Consumers today spend vast amounts of time on conversational channels, which has opened up new opportunities for different companies. This has helped companies get significantly closer to their customers for every single stage of the customer lifecycle, from pre-sales support, marketing campaigns, and post-purchase care.
Brands can significantly reduce their spending on operations while significantly optimizing their customer engagement activities. Consumers have always enjoyed shopping experiences that offer less friction than ever before. Marketers, especially innovators, are always jumping on various conversational channels to successfully engage with their customers and prospects.
The business journey involves modernizing the marketing experience across various channels such as email, SMS, and WhatsApp. Let’s dive deeper into understanding the different advantages and disadvantages of all the top customer engagement channels in the field of marketing.
Getting down to the nitty-gritty of Email Marketing
Email marketing is different as a channel compared to other social media channels due to the different preferences and various behaviour of audience cohorts. Depending on the numbers by generation, around 74% of baby boomers believe that email is an excellent channel for receiving information from brands. Similarly, 72% of generation X, 64% of millennials and 60% of zoomers prefer this form of communication.
Thus, it is essential for businesses in knowing and understanding the age demographics of their customers that influence the channels that they should prioritise. Here are some interesting statistics that we’ve obtained about email:
- More than 8 out of 10 people click a welcome email from a brand which generates 4x more opens and 10x more clicks than other types of emails.
- The click and open rates are much higher as brands send out around 5 newsletters per week.
- The average email click rate is 1.3% and the bounce rate is around 10.1%.
Understanding the importance of SMS marketing
One of the significant advantages of SMS involves its great global reach and its significant ability for sending messages without the internet. The SMS channel helps you connect with customers worldwide, especially in areas where data is not always available or free for a consumer.
SMS marketing is a fantastic tool in terms of improving the open rate, clicks and ease of access to talking with customers. SMS has become an excellent channel for breaking through the noise in terms of improving revenue and customer engagement.
Understanding the importance of WhatsApp marketing
WhatsApp is a relatively newer customer engagement channel with three different variations. Here are the 3 different variations that are provided by WhatsApp:
- The WhatsApp app is used by more than 2 billion people on a worldwide scale.
- The WhatsApp Business app is aimed at small companies looking to expand.
- The WhatsApp Business API is great in terms of the various features that are great for serving large businesses and successfully building WhatsApp capabilities into the software.
An advantage of WhatsApp is that it is great in terms of supporting various types of rich media such as gifs, videos and images. It is easier than ever for businesses to successfully engage customers with great eye-catching and interactive content.
WhatsApp helps to support all types of rich media such as images, videos and gifs as it is effective. It is easier than ever for businesses to successfully engage with customers through eye-catching and interactive content.
It is a great messaging app that is used across the world with more than 2 billion users and many countries across the world use it as a messaging app. The statistics on WhatsApp have revealed bigger opportunities for marketers that bring businesses and consumers designed specifically for 1-to-1 conversations.
The adoption of this engagement channel will continue to grow in different places such as Indonesia, the United States, South America and different parts of Europe.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it depends on your business goals and the audiences that you want to reach and achieve. Ultimately, you want to know your customers in figuring out the channels that work best for your company’s objectives.
More businesses need to choose a combination of the channels in ensuring full coverage of their target base. It is important to know and understand the maximum benefit of all the channels and the company might also use email for newsletters, SMS for urgent notifications along with WhatsApp for promotions.
At Route Mobile, we have all the tools and expertise needed to improve your communication strategy with our voice solutions. Want to learn more? Talk to us about how we can help you bring your voice strategy to life.
