Outreach depends on multiple factors, and is different for each business and each customer. Between WhatsApp and SMS, the former seems to be the more obvious choice in the modern times. In fact, by 2029, SMS is about to account for only 32% of all messaging revenue (Juniper Research) of the world.
However, SMS hasn’t lost its touch with digital evolution and now offers more functionality that some businesses may find more suited to their purposes.
SMS is not dependent on internet connectivity to reach users, which makes it a universal medium to reach your remote audiences. That alone is incentive enough for businesses operating in no-internet zones to reach their consumers effectively.
However, everywhere else, WhatsApp seems to have the upper hand in marketing. If your business wishes to reach its customers effectively, regardless of where they are, it is important to understand what WhatsApp marketing can offer you. You also need to know how these features differ from SMS marketing, and how you can choose the best option for your use cases. Let’s begin!
WhatsApp marketing: features & benefits
WhatsApp marketing is a chat that is exchanged between a business and its customer over WhatsApp. It can also be a business sharing promotions or offers with its customers over WhatsApp. This method of marketing helps businesses establish a two-way, real-time communication with its customers which empowers their engagement strategies and sales pipelines.
WhatsApp marketing allows businesses to build a relationship with their customers and animate the chat instead of using static marketing strategies to achieve better engagement and loyalty.
There are several benefits of using WhatsApp as your primary marketing channel:
- Enhanced engagement: WhatsApp is capable of hosting two-way conversations, helping you really connect with your audience. This is one of the major reasons why WhatsApp has a 98% engagement rate.
- Better response rates: A call from your business may be treated as spam by your recipients, but they may check your WhatsApp messages more readily. WhatsApp has a 98% open rate, which helps your business get seen.
- Cost-effective: WhatsApp is a highly accessible and customizable channel (using APIs) for startups and small businesses.
- Improved customer satisfaction: WhatsApp allows you to reach your customers quickly with services and support, which enhances their satisfaction levels.
- Lead generation: WhatsApp is an excellent channel to reach new consumers through groups, nurture them, and convert them into paying customers.
- Promotions: WhatsApp allows you to share pamphlets, brochures, videos, images, etc. to promote your products with a flair.
Several features make WhatsApp an excellent marketing channel for businesses:
1. WhatsApp Flows
A WhatsApp Business API powers you with the capability to automate customer experiences using a feature called Flows.
This feature allows you to create WhatsApp forms within minutes, using a drag-and-drop builder and templates. You can also incorporate these forms into all your communications like chatbots, bulk broadcasts, drip marketing campaigns, and even API integrations.
A powerful WhatsApp Business marketing software like Gallabox provides features to collect, organize, and analyze data from your WhatsApp Flows for enhanced performance.
Key benefit: Customized, automated chat flows to enhance engagement.
2. AI sales agents
With evolving digital technologies, AI has become a commonplace application. Businesses can integrate AI into their WhatsApp marketing initiatives to generate enhanced and automated conversations easily.
AI-powered chatbots help enhance marketing personalization by tailoring messages to user preferences, help your business generate engaging content automatically, help your support staff draft quick replies using AI-generated insights and suggestions, and a lot more.
You can even use chatbots as WhatsApp AI agents to hit business outcomes.
Key benefit: Quick and relevant responses that reduce customer waiting times.
3. WhatsApp Business API
This feature enables your business to bring all your marketing tools and data together on a single interface.
WhatsApp Business API gives you access to customizable integrations, marketing metrics, WhatsApp setup for multiple devices, high automation capabilities, and much more.
You can set up your WhatsApp to efficiently create and send bulk messages at scale using targeted broadcasting. It also allows you to set up lead nurturing flows with scheduled drip campaigns and automate your conversations for better engagement.
Key benefit: Integrate CRM and other marketing apps for a holistic campaign design and insight.
4. Shared inboxes
This feature allows your business to give multiple service agents the login to a single WhatsApp Business account. You can use the shared team inbox to view 360° customer profile and history and give all the team members access to customer and team conversations.
Shared inboxes also enhance collaboration by allowing members to add private notes, send quick replies and pin potential customer conversations for nurturing. Agents can also answer FAQs using predefined responses for quick engagement.
Key benefit: Enhanced collaboration and higher agent productivity.
