What to consider before sending B2B WhatsApp messages

Five tips to help with your B2B WhatsApp strategy

Make a content plan

At the heart of every successful content channel is a plan and WhatsApp is no different. It’s advisable to have a clear map of what you’ll be posting when. This will help you manage how often you’re sending messages, ensuring any posts are well spaced out and don’t overwhelm your audience, and make it easier to vary what you’re sending.

A content plan can be made on a simple Excel table for the month ahead. Making a forward-thinking plan gives you time to create posts and adapt if anything new or unexpected comes up.

Include clear calls to action

It sounds like an obvious point to make, but having a clearly defined idea of what you want a customer to do before planning to send a message is THE place to start. Sometimes the whole point of sending a message gets forgotten.

Start by considering if you want people to buy a product, visit a certain destination, sign up to an event or any number of other things, and how they’re going to do that. Once that is in place, build your message with that in mind – it’s amazing how much easier it’ll be to craft a winning piece of content.

Get your tone of voice right

Tone of voice is crucial in any communication, but it’s doubly important on a platform like WhatsApp because it’s primarily an informal place to chat with friends and family. As a result, avoid the temptation to be too formal in speech because it’ll jar with everything else your audience is receiving.

Use more colloquial language while retaining your business’s own way of speaking to customers. Also consider extending that approach into the type of things you send too.

Lots of similar messages that are too salesy in tone will eventually cause engagement to drop off, so try to be fresh, current and different in what you send – if someone is going to engage with what you send, they need to be getting something from it.

Split your strategy

Content is rarely a one-size-fits-all thing, so segmenting your customers depending on their preferences could be the best way to maximise engagement.

Segmentation paves the way for personalisation in messages, whether that’s targeting a certain group of customers with a promotional campaign, sending messages at a different time to suit them, or using different types of language.

This also allows for testing different messages to see what resonates best, as it provides an easy way to A/B test approaches and track the elements that make communications more or less successful.

Keep an eye on performance

Track what’s working – and what’s not – by watching the message analytics to see what’s being read and engaged with most. Having the ability to see message performance isn’t available on the free versions of WhatsApp, so is a clear example of an added service that professionalises your messaging strategy.

It’s also possible to add UTM codes to your WhatsApp messages to see the direct impact of what you send on sales or other engagement metrics. While it’s important to keep a watchful eye on how messages are performing, try not to be too reactive.

Make sure you’re understanding what you’re seeing, consider the different factors that might be having an impact, and leave enough time for trends to bed in so you can be sure what you’re seeing is an accurate picture of what’s happening out there.