What is online marketing? And how to implement it with WhatsApp?

All forms of marketing are in a constant process of further development. However, online marketing has always been the variant of marketing in which innovations have been most frequently implemented. Now, with the WhatsApp newsletter, a real revolution in online marketing is on the horizon. WhatsApp as a marketing channel offers good open and conversion rates. In addition to the basics of online marketing, you will learn in this article why the WhatsApp newsletter has such enormous future potential and why you should also use it for your business.

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What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is the use of web-based channels to promote a company's brand, products or services to potential customers. Online marketing methods and techniques include email, social media, display advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEA), and more. The goal of online marketing, analogous to other forms of marketing, is to increase sales, awareness, and profits. An important goal of online marketing is also to strengthen customer loyalty and build long-term customer relationships. Through targeted marketing and individual offers, companies can keep their customers loyal and increase their loyalty.

The terms "digital marketing" and "internet marketing" are also occasionally used as synonyms for "online marketing".

The widespread use of the Internet for business and personal purposes has created new channels for advertising and marketing, including those mentioned above. Online marketing, which mainly uses digital media to attract, retain and convert virtual visitors into customers, has many advantages and challenges.

**WhatsApp newsletter marketing will replace the email newsletter as one of the six pillars of online marketing in the future**

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Online marketing differs from traditional marketing, which has historically included media such as print, billboard, television, and radio advertising.

Before online marketing channels existed, the cost of marketing products or services was often prohibitive and traditionally difficult to measure. Consider national TV advertising campaigns that use consumer groups to measure brand awareness levels. These methods have traditionally not lent themselves well to controlled experiments. Today, anyone running an online business (as well as most offline businesses) can participate in online marketing by creating a website and running campaigns to attract customers at little or no cost. Those who market products and services also have the opportunity to experiment with optimizations to improve the efficiency and ROI of their campaigns.

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Advantages of online marketing

A key benefit of using online channels to market a business or product is the ability to measure the impact of a particular channel and determine how visitors acquired through different channels interact with a website or landing page. From the visitors that are converted into paying customers, further analysis can be performed to determine which channels are most effective for acquiring valuable customers.

Analytics for web or mobile app experiences can help determine the following:

Which online marketing channels are most cost-effective at attracting customers, based on the conversion rate of visitors to customers and the cost of those visitors.
Which channels are most effective at engaging customers and delivering greater lifetime value to them, such as email marketing that encourages repeat purchases from previous customers?
Which customer groups are characterized by high engagement and high potential for upselling - such as software or mobile apps, which are expected to sell more products to high-engagement customers.

Marketing success analyses can also be carried out on WhatsApp. To do this, the messenger service must be connected via the WhatsApp API. At Mateo, the connection via API (application programming interface) is standard and in-depth analysis is included in our WhatsApp marketing campaigns. But what are WhatsApp newsletters?

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What are WhatsApp newsletters?

WhatsApp newsletters are paid mass messages via WhatsApp to share relevant and valuable information with customers. WhatsApp itself calls these messages "Promotional Messages". For example, they can inform their customers about new products, point out discount promotions or remind existing customers about service intervals. The WhatsApp newsletter can thus be used as part of so-called "conversational commerce", where users can purchase products and services by chatting with the company.

To prevent spam and excessive advertising on WhatsApp, the parent company Meta has set some rules for sending newsletters. Among other things, there are caps on the number of messages sent and the content is also checked. Each message template for newsletters must be approved by Meta in advance. From a legal perspective, the GDPR must also be observed, which requires the user's consent (opt-in) to receive the newsletter. Promotional messages can only be sent via the WhatsApp API and are GDPR-compliant. These requirements may sound complex, but they are easy to implement with Mateo. With a look at the advantages compared to conventional email marketing, it becomes clear that the benefits of WhatsApp newsletters are usually much greater than the small additional effort.

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Would you like to learn more about Mateo's WhatsApp Newsletter Service? Or are you interested in an inbox where customer requests from different communication channels can be bundled centrally and processed efficiently? Simply arrange a free consultation appointment.

