Email marketing is dead. WhatsApp is taking over. But is your business ready for it?

Imagine the following scenario… 🤔

Open your personal email.📩

What would you find?

Bunch of unopened brand marketing emails crowding your inbox!

Whereas, if you open your WhatsApp…

You’ll see all your messages are opened and read!

In short, unread emails are killing a business’s reach among its customers. And in this write-up, we’ll discuss why it’s time for your brand to focus more on WhatsApp. 

Summary (to save you from TL;DR) 😉

- Email open rates are on a steady decline over the years. ‘Right message at the right time’ which is the crux for CX - no longer fits well for emails. 

- Human-to-human interactions, personalizations, and instant payments make conversational commerce a reality - something impossible with emails. 

- Unlike emails, WhatsApp has better quality and spam control in place. It reviews and approves a message before it reaches your customer chat. 

- Informal the new formal. And WhatsApp offers an end-to-end experience right from acquisition to post-purchase support

Email open rates are on a steady decline over the years. ‘Right message at the right time’ which is the crux for CX - no longer fits well for emails. 

Do you know how many emails an average professional processes during a day? Guess… 10? 20? Not even close. It’s 100! 

And you don't want your brand’s email to be the 101st. That too considering you spent hours crafting and designing them. 

Recent research reveals consumers are slowly moving away from email to WhatsApp as their preferred communication channel with their brands. 

For instance, the average email open rate in 2016 for B2C brands was 40%, but today it’s 23%. 

That’s a huge decline. But the reason? 

The rise of conversational messaging apps such as Facebook (2.85 billion users), WhatsApp (2 billion), and Instagram (1.3 billion) - offers more fun and easy experience to communicate than regular email. While people switch through these apps several times a day, sadly emails are not a part of it. 

Because a WhatsApp message is opened much faster than an email, your brand has the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time. 

WhatsApp’s faster support, better personalizations, and instant payments make conversational commerce a reality - something impossible with emails. 

Remember the email landscape in the early 2000s? It was adopted by growing businesses as an effective customer communication channel.

One thing that has always stayed consistent throughout the years is the “human-to-human interaction in a sales cycle.” It’s just that the medium keeps evolving. It was emails then. It’s WhatsApp now. 

As brands are becoming a part of a consumer’s personal space - WhatsApp offers better flexibility by putting the power in the buyer’s hand. 

Today, customers can start and pause an interaction and return when it is convenient - without losing the thread and context. It is evident that to and fro emails with longer wait time is not a preferred way of getting things done. 

From a business’s perspective, the ability to see a customer’s account in an instant, and solve their issues cuts down dramatically on miscommunication and confusion.

80% of consumers agree they are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides a personalized experience and 83% say convenience has become a critical aspect while shopping. 90% of customers rate an "immediate" response as necessary, and 78% back out of purchase due to a poor customer experience. 

Just like emails - with the right data, you can segment your audience by customers’ needs and previous interactions with your company, and fine-tune offers and messaging appropriately. This further enhances connection, loyalty, and retention. 

What’s more? You can complete the payment without leaving the conversation threads. The entire buying experience is consolidated in one place thereby making it easy for future references for everyone involved.  

Unlike emails, WhatsApp has better quality and spam controls in place. It  reviews and approves message before it reaches your customer chat

WhatsApp allows your business to initiate conversations with your customers, albeit with few checks intact. The messages require pre-approval by the WhatsApp team in the first place. 

For example, if you want to send an order confirmation to your customer, like:  

Hi Ram, your Order #1905 at Peach has been successfully dispatched and will be delivered by 7th April 2021.

The message template has to be approved by WhatsApp prior to sending. Here’s an example of the template you’d require to submit to WhatsApp for approval:

Hi {{1}}! Your order {{2}} your order has been successfully dispatched and will be delivered by {{3}}.

Plus, all these messages are to be pre-approved and opted-in by your customers before they receive them - making it close to spam-free. 

Informal is the new formal and WhatsApp helps you win your customers faster than emails 👔

The traditionalist view of messaging is slowly changing and overlooks the fact that WhatsApp is slowly evolving into a social media platform in its own right.

Think about the message streams between you and your potential customers when discussing a proposal or a support query regarding a product you recently delivered. 

When these conversations take place over email, it can take hours if not days to get resolved. And the girdle of checking the emails often is surely a pain in the a** for your customers. The drop-offs can be drastic. 

On the bright side, using WhatsApp means a quicker and more responsive form of communication, speeding up traditionally slow email processes. 

The benefits are clear, people will open your messages, respond, and get back to what they were doing.

Meaning, your customers won’t sit in a mountain of unread emails from your brand. That’s a win for everyone involved!

Takeaways

Yes, WhatsApp is taking over emails. But that doesn’t mean that your business magically will start growing the day you implement WhatsApp marketing. 

A poor messaging conversation can still drive a customer away just like a poor email strategy might. 

You only get what you put into it.

Best tip? If your approach to messaging is more reactive than strategic - now is the time to use WhatsApp Business to step into the new normal.

Say “what’s up?” to WhatsApp marketing