5. Chatbots
A 2024 Tidio study revealed that 82% of customers would use an online chatbot rather than wait for a human agent to resolve their issue. WhatsApp Business enables businesses to integrate whatsapp ai chatbots platform into their marketing strategy, helping them serve more customers in less time.
Furthermore, powering WhatsApp chatbots with AI and NLP enhances their capability to handle customer queries. Some platforms like Gallabox offer a no-code chatbot builder, using which you can easily create automated customer engagement workflows quickly.
Key benefit: Reduced agent workload and one-on-one chats with each customer.
6. Drip campaigns
This WhatsApp feature is a key marketing tool to nurture your leads and convert them into paying customers. It allows you to send timely and relevant messages that help enhance customer loyalty and drive conversions.
You can use templates suited for various types of campaigns (like onboarding, event reminders, etc.) to create and mobilize drip campaigns quickly. Many WhatsApp marketing tools help you track the drip campaign metrics such as engagement rate as well.
Key benefit: Lead nurturing within WhatsApp.
7. Broadcasts
whatsapp broadcast software are an essential feature of WhatsApp marketing that allow your business to reach hundreds of customers in a single click. You can enhance the impact of your broadcasts using personalization, targeted marketing using customer segmentation, and automation.
Your business can easily power its broadcast messages with reply-to configurations that help you manage broadcast replies with team assignments. Some WhatsApp marketing tools also provide you with a broadcast dashboard on which you can monitor the performance metrics of your broadcasts.
Key benefit: Massive outreach in a few clicks.
8. Click-to-WhatsApp ads (CTWA)
Click-to-WhatsApp ads (CTWA) are buttons, links, or ads that your customers see on other channels (like your website) that redirect them to your WhatsApp chat window when they are clicked. This feature allows your customers to contact your business directly through chat rather than sending an email and waiting for a reply.
These buttons are crucial for WhatsApp marketing strategy as they help capture leads and nurture them to become part of your brand. They also help enhance sales.
Key benefit: Capture leads on WhatsApp from other channels.
9. Payments
WhatsApp now allows users to send money to their contacts. Businesses can extend the functionality of this feature to accept payments over WhatsApp by selling products and services over this channel.
It helps to reduce friction in your sales pipeline and close deals faster by allowing users to browse and shop on a one-on-one conversation. You can share one-click payment links for ease and set up custom workflows to enhance operational efficiency and boost sales on this channel.
Key benefits: No need for credit cards and other long-winded payment mechanisms.
10. Catalogs
You can now enhance the functionality of your WhatsApp marketing by sharing full-fledged product catalogs with customers over chat.
By integrating with popular platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, your business can easily deliver interactive catalogs to customers right on WhatsApp, shortening the sales journey and closing deals faster.
Some WhatsApp marketing tools allow you to categorize and bundle similar products to enhance the browsing experience for the customers. You can easily incorporate this functionality with your chatbots, elevating customer experience further.
Key benefit: Turn your WhatsApp channel into a commerce-friendly marketing platform.
WhatsApp vs SMS marketing: A detailed comparison
According to a 2024 Klaviyo report, SMS demonstrates a click rate of 11.19% for eCommerce.
On the other hand, WhatsApp Business clients experience a click rate of over 50% on their WhatsApp message campaigns. This is a significant gap that your business can easily close by understanding the difference between WhatsApp and SMS-based marketing:
Overview
1. Reach and accessibility
Parameter: The number of users that can be reached.
About 3 billion people around the globe have access to WhatsApp, giving a high degree of outreach to businesses, especially in countries like India, Brazil, and parts of Europe. However, this reach is restricted to devices with a stable internet access.
SMS
SMS has universal reach as it is compatible on devices without the internet as well. It functions on any mobile phone as it is a network-provided service. It remains a viable option if your provider has access to the far-reaching and remote areas where internet is not an option.
2. Cost-effectiveness
Parameter: Value for money
For small and mid-sized businesses who need to reach a growing base of consumers quickly and cost-effectively, WhatsApp is a great option via business APIs. APIs enhance WhatsApp functionality through enabling chatbots, bulk messages, broadcasts, analytics, and sharing multimedia messages at no extra cost.
The platform offers good value for money, especially for growing businesses.
SMS
If your business has multinational branches, SMS can prove to be a costly strategy as network providers typically charge more for international messaging. Sending multimedia messages can also incur added costs even when negotiating for bulk.
SMS pricing depends on several factors such as destination, volume of messages, carrier agreements, etc., which makes it challenging to achieve economies of scale.
