Lessons learnt from rolling out WhatsApp lead tracking across 4 continents
"Buyers and sellers want to talk on WhatsApp. Find out what we have learnt about making these interactions measurable"
Here are the key lessons we have learnt so far as we have thought about, built, broken, fixed, tweaked and implemented our WhatsApp lead tracking solution over the last 3 years:
- Buyers and sellers (which I will group together as ‘users’ ) want to talk on WhatsApp. It's obviously market and vertical dependent but in general even when conversations don’t start on WhatsApp, many if not most, end up there at some point in the journey (a car dealer told me recently that he ends up on WhatsApp with 99% of his leads).
- If users are ending up on WhatsApp anyway, adding WhatsApp as a Contact Option improves the sales experience (SX) by getting them there faster and gives the business some insights into the interaction. BUT… offering WhatsApp as a Contact Option is not as simple as it sounds if you want to deliver a revenue boosting SX.
- User behaviour is tough to predict and varies considerably from market to market. There is no ‘one size fits all’. The best approach is to learn by experimenting.
- Conversation design matters. Structure and wording must be clear and detailed enough to let the user know what to expect but not so long and detailed so that they can’t be bothered to read.
- Onboarding is crucial. Beyond having clear message content, it's key to explain to users what to expect. E.g. A pop-up box explaining what’s about to happen when a buyer first hits the Contact on WhatsApp button or explaining to sellers exactly how WhatsApp leads will be arriving after a lead tracking tool is introduced.
- Some sellers like to receive leads on WhatsApp, others don’t (even those that don’t will often end up talking to buyers on WhatsApp). It's important to bear these lead notification preferences in mind when rolling out a lead tracking tool.
- Privacy is important to WhatsApp. We have had lots of enquiries from businesses who want to be able to see the content of conversations between their users to be able to moderate/learn/monitor etc. WhatsApp will never allow a third party to see the content of conversations between two personal WhatsApp app users, so if that is your goal, WhatsApp is not your tool.
