Three Ways Businesses in India Can Drive Sales This Diwali
As India prepares to celebrate Diwali, businesses have a great opportunity to connect with customers during this festival season. For many businesses, this means using WhatsApp to engage with customers in a convenient and reliable way on the app they’re already using throughout the day. In fact, 8 out of 10 people in India say that messaging is their preferred way of communicating with a business. To keep businesses on track and to engage better with their customers, here are three WhatsApp strategies that businesses can continue doing to drive more sales.
1. Create a great messaging experience for customers
For many small business owners in India, WhatsApp is their business – their website or virtual store counter to showcase products, answer customer queries and drive sales. So when customers come, you need to be ready. During Diwali, that might be as simple as updating your business hours in your business profile in the WhatsApp Business app to let people know you’re open during the celebration – especially if your operating hours will be different than usual – or even putting up an away message to inform customers when you’re available or when you might be enjoying the festivities. And if you have any special items or deals and promotions, it’s best to highlight that in your catalog so people can easily find what they might want to buy.
For larger businesses using the WhatsApp Business Platform, this could mean taking your WhatsApp experience a step further by creating an end-to-end shopping experience for your customers with a new custom “flow,” and enabling in-app checkout with the WhatsApp payments feature.
2. Attract new customers
The lifeblood of any business is finding more customers. So once you’ve built a valuable experience for your customers, it’s key to drive more people to your WhatsApp channel. To start, add a QR code to your storefront, website, product packaging, marketing materials or any other surface where people coming across your business can easily scan to connect with you on WhatsApp. From there, you can add a WhatsApp button to your Facebook or Instagram account that clicks to open a chat on WhatsApp so customers browsing your business on those platforms can easily start a conversation to ask questions or place an order. To find a brand new set of customers, businesses can take the next step and create Facebook or Instagram ads that click to open a chat on WhatsApp. These ads are an incredibly effective and powerful way to attract new customers and get them to start messaging with your business so you can close the sale. For businesses that run their entire operation directly from WhatsApp, you can now create these ads directly within the WhatsApp Business app.
3. Stay organized
Diwali can be an extremely busy week for businesses – especially with so much commerce condensed into just a few days. With a potential influx of chats coming from new customers, it’s essential to keep your business and chats organized to maximize efficiency and sales. One trick is using catalog collections to group and organize products into specific categories so it’s simple for customers to browse your offerings. To stay on top of your chats, label specific ones with customizable descriptions to keep track of things like pending payments, new customers and more. As your customer base and chat volume grow, businesses can graduate from the WhatsApp Business app to the more powerful WhatsApp Business Platform where they can engage with customers at scale.