3. Engagement and interactivity
Parameter: Capturing customer attention and driving actions
WhatsApp is a clear winner for its capability to send highly interactive and media-rich messaging as 62% of marketers are embracing this type of content for engagement. It is a two-way channel, which means customers can reply to your communications, share their feedback, or raise queries, which establishes true conversation.
For example, Hellmann’s used WhatsApp to run a campaign in Brazil where customers could send a message to a WhatsApp number to receive personalized recipe recommendations based on the ingredients available in the sender’s fridge.
With each recipe recommendation, Hellmann’s carefully placed their signature mayonnaise in the dish to achieve brand awareness and marketing goals.
SMS
SMS, as a marketing channel, is primarily a one-way channel. The communications that businesses share over SMS don’t typically require a reply from the customer. For example, taxi aggregators may use SMS channels to share ride OTPs and confirmations over SMS to ensure timeliness in message delivery that is not dependent on the availability of the internet.
4. Compliance
Parameter: Data, security, and encryption
WhatsApp is an end-to-end encrypted platform, which means that the messages exchanged between a customer and a business are completely private. Additionally, WhatsApp adheres strictly to user privacy standards that mandate businesses to provide opt-ins before any customer can start receiving their messages.
In order to ensure quality user experience, WhatsApp prescribed strict, anti-spam guidelines to businesses that must be followed at all costs.
SMS
Enforcement and compliance regulations differ from region to region, according to regulations for network providers. SMS also necessitates opt-in, but the enforcement may not be standardized. This makes it easy to misuse SMS channels for pushing spam messages to customers’ phones.
5. Versatility
Parameter: Supported use cases
Around 85% of marketers believe that WhatsApp generates more personalized and engaging campaigns.
In fact, WhatsApp now supports a variety of functions such as personalized marketing, transactional updates, customer support, payments, catalogs, etc. by way of business APIs. Brands can share rich media messages for content like video tutorials and event invitations.
Since WhatsApp is a two-way channel, customers can interact with businesses over various use cases, helping create a good brand-customer relationship.
SMS
SMS is known for its simplicity, powering communications that need urgent attention and have no scope for distractive content. Businesses can easily utilize SMS for time-sensitive communications such as event or appointment reminders, flash sales, and more.
SMS can reach a wide base of audience, making it more suitable for broadcasts.
6. Analytics
Parameter: Insights available to businesses
Business can integrate their enterprise analytics software with WhatsApp Business accounts through APIs, significantly enhancing the value and quality of insights available to them. They can easily measure interaction levels, engagement rates, delivery rates, conversions, etc. to adjust marketing strategies.
Additionally, integrating CRMs into WhatsApp helps business understand their customers even deeply and design hyper-personalized communications.
SMS
With SMS, businesses get basic insights such as delivery reports. You cannot know whether your SMS was read or not, or how well it kept your audience engaged. You can include tracking links in your SMS to gain some understanding of how your customers are engaging with your content, but it is not as exhaustive as WhatsApp.
7. Scalability
Parameter: Growing with the business
Around 84% of business professionals find WhatsApp chatbots essential for scaling their business.
WhatsApp is a highly scalable platform that supports features like broadcasts, group messaging, bulk messaging, and more. Using a top-notch business API, brands can easily scale their operations up by plugging in other necessary functionalities through external sources.
For example, as your business scales up, you can use WhatsApp as a customer service channel to meet growing ticket demands.
SMS
SMS also allows businesses to scale exponentially, however, it is not as versatile. For example, you can automate bulk messaging to reach thousands of your audience, but the messages would not be interactive. Also, sending MMSs at that scale would be costly.
8. Communication
Parameter: Opportunity for building relationships
WhatsApp is a two-way channel, which means every message that a business sends to a customer, they can reply to it. This creates opportunities for initiating conversations that businesses can leverage for brand awareness, product education, lead nurturing, and other functions of their marketing funnel. This makes WhatsApp a powerful marketing tool.
SMS
SMS can be a two-way channel, but it typically does not work when the communication is with a business. Customers may use SMS to communicate with friends and family when other instant messaging platforms aren’t operational.
Businesses can use this channel to share important updates with customers without the need for a reply. However, this makes SMS a one-directional marketing tool.
Combining WhatsApp & SMS for maximum impact
The true power of outreach lies not in choosing between WhatsApp or SMS, but in combining the two to create more opportunities and touchpoints with your customers.
