Image of a lady holding a phone, pointing to explore the essential features for WhatsApp marketing tools

WhatsApp marketing has a baseline open rate of 58%, almost 70% if optimized, personalized and timed well. Not to forget, high engagement and click-through rate of around 15%.

In fact, the global open rate of WhatsApp is reported to be as high as 98%.

Businesses just cannot simply afford to utilize the potential of WhatsApp for marketing. To do that, they require a feature-rich WhatsApp marketing tool.

This blog aims to help businesses choose the perfect WhatsApp marketing tool by ensuring it offers these must-have features.

Must-Have Features For WhatsApp Marketing Tools

Here are must-have features for WhatsApp marketing tools you should consider before choosing one.

Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is an advanced personalization feature that allows businesses to categorize their target audience into several distinct groups based on a commonality, shared characteristics or any specific criteria.

Segmentation is the antidote to generic content that misses relevance to the customers.

It helps companies to perform several types of segmentation for WhatsApp marketing, including:

  • Seasonal segmentation
  • Psychographic segmentation
  • Demographic segmentation
  • Geographical segmentation
  • Behavioural segmentation

Segmentation is essential for maximizing the ROI and minimising the custom churn. It ensures you send the right message to the right people at the right time.

Here are a few benefits of the segmentation feature in a WhatsApp marketing tool:

  • Help increase repeat customers
  • Reduce customer acquisition cost
  • Boost customer engagement
  • Retarget customers you will otherwise most likely lose
  • Low cost of conversion
  • Reduce the rate of unsubscribing
  • Better return on investment

Contact Management

Contact management is one of the WhatsApp marketing tool’s most foundational yet powerful features.

Managing a large volume of WhatsApp contacts through spreadsheets or email inboxes overwhelms businesses.

They must expect a contact management feature from the perfect WhatsApp marketing tool. The feature allows you to cater for the increasing number of contacts with your business across channels.

It allows businesses to:

  • Know who their customers are
  • Extensive details are organized and secured for easy accessibility
  • Manage customer queries on a real-time basis

Read This: What To Look For When Choosing A WhatsApp Service Provider

WhatsApp Templates

One of the top benefits of collaborating with a top business service provider like Route Mobile’s WhatsApp Business Platform through WhatsApp API is creating WhatsApp template messages.

You can create a varied range of WhatsApp templates for different use cases, such as:

  • Product launches
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Promotional offers
  • Order confirmation
  • Newsletters

This feature allows businesses to save time using a pre-set template where they don’t have to craft a WhatsApp business.

A snapshot a phone showcasing how WhatsApp templates looks

Also Read: Exploring New WhatsApp Business Marketing Features & Templates

Broadcasting, Automation & Scheduling

Through automation, businesses can maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of WhatsApp marketing strategy.

So, the WhatsApp marketing tool you choose must allow you to automate and schedule WhatsApp messages using workflows, triggers and other sub-features. Scheduling messages helps simplify WhatsApp marketing campaigns, allowing automated messages to be sent at the right time for maximized effectiveness.

Integrations

Integration for WhatsApp marketing tools helps businesses to interconnect several platforms or applications.

You can create a seamless workflow with brand consistency across various communication channels.

These features help you automate and streamline the marketing procedure and integrate it with various applications or systems like CRM, marketing automation, commerce platforms, and more.

Also Read: Working Knowledge Of WhatsApp APIs: On-Premise & Cloud

WhatsApp Chatbot

Using WhatsApp Chatbot can boost lead generation by 500% and 28% lead-to-conversion rate. Chatbots are critical for automating customer service help in:

  • Increasing customer engagement
  • Improve customer experience
  • Boost customer satisfaction
  • Boost sales

Chatbot interacts with customers through pre-determined messages, delivering instant customer support and information about products or services.

The chatbots are able to handle large amounts of routine inquiries and answer frequently answered questions instantly without customers having to wait longer for human customer agents.

Compliance & Security

To ensure data security measures and compliance with data protection regulations, you must expect a wide array of compliance and security features, such as

  • End-to-end encryption to protect sensitive information
  • Regulating adherence to WhatsApp Business API regulations such as consent, authentication, etc.
  • Secure data management
  • User authentication to verify user identities
  • Robust integrations
  • Ensuring to safeguard user privacy

These are major checkboxes to check when evaluating a WhatsApp marketing tool based on compliance and security features.

WhatsApp Drip Marketing

One of the must-have features of a perfect WhatsApp marketing tool like Route Mobile’s WhatsApp business messaging platform is drip campaigns.

These campaigns are about sending a series of strategically pre-written messages to users over a specific period of time.

Drip marketing allows businesses to nurture their leads, acquire new customers and deliver their customized messages to targeted contacts in a sequence without doing anything manually.

WhatsApp Flows

WhatsApp Flows is a WhatsApp Business Platform feature that allows businesses to create workflows on WhatsApp, offering to:

  • Acquire new customers
  • Allow easy signups for events, promotions, newsletters and more
  • Generating leads through personalizations
  • Improve customer retention
  • Reduce churn through repeat customers and cross-selling

Consider a WhatsApp marketing tool that can manage WhatsApp Flows, offering industry-specific message templates and smooth workflows.

A snapshot a phone showcasing how banking industry leverages WhatsApp flows to their benefit

Must-Read: Everything You Need To Know About WhatsApp Flows

Analytics & Reporting

Route Mobile believes, “to optimize, you must be able to manage and to manage, you must be able to measure”.

Hence, businesses must look for WhatsApp-specific analytics and reporting features while considering a tool for WhatsApp marketing in 2024.

A perfect tool will help you give clear, well-defined, specific, measurable results in the form of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like:

  • ROCS ( Return on Campaign Spend)
  • CTR ( Click-through Rates)
  • Delivery rate
  • Open rate
  • RPC (Revenue per Click)
  • Engagement rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Revenue per recipient
  • Cost per recipient
  • Total revenue

Conclusion

Once you check all the boxes for these must-have features, you will most likely end up with the ideal WhatsApp marketing tool. Consider a business service provider that is reputed, scalable, ROI-driven and has industry expertise in WhatsApp Business services.

Route Mobile is a leading cloud communication brand offering top WhatsApp business platforms with rich features like automation, integration, segmentation, marketing analytics, and more. Contact our experts to get started with WhatsApp marketing strategy for 2024.

FAQs

What Features Should You Look For In WhatsApp Marketing Tools?

Broadcasting, segmentation, analytics, automation, rich communication, integration, and chatbots are a few top features you should look for in the WhatsApp marketing tool.

How To Choose The Best WhatsApp Marketing Software?

While you choose the best WhatsApp marketing software, evaluate it based on several factors such as your marketing goals, ease of use, scalability, features, budget and customer support.

How To Maximize WhatsApp Marketing For Your Business?

To maximize WhatsApp marketing for your business, send broadcast promotional messages, automate the campaign workflow, use segmentation and personalization to craft relevant messages and leverage advanced analytics and reports.