Power of storytelling in WhatsApp commerce: Building authentic connections with customers

Launched in 2007, Vizury, an Affle company, is a performance-focused MarTech solution that empowers brands to achieve higher funnel conversions and customer retention. Since inception, the focus of this unique technology-driven services has always been the ability to bring customers back to a brand’s website, mobile app or retail store and improve new customer acquisition, retention and brand loyalty. Vizury helps brands deliver highly personalised customer experience on WhatsApp and scale growth by delivering outcome drive campaigns across the customer lifecycle.

In conversation with Adgully, Sujoy Golan, Chief of Marketing & Omnichannel Platforms & Chief Business Officer, Vizury, speaks at length about building long-term relationships with customers through WhatsApp Commerce, making brand’s marketing relevant to the customer journey, and much more.

How is Vizury building long-term relationships with customers through WhatsApp Commerce?

Understanding customer intent and interests play a major role in building long-term relationships. At Vizury, we have developed our products and offerings such that businesses can engage customers in a meaningful way and foster long-lasting relationships. We also enable brands to analySe customer behavioUr, preferences, and engagement patterns that can help them to gain valuable insights into what their customers truly want.

We must take into account that to truly understand customer engagement it is important to delve into data insights. Vizury’s customer-driven platform leverages analytics and data-driven approaches to uncover valuable information about customer interactions, preferences, and motivations. This deeper understanding enables brands to create personalized customer journeys on WhatsApp that are tailored to individual needs and preferences.

We also understand that while using WhatsApp as a channel is effective in engaging with customers, brands must also be mindful about their privacy. Therefore, we have designed our MarTech platform such that it enables brands to create hyper-personalised campaigns for WhatsApp tailored to customers’ needs and preferences, while also setting privacy-focused solutions as well as frequency caps on campaigns to avoid spamming.

How is Vizury fostering more deeper, more meaningful connections with their customers?

Today, no brand marketing can be successful if it doesn’t foster deeper and more meaningful connections with customers. WhatsApp is one of the channels that can help to establish a direct and convenient communication for the brands to interact with their customers and build seamless connections and trust. WhatsApp Commerce is so much more than just a communication tool – it can enable deeper engagements where customers can browse through the catalog, chat with the bot to discover products, and pay on the go without having to leave the app. This ease of shopping incentivizes customers to keep coming back every time they want to shop from your brand.

Vizury’s Engage360 is a marketing technology designed to co-exist with WhatsApp. With seamless integration with brand’s digital touchpoints, brands can leverage data-driven insights on customer behaviour and preferences to launch personalised, unique journeys on WhatsApp.

To enhance the storytelling experience, Vizury encourages its brand partners to leverage multimedia features on WhatsApp. Video and audio features can be used to create visually appealing product displays, share behind-the-scenes moments, or demonstrations. This allows brands to add a personal touch and make the interaction more engaging.

What are the challenges you have faced in WhatsApp Commerce storytelling and how have you overcoming them?

Challenges in WhatsApp storytelling stem from having a limited understanding of how to explore WhatsApp beyond as just another promotional channel. When clients invest in a data-driven marketing tech stack like Vizury, it allows them to create customer journeys that are highly contextual and personalised to maximise engagement and conversions. Brands have been approaching ‘WhatsApp commerce’ as another e-commerce website, wherein consumers will browse, shop and pay. But with already established sales channels from offline stores, to brand’s owned websites, marketplaces – it has been difficult for brands to realise the true potential of WhatsApp commerce.

We also advise our brand partners to not limit WhatsApp to a spray-and-pray approach. Instead, include WhatsApp in the mix of current channels and launch campaigns that are in sync with other channels. Having a 360-customer profile is crucial to understanding customer behaviour and their propensity to convert at any given stage. Adopting a holistic approach with the right tech partner can help to make WhatsApp storytelling effective and engaging.

How is Vizury retaining consumer-first brands? What are the innovative retention strategies for today’s customers?

For brands wanting to convert their potential users into customers and to retain existing customers into repeat purchasers, it is important to foster loyalty and engagement by delivering a seamless experience. Making sure a brand’s marketing is relevant to the customer journey helps marketers to make their campaigns more relevant and contextual. For instance, if a customer has already made a purchase for a product, retargeting them with ads for the same product is not only wastage of ad budgets but also spams the customer.

