insights, identify patterns, and create highly targeted campaigns. This is the key to building powerful messaging campaigns that the modern customer will actually engage with. 

End-to-end conversational messaging with Insider’s MindBehind acquisition

If you want to engage modern customers, you need to focus your efforts on building consistent, conversational customer journeys.

Insider’s acquisition of MindBehind has taken this capability up a notch with WhatsApp Commerce. The acquisition has enabled Insider to power end-to-end conversational commerce and messaging through WhatsApp, empowering businesses to deliver personalized, interactive experiences that resonate with their customers—all the way through to purchase.

The solution also introduces a comprehensive customer care and agent dashboard, providing businesses with the tools and resources to deliver exceptional human support through messaging channels. This empowers businesses to provide timely and personalized assistance, enhancing the customer experience and building lasting relationships.

Another standout feature is the ability to design intelligent virtual assistants using MindBehind’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Businesses can create smart, automated conversational WhatsApp experiences that can handle customer queries, provide relevant information, and deliver seamless interactions–all without coding or any IT dependency. 

By combining the power of automation with human touchpoints, businesses can deliver efficient and personalized customer experiences in just a matter of minutes–meeting those all-important customer expectations and building relationships that hit goal metrics out of the park.

WhatsApp marketing first-hand: How Blibli boosted conversions with WhatsApp

One company that’s seen incredible results with Insider’s WhatsApp solution is Blibli, a leading omnichannel commerce ecosystem and lifestyle platform in Indonesia.

For the latter part of the webinar, Nuraeni Saripudin Johnson, Blibli’s Assistant Vice President, shared the challenges faced by the brand and how Insider’s WhatsApp Commerce helped overcome them. 

Blibli already had an established suite of retargeting channels. Still, it knew there was room to drive higher conversions, and with over 90% of Indonesians regularly using WhatsApp, the messaging platform felt like a logical step.

To get started, Blibli sought a solution to enable its CRM team to deploy personalized WhatsApp messages easily and intuitively, leading them to discover Insider’s WhatsApp Business API solution.

Nuraeni explained the two sides of executing the team’s strategy. 

Strategy 1: Top-of-funnel success

To engage customers at the top of the funnel, Blibli used real-time segmentation and dynamic attributes to create hyper-personalized promotional messages on WhatsApp. 

The results were impressive, with click-through rates (CTR) ranging from 12.7% to 13.4%. 

Furthermore, the conversion rates (CVR) achieved exceptional results, ranging from 2.3% to 3.8%. These outstanding metrics indicated the effectiveness of Insider’s solution in capturing customer attention and driving conversions.

Strategy 2: Bottom-of-funnel optimization

Blibli also addressed its browse and cart abandonment rates. With Insider’s WhatsApp Business API solution, they sent personalized reminders and dynamic content to re-engage customers. The browse abandonment reminder campaign achieved a remarkable 3.2% CVR and an impressive 40.46% CTR. 
Additionally, the cart abandonment reminder campaign delivered fantastic results, with a 5.9% CVR and a 30.7% CTR. These numbers showcased the power of Insider’s solution in re-engaging customers and recovering potential lost sales.

Insider’s WhatsApp Business API solution offered Blibli comprehensive tools, including real-time segmentation, easy campaign setup, comprehensive analytics, and seamless integration with other channels. Nuraeni shared how this allowed Blibli to streamline its marketing efforts and ensure a cohesive customer experience across multiple touchpoints. 

Nuraeni also pointed to Insider’s WhatsApp solution outperforming other retargeting channels with a significantly higher CVR. From February to April 2023, Insider WhatsApp achieved an exceptional 24.4% CVR. In comparison, Web Push achieved a 0.31% CVR, and email achieved 1.23%. These impressive results firmly established Insider’s WhatsApp solution as a game-changer for the eCommerce site.

Start reaching customers on the channels they use most

The key to engaging customers and building loyalty in 2023 and beyond is conversational, consistent messaging. Insider’s comprehensive solution, including the WhatsApp Business API and CDP, offers businesses the tools they need to succeed in this new marketing era.

To get started, book a demo, explore our platform, or reach out to me; I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.