WhatsApp marketing vs E-mail marketing: What’s best for your business?

In today’s digital landscape, we find ourselves seamlessly navigating between various conversational platforms throughout the day. These platforms serve as invaluable tools for staying connected with friends, family, and colleagues, while also presenting businesses with unprecedented opportunities to engage with customers and maintain connections at every stage of the purchasing journey.

Marketers are capitalizing on these conversational channels to interact with customers, nurture leads, and deliver timely product promotions.

The benefits are mutual for businesses and customers alike. Businesses have optimized their spending and tapped into enhanced customer engagement possibilities, while customers relish personalized and effortless shopping experiences. What’s more, customers can easily connect with their favorite brands with just a few clicks.

In the realm of conversational communication channels, WhatsApp holds a paramount position. With over 2 billion monthly users, WhatsApp presents an enticing platform for marketers to delve into. This is predominantly attributed to several key factors:

1. Exceptionally high open rates: WhatsApp messages boast an impressive 99% open rate, ensuring that messages sent through this platform will likely be seen by recipients.
2. Instant responsiveness: As an instant messaging platform, customers are more inclined to promptly respond to WhatsApp messages than emails or other communication forms, leading to more efficient and effective interactions.
3. High user engagement: On average, users access WhatsApp nearly 23–25 times per day and spend approximately 38 minutes on the app daily, highlighting the significant engagement and attention garnered by the platform.

In this blog, we aim to provide an unbiased comparison of email marketing versus WhatsApp marketing, allowing you to decide which platform aligns best with your business needs. Let’s dive in.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• What is Email Marketing?
• Pros & Cons of Using Email Marketing
• What is WhatsApp Marketing?
• Pros & Cons of Using WhatsApp Marketing
• What is the difference between email and WhatsApp Marketing?
• Email Marketing vs WhatsApp Marketing: Which Is More Effective for Your Business?
• Conclusion

1. What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is simply using email to promote products and services. Despite rumors of its demise, email remains a vibrant platform with active users.

It’s a fast and cost-effective way to connect with new customers, allowing you to craft and share targeted messages. However, it’s crucial not to overdo it — people quickly lose patience with spam or irrelevant content flooding their inboxes.

Once your emails are flagged as spam, there’s no turning back. They’ll likely go unread, undermining your marketing efforts and missing your target audience.

However, the email open rates have plummeted, with some reports indicating rates as low as 20%. Regardless of how captivating your email content may be, if recipients aren’t opening your emails, your efforts are in vain.

In today’s landscape, people predominantly check their emails for business purposes, such as verifying OTPs and completing email verifications. This shift in behavior underscores the importance of adapting marketing strategies to meet evolving consumer preferences and habits.

2. Pros & Cons of Using Email Marketing

Let’s now look at the pros & cons of using email marketing.

Pros:

1. Cost-Effective: Email marketing offers significant cost savings compared to other marketing channels, eliminating expenses associated with printing, advertising, or branding space.
2. Scalable: It allows businesses to reach broad audiences or narrow, targeted groups as needed and provides a platform for sending targeted and personalized messages tailored to specific audiences.
3. Customer relationship: Email marketing helps you engage with customers who eagerly anticipate communication from your brand, as your email list comprises individuals who have actively opted in to receive emails.
4. Brand building: With email marketing, you can enhance your content’s relevance and align it with your brand persona by incorporating attachments, GIFs, or videos to captivate and resonate with your audience.

Cons:

1. Low open rate: There’s no assurance that your emails will reach customers’ inboxes, as they often end up in the junk or spam folder, reducing the likelihood of being read.
2. Every brand uses email marketing: Customers receive numerous marketing emails from various direct-to-consumer brands, increasing the chances of overlooking yours.
3. Limited designing options: Creativity is essential for making your emails noticeable to readers, but crafting unique designs can be time-consuming due to email’s limited flexibility in design options.

3. What is WhatsApp Marketing?

When comparing email vs. WhatsApp, it’s interesting to note that WhatsApp is relatively a newcomer in the block but has been gaining massive momentum with businesses and consumers alike. WhatsApp marketing refers to the activity of promoting your products and services on a popular platform.

There are three versions of the app: basic WhatsApp for personal communication, WhatsApp Business App tailored for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and WhatsApp Business API designed for medium and large enterprises.

Adding WhatsApp as a marketing channel enables businesses to instantly reach thousands of opted-in customers, engage in real-time conversations, share marketing content, and guide potential customers toward a sale.

WhatsApp offers immense opportunities for marketers by facilitating personalized conversations, bringing businesses closer to customers, and enhancing engagement.

4. Pros & Cons of Using WhatsApp Marketing

Let’s now look at the pros & cons of using WhatsApp marketing.