We work with brands to create connected customer journeys that are uniquely designed to the customer’s needs so that they can come back to the store for a better shopping experience. For customers who already exist in a brand’s CRM, Vizury’s platform integrates seamlessly with the brand’s internal marketing tech stack to create a retargeting strategy that minimises friction, eliminates unnecessary re-directions, and optimises user experience to move them down the funnel faster. We also recommend brands who work with us to incorporate a constant feedback mechanism for delivering better recommendations.  Various brands across the beauty and personal care space have been leveraging our product expertise and solutions to engage with customers in meaningful ways. This has not only resulted in higher engagement and conversion rates for them, but also fosters a sense of community for their customers.

How can businesses measure the effectiveness of their storytelling efforts on WhatsApp Commerce?

Measuring the effectiveness of any campaign is imperative for advertising efforts, irrespective of the channel and WhatsApp is no different. Continuous measurement helps brands to optimise and map the customer’s journey for each stage of the buying funnel.

At Vizury, we have designed our analytics module to enable brands with a full-funnel view of how customers are navigating through the journey from awareness to loyalty stage.

For instance, if scaling awareness is the goal, tracking and analysing engagement metrics such as message open rates, click-through rates, and the number of responses or interactions generated from the storytelling content on WhatsApp is critical. These metrics provide insights into how well the content resonates with customers and captures their attention. If a customer is truly engaged with a brand’s storytelling, they are more likely to recommend the brand to others. Therefore, tracking changes in NPS, CSAT following the implementation of storytelling campaigns may prove to be effective.

Tracking and analysing conversions such as making a purchase, subscribing to a service, or completing a specific goal that aligns with the brand’s objectives, helps brands understand how many conversions is the WhatsApp channel bringing in. For the loyalty stage, it is good to measure the percentage of customers who came back to the channel or the number of first time/ repeat purchases (CLTV) done either via WhatsApp or website/ app.

How is Vizury making sure that it is delivering personalised and relevant product recommendations or offers while ensuring customer privacy?

Vizury is deeply committed to delivering personalised customer experience, while also placing a high value on customer privacy. Our approach is multi-faceted and aims to balance customer needs and preferences with data security and privacy.

Vizury’s core engine – Engage 360 – is driven by first-party customer data. It integrates seamlessly with a brand’s existing marketing stack across channels, systems, and payment tools allowing them to capture over 50 different customer attributes, including demographics, intent, transaction behaviour, and website or app behaviour. Using this rich data, we create hyper-targeted segments by identifying customers based on their propensity to perform the desired action. Our engine also uses real-time consumer data, such as past browsing history, to understand where customers left off during their purchase journey. This allows us to re-target customers on their preferred channel of communication, enabling them to pick up right where they left off. This makes every engagement highly contextual and personalised.

A fundamental part of our strategy is the collection of WhatsApp opt-ins. Vizury’s state-of-the-art solution captures these opt-ins and enables brands to incorporate these when launching our WhatsApp marketing campaigns, allowing us to target our communications effectively.

We also have a proactive approach in managing the frequency of brand communications to ensure customers are not overwhelmed with notifications. In all this, we maintain a strict adherence to data privacy laws and best practices. Our commitment to privacy and security is a fundamental part of how we deliver personalised and relevant recommendations while ensuring that customer privacy remains a top priority.

How do you ensure that you are on top of changing shopping behaviour and also keeping up with customer expectations?

Understanding the way consumers shop and interact with brands becomes a crucial component for businesses aiming to stay competitive. I think a privacy-first approach has played a major role in shaping the way brands engage with their audience. Spamming customers with irrelevant messages will harm your relationship with your customers. Sending countless messages will not convert a customer unless the brand makes these engagements highly contextual.

Consumers expect tailored brand experiences that reflect their preferences, tastes, and needs. From customised product recommendations and personalised advertising to personalised customer service and unique shopping experiences, consumers are increasingly expecting businesses to deliver personalised interactions across all touchpoints.

A seamless integration of all customer touchpoints, including physical stores, online stores, social media, mobile apps, and other digital channels has become crucial to stay ahead of competition. The goal is to provide customers with a consistent and cohesive experience, regardless of the channel they choose to engage with.

What are your recommendations to D2C brands as they focus on sustainable growth in 2023 and also going ahead?

As we navigate the dynamic landscape of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) brands in 2023 and beyond, one of the most pertinent questions is around how D2C brands can grow sustainably in an increasingly competitive market. The answer lies in strategic introspection, realignment, and execution.

It is also essential for brands to perform a thorough analysis of their current strategies – to understand what has been working and what has not and ensure your brand stays relevant in the face of evolving consumer preferences. Following this, brands should realign on their goals. Whether it is increasing market share, boosting customer loyalty, or expanding into new markets, having a clear vision of what your brand aims to achieve is the foundation of any successful strategy.

The strategy should focus on the entire customer journey – from the moment a customer engages with your brand for the first time to becoming your loyal customer.