Last year, Viber became the most popular messenger application among Ukrainian users. According to Google, this messenger is installed on 97% smartphones. Viber channel is wide open for businesses looking to reach their customers and boost sales.
GMS Enterprise Relations Unit Manager Pavlo Kravchenko participated in the E-shop event hosted by Retailers.ua, where he shared insights from the COMFY (electronics retailer) and MAXICARD (loyalty programme) cases: both managed to increase sales and bring back some of the customers who’d left, all by working with their customer base in Viber.
We are sharing the full text of the article originally posted on Retailers.ua.
Like smartphones, messengers are a growing trend, still very much on the rise. According to Statista, the number of smartphone users will reach 3 billion by 2020, and 77% of the population are projected to own a smartphone by 2025.
Viber is one of the most popular messengers with users numbering 1.5 billion worldwide. In Ukraine, for example, over 22 million use Viber.
Features
Unlike SMS, Viber offers a more diverse range of features. The messages can include not only plain text but also vibrant images or a button leading the user to the site with a specific offering. Other possible uses include birthday greetings, order statuses for online retailers, bonus programmes displaying the points received via a programme, etc.
Additionally, Viber communications can be branded using your brand’s logo, style, and colours. Users appreciate high-quality visuals coupled with meaningful texts.
Viber also enables two-way communication with customers which makes it an excellent channel for working with surveys and customer satisfaction feedback.
One of GMS’ clients engaged their customers in two-way communication about their ongoing rebranding to learn what the customers thought. The response rate was extremely high: within the first 60 minutes of reaching out, more than half their customers responded.
Targeted after-call campaigns
Apart from regular messaging, Viber offers targeted campaigns after calls.
Viber users call a lot: for example, in the Ukrainian segment, 30% of the users use Viber calls daily. Upon hanging up, the user will be shown a brand advertisement in the form of a special banner. This service includes the option of targeting by OS and location.
When it comes to using mobile marketing services, it’s important to keep the usefulness of content in mind. It’s no secret that consumers today are literally besieged by heaps and heaps of various offers and commercial information.
A good marketer must know its customers well: their preferences, tastes, and needs are paramount to deliver only content which is relevant to each type of audience. In other words, if the ads are for automobile parts, for example, they need to be delivered to customers who own one, otherwise, this information is irrelevant and a waste of marketing resources.
Viber chatbots
Another current trend. Chatbots are able to relieve the pressure on call centres, automate some of the tasks, and free up resources for other projects.
Stickers
Statistically, over 30% of Viber subscribers use stickers daily (this share is higher in some regions, for example, in Ukraine, it’s more than 50%).
Branded stickers allow a business to stand out. Many companies have already launched their branded sticker packs, which enjoy great popularity among users; the brands, in turn, enjoy the extra attention it brings them and the opportunity to stand out from the cornucopia of competitors.
Content
Today the customer expects something more than just a message to buy something or join a loyalty programme. In fact, both new and old customers engage with content. When you want something from a customer, let them know, make an action call to buy something, to follow a link, etc.
It’s also important to control the schedule of communications. For example, one large retailer sends out messages on Thursdays and Fridays, so that customers are encouraged to shop over the weekend.
Cart abandonment. COMFY’s case
This is indeed a sore topic for many retailers. We were approached by one of our partners, COMFY, to help them tackle this very problem — the company managed to boost sales by 10% using Viber.
It used to be that COMFY’s customers had to decide whether to purchase a vacuum cleaner online, or in the shop. Now, the offline and online experiences have been integrated: the customers are free to order the goods online and pick them up in the store, or vice versa. They enjoy this smooth shopping experience.
Cart abandonment is a problem many retailers are all too familiar with. People look up goods online, compare, read the specs, add them to the cart, and then for some reason simply leave without completing the purchase.
A classic move for e-commerce would be to send an email with the contents of the cart and invitation to complete the purchase. But COMFY decided to go further and take to other channels of communication.
COMFY chose Viber because it combines the features of both SMS (quick delivery) and email (containing a link to the site and calls to a specific action). Additionally, Viber works well for e-commerce: it enables communications which contain appealing imagery and attaches direct links to specific goods.
Using Viber as an additional channel to work on abandoned carts, COMFY was able to boost their sales by 10% in merely 7 months. Viber turned out to be very effective for personalised communications: click-through rate for Viber promotions proved to be 30% higher compared to SMS.
The company continues to use Viber messaging to notify customers about special offers for both online and offline shopping.
How to use Viber communication to bring back lost clients and promote new purchases
MAXICARD was facing a challenge: bringing back the ‘lost’ clients who hadn’t made any transactions in the partner’s system for over half a year.
With the help of GMS, MAXICARD sent out offers to make a purchase starting at 1 UAH ($0.036 USD) and receive a discount, earn a bonus, or participate in a give-away. MAXICARD decided to use both Viber and SMS.
Viber allowed them to send a saturated cluster of information (image, text and CTA).
As a result of Viber and SMS bulk messages, MAXICARD managed to bring back 3.5% of the ‘lost’ clients in just a month and a half, and these retrieved customers spent over 3 million UAH in the networks of the partners (over 106k USD). 78,108 people received messages on Viber, of whom 3,193 made a purchase. This amounted to a conversion rate of over 4%. 57,199 people received an SMS, of whom 1,507 made a purchase: a conversion rate of just 2.5%.
Conclusion
There is no panacea for boosting the efficiency of your customer outreach because every case is unique. Having a presence in every single channel shouldn’t be the goal in itself. It should work towards your goals. Be where your customers are.
For example, if your target audience is young people, they use messengers. But if they live in areas with a bad internet connection, SMS might be a better pick.
Make communicating with your brand easy and intuitive for your customers. Explore how GMS can help you bring back lost clients today.