Decrypting Audience Outreach with WhatsApp for Business in 360 SMS

The consistent evolution in the texting landscape has given way to richer formats of interaction and access. Together they’ve redefined the ways we think of text and communication in general. WhatsApp has been the foremost catalyst of this change, to the point where active users view incoming notifications almost immediately.

But businesses that recognize WhatsApp as a force also look to pair its reach with equally good personalization and more dynamic applications.

Why we prefer WhatsApp-automation
over Bulk-WhatsApp

When WhatsApp messages are batched together in larger numbers, you’ll still need the recipients to reply to you within 24 hours, as an accepted form of consent. You must get recipients to opt-in and respond every 24 hours, even if you’ve established a relationship with them over a long conversation in the past. That means, by design, maintaining WhatsApp databases and sending bulk messages to non-respondents is futile.

To effectively use WhatsApp, businesses need to check in on who’s responded in the last 24 hours and send out messages only to them. This is easily done with automation over WhatsApp. You could configure a custom dynamic field in a Salesforce Report over all recipients. You could set this up to countdown from 24 hours and reset every time the customer replies and a new ‘session’ starts.

WhatsApp Attachments
– Important Considerations

Businesses can’t send locations or contacts using WhatsApp. They also can’t see replies to specific messages. If a customer replies to a specific message, agents will see only the new message the customer sends.

Aside from this, only a single attachment of no more than 4.5 MB can be sent per message. Also, attachments can only belong to one of the following popular formats:

Images: JPG, JPEG, PNG

Audio:  MP3, OGG, AMR

Documents: PDF

Video: MP4

Sidestep Service-provider gatekeeping with 360 SMS for WhatsApp

With no other competing means, while millions of business ventures depend on high-priced SMSes for a quick means to connect and engage with the audience, 360 SMS makes WhatsApp messaging benefits workable at a much-reduced cost. 

WhatsApp for business texting has redefined the texting landscape, providing an intuitive and familiar chat-like interface to users.

Meet 2 billion customers where they are – Tap into Conversational Commerce

Almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy, WhatsApp, once merely limited to reaching out to family and friends, share images, videos, etc., has now jumped to the center-stage of business to offer up its massive user-base.

WhatsApp over 360 SMS serves as an effective way to keep users updated through personalized alerts.

In any business, it’s ideally the customer whose consent matters most for starting any dialogue, and Salesforce native app’s WhatsApp functionality is no exception.

To initiate any business conversation using WhatsApp, a customer’s first Reply or message to a pre-approved message template is accepted as consent to take the conversation to the next level.

For example, your first pre-approved template could look like something this:

<Your account with 360 SMS app has been activated>

The moment a user replies to the first message, the session gets activated.

Unlike SMS, you can’t send messages that aren’t approved by the WhatsApp team.

On receiving consent from customers, the feature lets you send free forms, messages, and attachments for up to 24 hours calculated from the first message received at the customers’ end.

After 24 hours, if required, you can get the session reactivated by again sending another message from a pre-approved template followed by a user reply.

Engage Global WhatsApp Audiences securely, at scale

With no restrictions or caps on WhatsApp message-sending capacity, you’re free to send as many messages as you want and target wider audiences faster. For more personalized communication though, you can use WhatsApp to send bulk messages through ListViews, Campaigns, or even Reports.

The Salesforce ListViews you create are customizable lists created by applying relevant filters and logic based on audience targeting criteria. For Campaigns, you can either use existing ones or append them by adding members to it based on the responses you receive.

For shooting WhatApp bulk messages, both of them can solve your purpose, saving a lot of time and preventing you from sending messages one after another, manually.

For ListViews and Campaigns, you’d be stuck selecting recipients manually one after another beyond a certain threshold of recipients, but not with Salesforce Reports. 

It lets you send templated bulk SMS once, daily, or monthly over a pre-set period. You can take advantage of bulk WhatsApp messages with Salesforce Reports if you’re sending out texts to over 2k recipients. And without a threshold for selecting recipients, sending bulk messages is distilled down to a single click.

Deep audience penetration on a budget

Texting remains a ubiquitous means to reach customers, and yet, it remains prohibitively expensive for many European countries struggling with high SMS prices and country-to-country texting restrictions. As a contender, WhatsApp messaging projects itself as the best communication channel to reach customers promptly and let businesses tap into open-rates, engagement volumes, and customer fulfillment they’ve always dreamt of.