YourStory, born out of its founder Shradha Sharma’s goal of celebrating, nurturing and empowering innovative entrepreneurs, is India’s one-of-a-kind and leading tech media platform that tries to foster a positive startup ecosystem through stories, resources and products related to entrepreneurship.
Over the years, YourStory has become one of the key voices and positive enablers for many entrepreneurs and changemakers in the country, writing about all the massive developments in its fast-growing start-up ecosystem. YourStory, in line with its core principles, has also been hosting many events aimed at community building and the promotion of a collaborative environment in entrepreneurship.
Both within and outside YourStory for other startup companies and entrepreneurs, the company organizes a lot of meetings or events.
And communication was a major challenge that the company needed to address. Using email to invite people to events generally fetched lower conversions and lower turnouts.
Another major problem that YourStory wanted to address in their communication was the limited personalization capabilities and the lack of accessibility.
Alternative solutions that can fill in the marketing requirements, such as performance marketing or the use of subscription tools, were however not cost-effective enough to be considered viable.
The company needed a solution that would be able to provide personalized, timely communication while being more accessible, conversational and cost-effective compared to traditional methods of online event invitations.
With its key pain points defined, YourStory sought out an ideal solution that could effectively deliver on all the requirements.
Eventually, the answer was found to be in WhatsApp marketing.
Upon discussion and analysis, YourStory set clear objectives and goals for their strategy:
Using the WhatsApp Business API with Interakt, YourStory kickstarted their marketing campaign on the chat app – with their first focus being on sending out personalized event invites.
Taking their invites to a channel that is commonly used by their target audience for day to day conversations, resulted in higher open rates.
The conversational nature of the platform also helped the company make the interactions more conversational, enabling audiences to write to them with any questions they might have, while at the same time enabling the team to address these queries in a more direct and hands-on manner, thus resulting in easier and effective conversions.
YourStory, leveraging the WhatsApp Business API, also set up various automations to ensure responses to all queries, in the absence of its team.
Scaling their WhatsApp campaigns strategically, YourStory now also has WhatsApp automation to send out notifications with crucial event invite details, follow-ups and reminders, and similar messages.
Being able to address all the stages of the funnel for their event marketing on one platform has helped the company also streamline their overall spends, getting higher ROI from the campaigns.
These were the basic features that any D2C company required, and Interakt was able to deliver on all these features perfectly in a way that Mortantra’s specific requirements demanded.
While using email as its primary channel for sharing invites for its meetings and events, YourStory has seen comparatively lower conversions.
The company was seeing conversion rates of about 25-30% on average from sending invites to 1000 people.
By using WhatsApp as its key channel for sharing invites, the process was turned more conversational. The company was able to see a 60-65% in its conversion, majorly in terms of attendance for its events, owing to WhatsApp’s ease of use in combination with Interakt.
Since using Interakt, YourStory’s automated delivery rates have also drastically improved with a 95% increase from its previous numbers. Interakt’s easy-to-use interface enabled the company’s team to easily make the most out of its features and flows in minimal time, being able to scale their campaigns to a wider audience.
As events play a crucial role in generating data from the attendees and building community, YourStory required an effective way to market these events and improve attendee turnout.
Using traditional marketing channels wasn’t able to fetch desirable results thus raising the need for a fast, conversational and personal marketing platform.
With WhatsApp marketing made effective with Interakt’s unique features, automation capabilities, easy-to-use interface and responsive and stellar customer support, YourStory was able to see a massive improvement in its conversions.
By providing a two-way communication loop and responding to queries using WhatsApp automation features enabled by Interakt, the company is effectively driving more customers to its events.
Want to know how you can improve your event marketing campaigns with WhatsApp?
