Nurture future students with interactive campaigns using WhatsApp push notifications
With WhatsApp Cloud API you can create original experiences to boost your sales
CONTEXT
During the pandemic, academies and institutions were forced to go digital so as not to be left behind. On the other hand, we all realized that being able to study from home is a reality (and a convenience).
Every time there are more and more academies looking for customers and bombarding social media and other media with ads about their courses. These ads eventually tire the users and blend with each other.
All of this translated into the need of standing out among the competition with marketing strategies that create unforgettable experiences from the very beginning.
The problem
The ads campaigns and social media posts are very useful to attract people to your institution’s website. However, as the competition is growing, the following can happen.
- Your ads are buried among thousands of ads from other academies and institutions, which prevents you from standing out.
- Calls to action lead to contact forms, but these are boring and the conversion rates are very low.
- You don’t have a way to contact directly the interested people.
THE SOLUTION
A compelling reason to choose this channel is that WhatsApp messages have a 98% open rate, and is an interactive channel by nature.
Other WhatsApp advantages are:
- One-to-one two-way communication
- Immediate answers
- Asynchronous
- Automations
Starting a marketing strategy with ads that lead to WhatsApp will help you create a different experience for your future students
SOME EXAMPLES
- Trivia to win a free course
Giving interested people the opportunity to try out and see what the course is going to be like is great proof of value.
A fun and interactive way to offer the class is with a trivia on WhatsApp.
The first thing you need is an entry point, for example, a push notification with a button that activates a trivia chatbot that asks questions about a subject of your choice. If the user answers all the questions correctly he will win a free session.
Using this type of campaign will allow you to:
- Collect the information of the people who are interested in your courses
- Provide a fun and original interaction on your prospects’ favorite channel.
- Stand out from your competition and show your value.
- Weekly challenges
Push notifications are the royalty of interaction, and if you launch a marketing strategy on WhatsApp you will see results from the very beginning.
An idea to take advantage of this tool is to send weekly challenges that follow the theme of your academy.
For example, you can create one with a weekly challenge to offer a discount to the participants who complete it.
- Multimedia messages
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, and with push notifications you can send multimedia elements such as videos, images, and documents.
You can create an interactive campaign on WhatsApp to send short videos of any of your teachers talking about a subject, an infographic, or a curious fact in image format.
You can add buttons to this message so that the user can interact with a live agent or that activate a chatbot that compiles their information.
These are only a few examples of interactive campaigns, the limit is your imagination.
Goog practices
Now let’s dive into some good practices you should keep in mind when creating interactive WhatsApp campaigns.
- To send push notifications you must have the users opt-in. You can obtain it by asking them directly in a user-initiated conversation, on your webpage, in a phone call, etc.
- Do not send too many messages. We recommend sending a maximum of one message per week to avoid saturating users.
- Create segments for better personalization. It is better to send a message to a few people that are interested than to many that aren’t.
- Be aware of when you send a message and keep in mind the time zones and your customers’ habits.
- Make your messages dynamic, don’t be afraid of using emojis, stickers, gifs, etc.
- Think about how you talk with your friends and family and use these elements in the conversations with your customers.
Conclusions
Standing out from your competition can be difficult and users are drowned in one-way, repetitive advertising.
WhatsApp interactive campaigns are a great way to attract customers and give them a great experience.
