2022年12月26日

Business Value of the WeChat Official Account

By iclick | IParllay Marketing Blog, WeChat Marketing

Business Value of the WeChat Official Account

iclick
2022-12-26

What functions do companies want to achieve by WeChat, or what business goals do they want to achieve? These questions seem pointless, but many companies just don’t know it. Companies often ask me, what is the value of WeChat? Or what companies can do on WeChat? someone may answer that they wanted to sell things, engage with WeChat users and maintain a good relationship with customers on WeChat, etc.
First, we have to clarify two points: we need to understand the value of WeChat and the users needs; Then we need to divide the business goal into phased indicators, so that we can make the business goals of WeChat marketing practicable.

1.To Win The Market And Seize The Opportunities

With the increasing popularity of smartphones, WeChat has gradually moved from a high-income audience into a popular style. There is no doubt that there are unlimited business opportunities in the market of WeChat. So now, either companies, organizations and individuals, large or small , everyone rushes to register the WeChat Official Accounts in order to gain a place in the WeChat market.

An easy-to-remember name of the OA are usually catchy, which allows you to take the lead in the WeChat market; and a name that matches the company’s identity can help your company stay invincible in the fast-growing WeChat market and win more business opportunities.

2.As A Mobile Marketing Platform

1)Sales-driven becomes workable, businesses delivering product or service information to users promptly and quickly to bring about transactions and deals, which in fact shortens the marketing cycle of business.
2)Better for branding. WeChat users can not only receive information from brands, but also sign up to participate in activities or enroll to campaigns more conveniently. By increasing the stickiness of user engagement, branding can be much more deepen.
3)It can maximize the exposure of promoting sales of goods or other campaigns, timely and effectively let the newest business promotional activities reach to users, and reduce the marketing costs of businesses.
4)Since the bound between online and offline marketing is an inevitable trend, the close-loop of O2O marketing can be done on the OA. WeChat provides a more convenient channel for the combination of the two, such as scanning the QR code.

3.Enhance The Companies Image

The WeChat OA is also part of the company’s intangible assets. Maybe within a year or two, your customers will take the initiative to ask about your WeChat OA. it would be a bit late to apply for one by that time, especially for the clothing, beauty, crafts, communications, multimedia, tourism, social networking, trading and other industries.

4.Building Up A “living pool” To Accumulating Business Users

Without self-service terminal and membership system, users are just like “rushing water” for traditional businesses; through the establishment of self-service terminal and membership system, businesses seem to be able to integrate users into the “reservoir”, but in fact, there are many breakpoints between the two sides, the activity of the reservoir is not strong enough, however the WeChat OA perfectly make up for this deficiency.

5.As A Platform For Customer Research

1)The survey is a very important section for every business to formulate the business strategy. Large companies are even to let special development departments to do the survey. Companies issued questionnaires or telephone research by the 3rd-party in the past were faced with problems such as high cost and inaccurate data. Nowadays, however reach users directly in the WeChat OA to do the survey which can not only active users, but also save a lot of cost.
2)Research of user experience: mobile Internet makes the era of experience economy coming. User experience will become the core competitiveness of enterprises. It includes product experience, service experience, brand experience, logistics experience and other process. These processes can help enterprises make timely operational adjustments through real-time feedback from WeChat users.

6.Management Value As A CRM

The core of the CRM is to use automated analysis to achieve marketing, sales management and customer service, so as to reduce marketing costs, shorten the marketing cycles and improve customer satisfaction. In this way, the ability of WeChat OA to reach users in real time and totally for free is actually to shorten the marketing cycle and reduce marketing costs, which is faster, more convenient and more cost-effective than email and SMS.
As a natural communication tool with users, WeChat greatly facilitates the experience and cost of communication between users and enterprises. The enterprises marketing effect will be maximized especially when WeChat OA integrate with the enterprise’s original CRM system.

7.AS A Mobile Website

Enterprises need websites to provide information in the era of PC. In the era of mobile Internet, enterprises still need websites. However, users do not need to search through Baidu, Google or typing the domain, they can easily acquire information such as business introduction, product services, contacts, white paper, etc just by searching the name of the WeChat OA, reading the WeChat articles or scanning the QR code on WeChat.
For example, when we have followed a WeChat OA of an express company we can query the status of express delivery on WeChat but without login to the website, which saves the switching time between the mobile and the PC end also improves the user experience. The websites(Html pages) carried in WeChat OA have become a very important information entry.

