WhatsApp Business Marketing worth watching in 2022
With nearly 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp is of obvious interest for business marketing. Still limited, the presence of advertisers could intensify with the provision of new functionalities intended for companies, provided that specialized solutions are used.
Marketing on Whatsapp, a not so new practice
Until 2019, sending “WhatsApp newsletters” remained a popular gray area in some countries, including Germany and Latin America, where businesses were not shy about reaching out to their customers en masse via WhatsApp. Despite the total absence of regulation and control on the part of the Meta firm, this practice had entered into usage and was well accepted.
But we understand that this situation has become too risky for the application, whose success is based above all on the user experience, but also on the absence of spam for its millions of users. The parent company therefore decided to crack down, and in December 2019 decreed a ban on using its services to initiate conversations for commercial purposes, officially putting an end to this practice.
At the same time, the WhatsApp Business application, launched in January 2018, took over: it allows small businesses, mainly local ones, to be contacted by their customers and to respond to conversations initiated by them, but not to contact directly. The creation of a profile on WhatsApp Business subject to validation, as well as the limitation of the possibilities of sending mass messages thus allowed WhatsApp to continue to offer a platform to local businesses while ensuring that they could not not send unsolicited messages to large contact lists.
WhatsApp campaigns back in 2022?
As of June 2021, the ability to do marketing on WhatsApp appears to be open again after the app re-allowed business-initiated messaging.
To do this, you must use a third service, paying this time: WhatsApp Business API. The API, which allows you to connect to WhatsApp services to send mass messages, is however not directly accessible to companies and to be able to use it, you have to go through two filters:
Have a validated WhatsApp Business profile
Go through one of the partner solutions selected by Meta to offer access to the API.
In summary, WhatsApp only grants direct access to its API to a very small number of partner companies, who in turn offer this access to their customers as a service charged by the number of messages sent.
Who are these official partners? Although they have not all been revealed, they are essentially companies offering solutions specializing in direct marketing and customer relationship management, starting with service providers for email marketing, newsletters, etc. .
This strategy allows WhatsApp, which has a small workforce and fears above all for the experience and susceptibility to spam of its users, to use these partners as a “buffer” to ensure that the messages sent are compliant with anti-spam regulations, starting with the GDPR.
Between untimely marketing and customer relationship management, a boundary still blurred
With a 98% message open rate, 60% click rate, 2 billion users: the advantages of such a marketing channel is enough to make advertisers dizzy.
But this prospect of Eldorado is a double-edged sword: will the growing presence of companies on WhatsApp be to the detriment of its users? If certain geographical areas are already used to this mixture of genres, some users may frown when they are contacted directly on their email after leaving their phone number in a form.
