Harris Naga Putra
Aug 20, 2023
Harris Naga Putra
Aug 20, 2023
I recently hosted a webinar in partnership with Meta and Blibli, Southeast Asia’s leading anime, comic and gaming community, on how to grow loyalty and engage with customers in 2023. Or, more specifically, where the best place is to develop that relationship. B
With so many channels now available and endless customer preferences, building an efficient strategy to develop customer relationships is a challenge faced by marketers worldwide.
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
Strategies to defy the odds and engage modern customers
WhatsApp marketing
Overcoming data silos with Insider’s CDP
End-to-end conversational messaging with Insider’s MindBehind acquisition
WhatsApp marketing first-hand: How Blibli boosted conversions with WhatsApp
Start reaching customers on the channels they use most
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:
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.
We then took a top-level look at three key strategies to help increase customer engagement in 2023.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Written by
Harris Naga Putra
Harris is Insider’s VP of Sales and has over ten years of digital and growth experience. He worked to build Insider from the ground up in Indonesia, Australia, and the entire APAC market. With a wealth of experience in Customer Data Platforms (CDP), growth strategies, and personalization, Harris has played a key role in driving growth for over 150+ brands worldwide.