8.To Become The Communication Export Of Brand Culture And Enterprise Information

The flourishing development of WeChat users and Official Accounts has accelerated the trend of business breaking away from media. At the same time, traditional enterprises have shifted the center of self-dissemination from websites, Weibo, internal magazines and mobile newspapers to WeChat.
To enterprises which means: the audience is their own, the content is their own, the channel is their own, the cost is low, and the reading rate is measurable.

9.As The Service API of Product Marketing And CRM

Not all traditional businesses are suitable for e-commerce, but e-commerce is the trend of the times. If the promotion and CRM can be guided from the offline to the WeChat terminal, it would undoubtedly greatly reduce the cost of human, financial and material resources of enterprises, also monitoring and effect assessment will become more assured.

10.As An Entry Of Traffic

Internet economy is actually the traffic economy, without traffic enterprise can not become the e-commerce. As a “User living pool”, WeChat OA provides traffic guarantee for every traditional enterprises such as self-operated e-commerce.
Using WeChat OA to accumulate users, strengthen users’ stickiness through marketing campaigns, and then to do the further sales conversion.

11.Mobile E-commerce Channel

Retailing should become a full channel in the future. Enterprises need to make it as convenient as possible for consumers to take orders at anytime, anywhere. For example, when someone suddenly wants to buy a clothes when he/she is using WeChat, they could purchase orders directly on WeChat OA of Nike or Prada without jumping out of WeChat, and they don’t every need to download an App or go to the website. This is what the user experience. Therefore, WeChat OA can become one of the channels of enterprise mobile e-commerce. It is a perfect experience for customers to purchase orders, finish the payment transactions, even logistics inquiry and customer service all within WeChat.
When enterprises deeply understand the value of the WeChat OA, and then determine what kind of service they want to provide through WeChat according to the needs of their customers, which is what enterprises should do on WeChat to solve the pain points of users.
Therefore, how to do the WeChat marketing should be determined after the enterprises has studied the value of the tools and the needs of their users and then assessed its own capabilities.

Create A Single Customer View

By iclick | IParllay Marketing Blog

Create A Single Customer View

iclick
2022-12-26

A Single Customer View is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organisation about its customers. This data can be viewed in one place, such as a web page or a product port.

Businesses Want A Single Customer View

Businesses of all sizes understand the importance of a single, unified customer view. A single view of the customer is beneficial, as the unified identity allows for an aggregated representation of personal data and customer behavior. While there are many advantages to building a single customer view, many businesses struggle to overcome the challenges associated with building one. Without a holistic representation of the customer, organizations lack the visibility they need in order to keep business moving forward efficiently.

A Single View of the Customer Provides Numerous Benefits

Organizations strive to deliver effective marketing and sales campaigns in order to boost revenue and drive new business. In order to deliver better campaigns and empower field sales teams, having an identity management solution that allows businesses to obtain a single customer view is crucial. An identity management solution allows companies to look into and examine previous customer behaviors, interactions, purchases, etc., to better analyze and target customers to create a single view of the customer. Moreover, with a single view, sales teams are empowered, as they now have information to develop a complete understanding of prospects and customers. Sales teams can understand what products prospects and customers have expressed interest in, what has already been purchased, documents that have been signed, and even feedback and reviews regarding the product. Because companies often have a number of departments which interact with consumers (sales, marketing, customer service, IT, etc.), customer data gets placed in a number of different systems. One department may use an ERP system to manage financial data, while another uses a CRM system to organize customer information. Other parts of the business might use billing, application tracking, and social media monitoring applications to engage with and understand customers.

A single customer view benefits organizations, allowing them to minimize costs, simplify business processes, and have the strategic edge over the competition. With a 360 degree view of the customer in a single location, business can run more efficiently and effectively. Not only are companies able to better target and drive business with a higher quality of insight, they can also minimize costs by avoiding ineffective marketing tactics. Additionally, a unified view of the customer on a single interface ensures that business can run without complications when employees are out of the office, sick, or on vacation.

A study conducted by Gartner states that “To successfully target, acquire, develop and retain customers, organizations rely on accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer information and insight.” This insight provides businesses deeper visibility into their customers and their behaviors, allowing them to better market and sell products. Moreover, as businesses grow and the channels of customer engagement increase, the importance of creating a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the customer increases as well. Building a complete customer view has become a major challenge for businesses to overcome, but one which has a very valuable payoff.

Challenges Surround Single Customer Views

With several systems and applications managing different types of information, it is difficult to create a single customer view in which all the details associated with the customer are in one location. Moreover, legacy systems can complicate matters, creating difficulties when it comes to sharing data, as they are outdated and inflexible. Data silos, or systems that hold valuable information, are isolated, making it difficult for organizations to be optimally productive.

