Individuals are shifting from Email or SMS business communication to WhatsApp business communication. In many cases, this shift is linked to low email open rates (20 to 50 percent) for nearly 60% of marketers worldwide.
These numbers depend on factors like industry, target audience, subject line framing, or CTAs. However, the numbers are more promising for SMS as a communication channel for businesses. This is because most adults use their mobile phones as an extension of their arms.
However, there are limitations to scaling businesses to an international platform while keeping your messaging visually engaging.
WhatsApp allows you to deal with the challenges of these communication platforms.
Its open rates exceed 95% and click-through rates at 15%,
The communication platform delivers higher messaging quality, use of media, and international messaging plus for free. Moreover, it has a tremendous market reach. Presently, 50 million companies worldwide (excluding China) use WhatsApp as a marketing channel.
Cooby makes WhatsApp more efficient for businesses and enterprises to optimize their business communication. It allows you to track the progress of several leads and declutter their chats to improve response times. Cooby’s WhatsApp CRM integration allows you to sync these conversations with other interactions on different channels. It gives companies a 360-degree overview of their customers or prospects.
Exploring challenges of business communication on email and SMS
Below are a few challenges that businesses observe when they communicate over email or SMS.
Email communication uses and challenges
Over the past 160 years, communication has evolved from slow, expensive horseback deliveries to emails accessible worldwide via the Internet.
However, if we really think about it, we haven't upgraded much since horseback deliveries, as emails have become a traditional communication medium. Yet, email is preferred for sending detailed information, such as invoices, contracts, or newsletters, where formatting and attachments are necessary.
It excels at elaborate updates and documents that need more space than SMS, or WhatsApp can offer, even with its lower open rates of around 20%.
Another common opinion is that email's professional tone makes it ideal for formal exchanges. It’s also searchable and easily archived. You can easily locate past communications and access conversation records whenever necessary, which is important for businesses needing conversation records for compliance or reference.
There is an evident shift to WhatsApp being the most popular communication channel, with about 2.8 billion monthly users and 100 billion messages being sent daily.
WhatsApp bridges convenience and functionality, while email remains the go-to for long communication. Even with its defined purpose, there are notable challenges in using email for business purposes. The challenges are as follows:
- Emails can lead to information overload, thereby causing messages to be ignored or left unread, especially when there are too many. Due to the sheer volume of emails that flood a customer's inbox, experiencing email overload is almost inevitable.
- Emails lack a personal touch. Many email campaigns rely on generic templates not tailored specifically for the target audience. Naturally, this type of communication “feels” like mass communication and does not entice the desired CTA from consumers.
- Going through emails can be exhaustive as they do require time to sort. Sorting through emails requires mental effort, especially when determining which messages are urgent, important, or irrelevant. This cognitive load leads to fatigue.
- Emails often don’t reach the target audience. This happens due to the low email deliverability ratio. In terms of email deliverability, low open rates signal internet service providers (ISPs) that recipients are not interested in the brand or the content. This lack of interest affects future email delivery and can even cause the campaigns to be blocked. It's a vicious cycle—low open rates cause ISPs to block future emails, leading to even lower open rates and further decreasing engagement.
- Business communication via email also faces the issue of higher bounce rates due to outdated or unverified email address lists. This, once again, affects the deliverability ratio of your emails.
Overly promotional language, spam trigger words, and poor sender reputation also cause emails to be filtered out before reaching the recipient's inbox. Overall, emails face their first judgment based on the subject line. It acts as the welcome mat of emails, and often, the issues with subject lines are straightforward: If the subject line makes your email look like spam, both people and the spam filters used by ISPs to protect them will likely treat it as spam.
SMS communication uses and challenges
Somewhere after letters were delivered on horseback and email was discovered, there was SMS – simple, reliable text messages. SMS has been the backbone of mobile communication for ages.
The most significant advantage of SMS is its dependability, making it a lifesaver in areas with spotty internet or for people who prefer a simple phone. Nowadays, many domestic plans have unlimited texting (not including bulk messages), so messages can be sent freely without worrying too much about costs. Unless, of course, you're sending messages overseas – those can add up!
While SMS may lack the advanced functionalities offered by platforms like WhatsApp, its core strengths lie in its simplicity and reliability. It presents a straightforward communication method that functions flawlessly on any mobile device, regardless of age, model, or feature set.
This dependability proves particularly valuable in regions with limited internet access or for individuals utilizing basic mobile phones. While almost everyone reads texts sent by SMS (like 90-98% of the time), whether the communication actually persuades the desired CTA depends on the message. That said, SMS communication comes with certain challenges.
