How to use WhatsApp for Re-targeting

Re-target effectively with WhatsApp. Learn how to reach customers who've abandoned their carts, boost conversions and drive sales.

After reading this title, you might wonder why I need a retargeting campaign when I can convert all my customers with a killer ad. You couldn't be more wrong.

Even in a perfect world, half of the customers who visit your store will leave it without buying anything (concept of probability). In our imperfect world, however, the number of first-time visitors who are not yet ready to buy your product increases to 92%. The interest in the product might be there, but it's just not enough for them to hit that "Add to Cart" button.

As an eCommerce business owner, you've already spent enough on ad campaigns to bring traffic to your store. Now, these customers know about you and your product. It would not be a great decision to let them go without getting something in return.

Now, setting up a retargeting campaign alone is not going to do much for you. If anything, you'll be making an endless loop of a campaign to bring the same people to take the same action. It only works to an extent. But what if there was a better way, more like a better flow, to convert these customers?

That's what we're going to discuss in this blog. Let's jump right into it.

WhatsApp Marketing — Why Use It?

Marketers across the world are trying to find innovative and efficient ways to reach and convert customers at the lowest possible cost. And messenger apps have shown the potential to become the go-to channels for grabbing and retaining audiences' attention.

And out of all the messenger apps, WhatsApp is the most popular among marketers because of its 2 billion monthly active users (highest among messenger apps). Moreover, it also boasts the highest message opening rate of 99%, leaving behind SMS and IVR.

What WhatsApp does is it removes the struggle of bringing traffic to the landing pages and shortens the funnel. And not just a shorter funnel, this app also gives marketers a chance to engage the customers with persuasive, personalized, and real-time conversations.

Another great thing about WhatsApp marketing is that you can automate it completely. The 24/7 chatbots make your brand more visible and accessible, helping you create a deeper relationship with the audience.

These are some of the reasons why you should use WhatsApp conversational marketing to increase conversions. Now let's see how you can use it for retargeting your potential customers and converting them. Hop on.

Improve Your Retargeting Ad Conversions With WhatsApp

Traditionally, it was believed that customers required seven touchpoints from a brand before they finally converted. However, the online space is now much more saturated than it was when this stat first appeared. This has led the current marketers to believe that the number is quite higher for the current market.

Knowing this, brands have to have a retargeting strategy to ensure they don't lose their potential customers. More so, when all they have to do is appear more in front of these customers and with better deals.

Retargeting is a process where the customers who left your site without taking any action are shown ads on different platforms. This means you always stay in the mind of those who are interested in your products.

Here our aim is not just to be in the minds of those customers but also to increase the chances of conversion by bringing them to WhatsApp. So first, we'll add an invisible pixel to our site using which we'll target the ads to the right customers. We'll set "text on WhatsApp" as the object of our campaign to bring them into our

WhatsApp funnel. We'll then use WhatsApp automation to ensure every customer receives a reply quickly. This is the flow we're going to follow.

Let's dive deeper into these steps.

Add Pixel To Your Website

Retargeting customers using Pixel is one of the most popular ways to do it. The first step is to add an invisible and unobtrusive piece of JavaScript code (also referred to as a pixel) to your website. This Pixel tracks the cookies on their browser once they leave your site.

And when these customers surf the internet, these cookies notify the relevant retargeting platform to show those visitors the ads of specific products that they explored in your store.

One of the biggest reasons why you should add pixels to your site is because it's timely. You can target a visitor as soon as they leave your store. The targeting can be behavior-based or specific to the pages they've visited.

Let's take Facebook, for example. If you have to add its Pixel, just open the Ads Manager and go to the Pixel section. Here, click 'Create a Pixel' and enter a name for it. Then click 'Install Pixel Now.' After installing it, copy the base code of the Pixel and paste it between the tags on each web page. Or you can just paste it into your website template to install it on your entire website. If you want to track specific action on specific pages, add 'event' on those pages.

For the amount of complex work pixel does, it's quite easy to install.