As businesses employ SaaS and cloud-based applications and systems, sharing data with on-premise systems becomes complicated. Furthermore, as the number of devices and channels of engagement increase (mobile, computers, tablets, face-to-face, apps, etc.) it becomes increasingly difficult to manage information related to a single customer when it comes from numerous devices, databases, applications, and departments. Disparate applications contain all sorts of customer data and without a single customer view, businesses must run multiple applications at once to obtain all that information. Switching back and forth between different applications can complicate tasks and slow down performance. What’s more, different systems must not only communicate seamlessly, they must also be aware of business rules associated with each application and service.

Create A Single Customer View With Parllay

As WeChat becomes an important channel for online customers acquisition, the various attributes and activities of WeChat users have important commercial value. However, CRM software adopted by many companies in the world, such as Hubspot, has strong customer management, web marketing and automated marketing capabilities, but does not have WeChat user management capabilities. For companies that use HubSpot and WeChat to conduct business, customers are scattered in two systems, unable to focus on data analysis, automatic marketing and customer management, which not only increases customer operating costs, but also reduces marketing efficiency, while also affecting the effectiveness of precision marketing. Based on its powerful WeChat data deep development analysis and integration capabilities, Parllay launched the HubSpot+WeChat integration solution. Contacts obtained by the enterprise from WeChat can be automatically synchronized to HubSpot’s CRM, including contact WeChat attributes and real-time WeChat behavior. At the same time, companies can also trigger WeChat official account actions through the HubSpot workflow to interact with users. As such, a single customer view is well represented in the HubSpot.

Does it worth to have the WeChat-CRM at the beginning?

By iclick | IParllay Marketing Blog, WeChat Marketing

Does it worth to have the WeChat-CRM at the beginning?

iclick
2022-12-26

As more and more global enterprises considering to explore the Chinese market, WeChat marketing has been paid more and more attention by enterprises.
The fact is many foreign companies are not familiar with WeChat. Everything is a new start and has to learn from the beginning. For example: WeChat for personal and for business using are different. Here is where the WeChat Official Account comes up.

No matter what industry you are from, the reasons for considering WeChat are as follows:

The popularity of WeChatin China – more than 1.4 billion users
Compared with receiving WeChatmessages, Chinese people have less habit of receiving and sending emails
Use WeChatinstead of the website as the main channel for marketing and customer acquisition
There may be more reasons…

Tencent allows enterprises to apply for and opening the WeChat official account for commercial use, but WeChat official account does not have complete marketing and data capabilities. Here is where the WeChat-CRM comes up. In a word, the WeChat-CRM is to help enterprises to empower their WeChat Official Account for business, marketing, analysis and an end to end SAAS solution.

As the companies have just understood the use differences of WeChat different types, realized that the commercial use is to need the WeChat Official Account, and applied for it, but because the WeChat OA is a new one which has no followers yet, or the number of followers is very small, Now the next question arises: Does it worth to have the WeChat-CRM at the beginning?

Definitely it worth to have WeChat-CRM at the very beginning:

To record each of the follower’s behavior track(activities timeline) and WeChatproperties(geographical location, gender, sources, life cycle stages, persona, score, tag them based on their behaviors or interests etc-these important data and record would be very helpful and important for your insight of each of your follower and let’s say if you are going to have WeChat-CRM later, then these data of the previous followers will not be availabled any more, which will leading hard to identify the previous follower’s persona and their use intention of your business later on. WeChat backend does not provide such complete profile and data of each follower, which only involved the alias and WeChat nickname of each follower. That’s one of the reasons why every company worth to have WeChat-CRM at the very beginning.
To give your followers an amazing first impression and personalized engagement to increase the retention and reduce the loss rate-Once your WeChat Official Account has been gone alive, then there will be potential customers to come in, so it’s important to give the new followers a good first impression to reply a welcome message and the personalized engagement based on their different sources and WeChat
Another depressing fact is-WeChatallow followers to subscribe company’s OA but also allow them to unsubscribe. According to our many year experiences and our research, we found that the loss rate of new followers is average as high as around 50% of company’s OA before they implemented the personalized marketing. But after that the loss rate can be greatly reduced about 40% and can continuing to nurture the follower to become customers.

WeChat marketing is a process of accumulation. Do a good job of personalized engagement on a firm footing, and give each of your follower personalized care. Stick to it, and you will see the harvest and realize the business growth.

IParllay Marketing Blog