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.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTO BY ADI GOLDSTEIN ON UNSPLASH