BGC CEO Akhtar Zahid explains how the UK's largest party and gift cards wholesaler used B2B WhatsApp to entice customers back
Hi Akhtar, tell us about BGC Wholesale
BGC is a business with two sides, one is publishing and greeting cards, and the other is around stationery and party. I started in January 2023 and could see the potential for the business and liked the growth agenda we have in the medium-term. While there are other wholesalers who sell similar products to us, we’re the only one with multiple sites and are the leader in the sector in that respect.
Why has WhatsApp become a key part of your strategy?
WhatsApp is how everyone communicates these days and I had seen on b2b.store’s website they were working with it. Some businesses communicate with customers using an app, but it’s not always the person in the shop who is making the final decision, so I thought B2B WhatsApp might be a fun way to communicate to the right people instead.
There’s a directness to it as well. How many emails do I get that go into spam or I just delete and don’t read? If you think about a business, they’ll probably look at email to pay their bills because that’s how they come through, whereas a lot of customers I’ve met are WhatsApping each other – it’s an extension of their computers and therefore thought it was something we should look at.
How do you use B2B WhatsApp?
The platform and cost didn’t look extortionate, especially when you consider the days are gone of posting a print mailer out centrally to customers. If you can put together a road map of engaging customers, you’d give them some offers and promotions, but that’s just another avenue to keeping customers that currently shop with us, so we thought we’d aim at lapsed customers instead. We felt the potential for bringing customer back that weren’t currently spending with us was much greater than getting incremental spend from active customers.
What was your approach?
At the moment, we’re giving them discounts of 10-20% to get them back into depot and spending with us. The real test of that will be when the vouchers expire and we’ll see if they come back, but the idea is that when they do spend, they’ll also have a look around and think our depots are different, cleaner and have more relevant stock than we had before. If they continue to buy something from us, that’s positive.
Do you see your use of B2B WhatsApp going further?
Potentially, yes. There’s a big universe of customers from greeting card stores and more generalists that might stock cards, stationery or party stuff, so it’s then about targeting them. By personalising the messages we send to different customers, we can target them with something that’s specific to their business.
The campaign in numbers
- £2.5k total campaign messaging spend
- 14% returning customers redeemed vouchers
- 19x ROI achieved by four-week B2B WhatsApp campaign