Here is how you can combine WhatsApp and SMS into your marketing strategy and reach more customers:
1. Contact and engagement
SMS clearly has a broader reach than WhatsApp, making it an excellent channel for initial contact, especially when you are targeting a diverse, large audience. Of the customers who show interest, you can continue the engagement on your WhatsApp channels to provide them with more personalized experiences and rich messaging.
For example, a clothing brand can create outreach SMSs with a link to WhatsApp to discover its audience. Once the opted-in audience is on WhatsApp, they can share their catalogs and generate higher engagement. Brands can even sell on WhatsApp through API connections.
2. Alerts and follow-up
SMS are the go-to channel for communications you want to read immediately, which makes them the right choice for sending time-dependent information. On the other hand, WhatsApp is an excellent channel to follow up with your audience about a subject.
For example, a doctor’s clinic can send their patients appointment reminders through SMS. As a follow up, the clinic can then send them a map or route information and parking updates over WhatsApp.
This strategy combines the best of both worlds – leveraging SMS for important, immediate information and using WhatsApp for enriched communications.
3. Segmentation and optimization
User segmentation and categorization can help your business outline the best channels to reach various cohorts. For example, if your target audience is Gen X or older, you can use the simpler channel (SMS) to market to them as these channels are more familiar for this audience and they are comfortable using them.
On the other hand, Gen Z is more tech-savvy and understands the flexibility and usage of WhatsApp very well, enabling you to share complex experiences with this segment.
It enhances the response and efficacy of your marketing campaigns.
4. Multichannel impact
A strategic combination of WhatsApp and SMS ensures that none of your target customers fall through the cracks. You can synchronize your campaigns across both channels to reinforce your communications and increase conversions.
For example, a brand can start by sending a message on one platform and following up on the other. This way, the brand is able to avoid seeming spammy as WhatsApp allows it to share media-rich messages while SMS empowers it to share direct communication.
The brand announces a flash sale on SMS, and provides an opt-in link that redirects the users to WhatsApp where the brand shares a sneak peek of the event through catalogs or video.
5. Cross-promotions
Businesses can use both channels to promote each other and boost opt-ins and conversions. For example, SMS campaigns can encourage users to opt-in for WhatsApp communications (for the customers who haven’t yet.)
For the customers already on WhatsApp, businesses can share opt-ins for SMS to share urgent or sensitive messages. For example, a restaurant shares opt-in links via SMS to invite customers on their WhatsApp channel for recipes. On this WhatsApp channel, the restaurant invites them to subscribe to SMS updates for real-time delivery notifications.
WhatsApp or SMS, it is all about outreach
WhatsApp represents a modern communication method that has rapidly gained global popularity. Its appeal lies in enabling secure, private messaging between people, enhanced by various forms of media.
But SMS has its advantages too. Non-profit organizations engaged in serving remote areas can monetize their marketing strategies better with SMS as an outreach tool rather than WhatsApp, which relies on the internet.
Both channels have advantages and limitations that businesses need to work with to their benefit. To extract the best possible potential from WhatsApp, start using Gallabox – a platform designed to amplify, simplify, and enrich your WhatsApp marketing efforts exponentially.
Gallabox offers chatbots, business API, WhatsApp Flows, catalogs, payments, and much more to help you monetize your WhatsApp channel through efficient, streamlined marketing workflows.
Start a free trial today to learn more!
FAQs about whatsapp vs sms marketing
1. Which is more cost-effective for small businesses: WhatsApp or SMS marketing?
WhatsApp is more cost-effective for small businesses because it allows them to send media-rich messages without any extra cost. Additionally, small businesses can share messages in bulk or broadcasts without significantly raising the costs. WhatsApp Business API software is also available at competitive prices, further enhancing the cost-efficiency of the platform.
2. Do SMS messages have a better delivery rate than WhatsApp messages?
Yes, because SMS is not dependent on the internet, whereas WhatsApp is. SMS can reach any person who has a mobile phone regardless of whether or not it supports the internet, giving it a wider reach and better delivery rate.
3. How do customers perceive WhatsApp marketing compared to SMS marketing?
Consumers prefer personalized messaging to general SMS because they can relate to these messages. WhatsApp can provide personalized messages enriched with videos, images, emoji, and other media to better resonate with its target audience.