- SMS has limited space. With just 160 characters, it's tough to say everything you want and make it interesting. This means it's hard to tailor the message for each person.
- Spam filters pose another challenge for SMS marketers. Messages are susceptible to filtering, which prevents delivery to intended recipients. Even carefully crafted and targeted campaigns may fail to reach their audience. Moreover, excessive or irrelevant messaging damages brand reputation and leads to customers perceiving the sender as spam.
- Technical limitations come up due to network rules, compatibility issues between different phones, and limits on message length and format.
- SMS conversion rates are often lower due to the challenge of crafting a compelling call to action within a brief message.
- SMS messages are text-only, which means you cannot include images, videos, or other types of media.
While it is possible to track and measure text messages, there are some metrics that miss. For example, you won’t find out who read your message.
Addressing business communication challenges
It has been established now that Email and SMS have their own niches, but they both face common problems such as lack of personalization, limited reach and risk of being easily labeled as spam.
"Being able to reach somebody halfway across the world instantly, on a device that is always with you, was powerful." — Jan Koum, Co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp. The inception of the app WhatsApp stemmed from the founder’s frustration with the limited potential of iMessage to be a borderless communication tool.
The result: WhatsApp, a global platform compatible with both iOS and Android. Initially, the idea was to create an app that allowed users to display their statuses next to their names in the contacts list, notifying their contacts of their availability.
The state of WhatsApp
WhatsApp morphed into a powerful communication tool, including features like end-to-end encryption, disappearing photos and messages, broadcast lists, and seamless media sharing. With nearly 3 billion users globally, WhatsApp ranks third in the US with 91.3 million users, with India and Brazil at the top. To what do we owe WhatsApp its popularity? Well, for starters, it's completely free to use!
Additionally, WhatsApp's user base is truly global in scale, with the app being the dominant messaging platform in over 100 countries worldwide.
Uses and challenges of using WhatsApp for business communication
- Tailored messaging. WhatsApp has features that allow businesses to send tailored messages, making customers feel valued and understood.
- Privacy. Knowing that conversations are private due to the end-to-end encryption feature helps increase customers' trust.
- Reach- It's a platform people already use daily, making it easy for you to reach them with your message.
- Two-way async communication. WhatsApp allows for real-time, two-way communication, enabling businesses to build relationships and address customer concerns promptly.
- Media sharing capabilities. WhatsApp’s seamless media sharing feature helps in curating messages that appeal to customers visually, cognitively, and conceptually.
However, WhatsApp comes with its own set of challenges.
If your sales representatives are using their personal or work phones to close deals, then dealing with cluttered WhatsApp inboxes as they work with several clients daily will cause inefficiencies. It results in delayed responses or unstandardized response formats, all of which the manager may not even be aware of.
Due to the same reasons, sales reps may not be able to navigate through the unopened chats. Plus, manually transferring customer data from WhatsApp to your CRM systems consumes additional employee time that could be dedicated to lead generation.
When sales reps spend time typing out responses to clients instead of being able to use templates tailored to meet customer needs, again a challenge that could cost businesses time and money is created.
How Cooby addresses WhatsApp’s challenges in business communication
“Cooby is a tool that improves information flow. It makes sure everyone in the business can be on the same page when it comes to customers.”
- Wen Shaw, CEO of Cooby.
Managing WhatsApp interactions with customers becomes increasingly challenging as businesses grow. As businesses scale, managing customer communications becomes more challenging since WhatsApp is largely disconnected from other business tools.
Cooby helps WhatsApp users organize accounts by triaging customer chats, taking notes, and setting reminders to improve productivity.
Cooby's native integration with CRM enables 2-way syncing between WhatsApp and CRM. Your WhatsApp messages sync automatically with your CRM, helping businesses have a complete overview of customer communication. It empowers your rep to focus more on WhatsApp sales while helping them update contact information directly from their WhatsApp.
Sell and support intelligently
Cooby allows managers to coach their team effectively by keeping track of all customer communication in one place. Mission Mittelstand, a German SME consulting firm, faced a challenge managing a surge of WhatsApp group chats. The entire coaching team was added to every client group, hindering productivity. With Cooby, they organized their inboxes, reduced group chat overload, and reduced communication time by 20%, helping them prioritize support for more strategic clients.
Moreover, Cooby integrates with your CRM to add more visibility to your sales conversations and make it easier to standardize messaging. Reps don’t need to transfer WhatsApp conversations to the CRM; Cooby automates the entire process.
Boutir, a video-centric e-commerce platform, has experienced a nearly 300% increase in sales with 23x ROI. It uses Cooby to track and manage customer interactions effectively.
Take a Cooby’s free trial and make your business communication more effective.
