How to improve customer engagement with WhatsApp Business for Social Commerce

Haven’t we all browsed or scrolled through our favourite networking site and eventually something caught our eye? Maybe it's that summer dress that your friend recently bought or the new skincare range that an influencer is promoting on their page? What next? Well, immediately our consciousness forms an opinion and we know that’s exactly what we need, and voila! We’ve made a purchase, all within the app that we’re scrolling through.

Welcome to the future of e-commerce, and welcome to the new way we all shop. This is what social commerce is, and it’s a powerhouse for product discovery!

What is Social Commerce?

Think of it like this, it’s the smart integration of e-commerce on your favorite networking websites or apps like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook. How is it any different from social media marketing? 

Social commerce offers its users the ability to purchase or checkout right within the app used without redirecting to an online store. The entire shopping experience from product discovery to checkout happens on social media.

According to Accenture reports, “Social Commerce” is set to sweep the world, growing into a $1.2 trillion wave of change by 2025.

“It’s word of mouth on steroids”, says Sandie Hawkins, GM of North America Solution, TikTok.

Benefits of Social Commerce

You wonder why “Social Commerce”? Here are the top 4 reasons:

1. It makes shopping an interactive experience

Shopping on e-commerce sites lacks the aspect of interaction, whereas Social Commerce is all about that. From displaying your new purchases online to consulting your family and friends, the interactive element rates high with social commerce.

2.Low friction streamlined experience

Fancy a pair of sneakers that go well with your attire? You just click and checkout. It eliminates the tedious process of toggling between ads on the retailer's website or migrating from product discovery to filling in details. It’s hassle-free!

3. Your target audience is right there

With the enormous amount of customer data at your disposal, it’s easier for businesses to direct their products or services while promoting catalogs to their target audience, including leveraging messaging platforms like Whatsapp by enabling Whatsapp Commerce.‍

4. It widens your reach

The aunt you despise and your fun-loving cousin are both on social media. That’s no surprise! More than 3 billion people have social media accounts and social commerce helps you tap into that market. It’s the mode that millennials & Gen Z are most comfortable shopping on.

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WhatsApp for Social Commerce

It’s no surprise that platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Facebook are the forerunners of Social Commerce but WhatsApp business platform holds a tremendous amount of potential as well. Here’s how:

1. Improved customer engagement

WhatsApp provides your customer with a product and service catalog to browse through all within the app. Notifications and regular offer updates keep the customer informed. WhatsApp undoubtedly has a high open rate as well, which makes this a preferred channel by businesses for Social Commerce because there is a two-way flow of information.

2. Consistent audience growth

Visual appeal is one of the factors that drive a business and WhatsApp for business taps into that by sending in your customer a rich influx of multimedia such as images, videos, pdfs or even gifs to keep the customer engaged. This gets your customer base growing rapidly like hotcakes because of the easy to share option.

3. Increased average order value

With the inclusion of WhatsApp carts and in-app WhatsApp UPI, end-to-end payments are much more simpler now. WhatsApp Pay allows users to make transactions and opens a channel to host integrated e-commerce opportunities.

4. Higher search engine ranking

Social Commerce increases the traffic to business websites influencing the website's search engine ranking positively. Another way of driving traffic from WhatsApp is by sharing links to website content which allows users to share, engage, like or comment.

5. Improved customer insights

It is now possible to keep a track of your customer insights with WhatsApp Business API using platforms like Interakt which manage and monitor your key chat metrics from the likes of Average Response Time and Average Resolution Time to gauge how swiftly your agents resolve customer issues. Insights are always important in understanding your agent-customer interactions.

Conclusion

Social commerce succinctly can be summed up as the use of networking websites to promote and sell products and services. In the process, aids like influencer marketing, ads, promotions & giveaways are used to boost sales. The way we engage and shop is definitely changing. Social commerce allows brands & businesses to generate sales directly from social media effortlessly by providing a streamlined experience to users and this has resulted in lesser cart abandonment issues.

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Is your business ready to leverage this revolutionary change? Get started with the WhatsApp Business platform on Interakt to tap into the power of social commerce. Checkout Interakt’s affordable WhatsApp Business platform pricing here.

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