Run Retargeting Ads on Various Platforms

Choosing the platforms on which you run retargeting ads is very crucial for its success. You have to know where your audience hangs out on the internet. You can use analytics tools like Google Analytics to find out the referral sources for your Shopify eCommerce store.

If you see the majority of traffic coming from Google search, double your efforts of paid search retargeting. Do the same for social media platforms if the traffic is coming from Facebook or Instagram.

If you're going with social media, Facebook and Instagram should be your go-to options. You can go to Facebook Business Manager to create a set of audiences for your ads. When you're creating the audience set, select the option corresponding to your retargeting Pixel and set the number of days limit according to your need and past A/B test results.

When you've finalized the audience, create the budget for your campaign. This will determine the range of impressions your ad will get when it's launched. The more visitors you can target, the more leads you'll have for conversion. Hit that "Publish" button to launch your ad.

The Campaign Objective: Text on WhatsApp

Okay, so it's clear that you need to launch an ad for retargeting customers. But what's that one thing that'll change the complete game — it's the campaign objective.

Like we said earlier, you don't want to fall into an endless loop where your customers are led to the same page and are asked to do the same thing. You have to take your customers out of that loop, preferably on a channel where they can reach out to you 24/7, like WhatsApp.

So, the campaign objective should not be to lead your customers to the product or discount page. It should rather be to lead them to your WhatsApp chat. Once they hit that send button, you'll have their contact details, using which you can reach out to these customers anytime (must be appropriate for them).

But first, you have to ensure that they click on that Click-to-WhatsApp ad. And how do you do that? Here's how.

Offer Irresistible Discounts With Pre-filled WhatsApp Text

You can entice the targeted customers with irresistible discounts and offers. For example, you can offer a 10% discount and free shipping on a product. Customers who were really interested in the product will never want to miss out on this offer.

The more urgency and FOMO you can create with your ad, the higher will the chances of your potential customers following them.

However, you can't just give them the coupon code to avail the offer directly. If you do, they'll probably never enter your WhatsApp funnel. And there's a chance that they might not even buy the product.

So to bring them into your WhatsApp, what you can rather do is ask them to click the "Send Message" button on the ad to get their customer coupon code. You can set a pre-filled message for the ad where they can enter their name to receive the coupon code.

Moreover, if these customers still don't purchase your product, you can give them a higher discount and reduce the time limit for creating urgency. You gave them a 10% discount and free shipping. This time, try giving a 20% discount with shipping charges and set the time limit to 2-3 hours. This way, you won't have to sell the product at a 20% flat discount to everyone, as most of your customers would have already purchased the product.

You can go as high with your discounts as your budget allows you to. The main aim is to acquire new customers and keep the stock running. Because if these new customers happen to like your products, they are definitely going to prefer you over your customer.

Automated Chat Response with Custom Coupon Code

Now you're offering discounts via WhatsApp chat. Are you planning to sit an entire day and reply manually to all the customers who click on the ad? And that too for an uncertain number of days? You have a store to manage, which makes this task humanly impossible.

You still can, but at the cost of making customers wait for God knows how long. This is where WhatsApp automation comes into play.

You can set up a WhatsApp chatbot to send personalized replies with coupon codes to the customers the minute they send their messages. This chatbot can be further used to re-engage the customers if they have not purchased the product.

If all your discounts have been exhausted, using the WhatsApp marketing chatbot, you can show other relevant deals to the customers who've opted-in.

Improve Conversions With Conversations

There's nothing that drives conversions better than conversations. When you engage your customers with genuine conversations, they feel more confident to move from consideration to action. It creates a frictionless shopping experience for them.

With the help of QuickReply.ai, you can leverage the complete potential of WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Business API to create a more engaging experience for your potential customers. Hence, increasing the chances of conversion.

It can help you in setting up automated WhatsApp chat replies, adds FAQs to provide a quick resolution to customers, notifies them about their orders or products in the cart, informs them about sales, and much more.

Need help? Reach out to us at marketing@vfirst.com

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