Pros:

1. Highly Secure Platform: WhatsApp ensures high levels of data privacy and security through its end-to-end encryption of all conversations, providing customers with assurance regarding their data.
2. Real-time Customer Support: Businesses can offer real-time customer support and service through WhatsApp, enabling instant solutions to queries and fostering easier connections with customers.
3. Engaging Communication: WhatsApp facilitates highly engaging communication by allowing users to incorporate elements of fun and creativity such as gifs, emojis, and audio or video content into messages.
4. Stronger Customer Relationships: By engaging with brands on WhatsApp, customers feel more connected, heard, and understood, enabling businesses to build stronger relationships. Automated responses and quick replies help address FAQs and product-related queries efficiently.
5. Improved Conversions and Sales: WhatsApp is an ideal platform for improving conversions and increasing sales as customers are more likely to respond to messages on this channel. Timely messages announcing new product launches, recovering abandoned carts, and sharing discounts and offers can effectively win over customers and drive them back to stores.

Cons:

1. Strict Guidelines and Policies: WhatsApp has established stringent guidelines and policies that companies must follow.
2. 24-Hour Response Window: Once a customer reaches out, businesses have a 24-hour window to respond. Failure to do so restricts responses to WhatsApp template messages, which must be pre-approved by WhatsApp before sending to customers. But that won’t be a problem for your business, as ShopKey has hundreds of pre-approved template messages for your business to use.

5. What is the difference between email and WhatsApp Marketing?

The primary difference between email and WhatsApp lies in the speed of communication and the risk of messages being classified as junk or spam.

When deciding between WhatsApp and email marketing, it’s crucial to consider the following differences:

• Open Rate: WhatsApp boasts an impressive open rate of 99%, attributed to its quick and personal nature. In contrast, email faces challenges like cluttered inboxes and spam, resulting in a lower open rate of around 21.33%.
• Click-Through Rate: WhatsApp achieves a click-through and conversion rate of 45–60% due to its personalization, instant response, and direct communication. Email typically yields lower click-through and conversion rates of about 2–5% due to recipient reluctance to click on external links.
• Junk & Spam: Emails are prone to being marked as junk or spam, while WhatsApp messages are not. WhatsApp provides indicators such as double-tick and blue-tick to confirm message delivery and read status.
• Resource Dependence: Email marketing demands significant effort in design and content creation, while WhatsApp is more casual and requires fewer resources. WhatsApp also allows for sharing various content types without file size constraints.
• User Responsiveness: Users spend an average of 40 minutes daily on WhatsApp, leading to almost instant response rates. In contrast, email responsiveness is lower, with users typically checking emails for specific purposes such as OTP verifications or business communications.

While email marketing remains prevalent, with 82% of marketers worldwide utilizing it, WhatsApp marketing offers distinct advantages in terms of open and click-through rates, lack of spam issues, resource efficiency, and user responsiveness.

6. Email Marketing vs WhatsApp Marketing: Which Is More Effective for Your Business?

Email marketing and WhatsApp marketing each offer unique strengths in engaging consumers and driving brand growth. WhatsApp excels in providing quick, intimate, and resource-efficient communication, while email marketing delivers segmented, personalized content and a substantial return on investment (ROI). Additionally, email verification ensures messages are not undelivered or marked as spam.

The choice between WhatsApp and email marketing depends on your business’s nature and goals. However, you don’t necessarily have to choose one over the other. Combining both channels often yields the best results.

For example, let’s consider a local restaurant seeking to enhance its customer outreach strategies. The restaurant could implement ShopKey to provide a click-to-chat WhatsApp button on its website. When visitors click on it, the restaurant can offer immediate deals, like a lunch special, via WhatsApp for fast responses and instant engagement.

Simultaneously, the restaurant could use email marketing to share stories, recipes, and updates with customers interested in deeper connections. Email allows for more detailed content and can help build stronger, ongoing relationships with customers over time.

In this scenario, integrating WhatsApp and email marketing into the restaurant’s strategy can be highly effective. WhatsApp captures attention quickly for immediate deals, while email marketing nurtures long-term customer relationships.

7. Conclusion

Indeed, both WhatsApp and email possess distinct strengths. While WhatsApp offers immediacy and intimacy, email thrives in delivering personalized, detailed content.

When debating between WhatsApp and email marketing, your decision should align with your company’s nature and business goals. However, it’s not necessary to choose one platform over the other.

Instead, why not leverage the strengths of both? A balanced approach that incorporates WhatsApp and email ensures swift engagement and fosters long-term relationship-building, leading to a robust marketing strategy overall.

Further Reading

Are you interested in learning how WhatsApp can benefit your business? Read these articles to find out:

• WhatsApp Business API: The Ultimate Guide to WhatsApp API [August 2023]
• WhatsApp’s New Conversation-Based Pricing: Effective from June 2023
• Top 10 Unique WhatsApp API Benefits You Need To Know

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