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Online marketing with WhatsApp newsletter - the future of marketing

As described in the basics, email has been one of the most important marketing channels in online marketing to date. Particularly in existing customer marketing, newsletters, which have been sent by e-mail to date, are the best way to motivate customers to make recurring purchases. For new customer marketing, advertisements in search engines or on social media continue to be the right channels due to the lack of contact information such as telephone number and e-mail address. In existing customer marketing, it has become almost impossible to achieve marketing success with email newsletters in recent years. There are many reasons for this: a flood of promotional emails to consumers, extremely low open rates, spam folders, a distant and far too formal user atmosphere, and several other factors. Why this is different with WhatsApp will now be explained.

The user atmosphere of Germany's most popular messenger service WhatsApp (>60 million users) is very informal in contrast to e-mail, as most users communicate with friends and family via WhatsApp. When companies are reachable via WhatsApp and send newsletters to customers, this creates a closeness to the customer that is simply not possible with e-mail newsletters. Emails are too distant and too impersonal and thus not the right way to go as a marketing channel that is intended to influence consumers' primarily emotional buying behavior.

Another advantage is that WhatsApp newsletters are guaranteed to reach the recipients and are not sorted into the spam folder by the mail provider like many email newsletters. Your newsletter will get the attention it deserves between personal messages from friends and family members.

Reading tip: How to optimize the conversation rate and prevent the newsletter from being unsubscribed by the recipients, we have described in our article about WhatsApp marketing.

Traditional marketing channels like email are increasingly saturated. Many consumers receive dozens of email newsletters every week and delete most of them unread. In technical jargon, this phenomenon is called channel fatigue. As a marketer, there are only two options left in such a case: Either emails can be further optimized in the hope that open rates will increase by 1 or 2%. Or it can switch to a channel such as WhatsApp, for example, where there is still little competition. That the latter option is likely to be associated with greater success is suggested by statistics on newsletter open rates. While e-mail newsletters are only opened in 22% of cases for the reasons mentioned above, the figure for WhatsApp is a full 98% (source: Gartner).

The excellent open rate, combined with customer proximity on WhatsApp and the resulting significantly higher conversion rate, leads to significantly increased sales revenues. Various field reports show that switching from email to WhatsApp newsletters can contribute significantly to a company's success. By the way: Mateo provides you with reliable evaluations and statistics on the behavior of newsletter recipients, which can be used to evaluate the success of your WhatsApp campaign.

For these reasons, it is extremely likely that WhatsApp newsletters will revolutionize online marketing, at least in the area of existing customer management. Email newsletters will continue to be widespread, but they will hardly be able to contribute anything to the company's success. As is now common knowledge among competitive strategists, competitive advantages are by far greatest among so-called first- and early-movers, i.e. companies that are the first to use new strategies. That's why it's hugely important for business success to embrace new marketing channels like WhatsApp as early as possible, rather than chasing the competition. With Mateo, WhatsApp marketing is no longer a pipe dream. You can make a free consultation appointment today.

Reading tip: You can find out how WhatsApp marketing campaigns work and how sending WhatsApp newsletters works in our blog article "How to WhatsApp Newsletter - How companies can start their own WhatsApp marketing campaigns".

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Examples of use of WhatsApp newsletters

There are a variety of uses for WhatsApp newsletters. For example, alert customers that products they regularly buy are available again.

You can also carry out up-selling and cross-selling strategies particularly successfully. If a customer has already purchased something from your product or service portfolio, a short WhatsApp message is often enough to sell further matching items. If you run a hotel, for example, you can draw your guests' attention to the specialties of your in-house restaurant.

In many industries, certain products and services are in focus at certain times due to seasonal factors. Simply remind your customers via WhatsApp of upcoming service intervals such as tire changes, inspections or renewal of the TÜV sticker.

Which customer is not happy about a personal discount voucher for their birthday or warm Christmas greetings? With the WhatsApp newsletter you raise customer relations to a higher level.

Of course, new products can also be advertised in the classic way. As described in our article on WhatsApp marketing, newsletters should not be sent too frequently. However, for products where there is likely to be great customer interest, a short WhatsApp message is worthwhile.

Mateo can of course also be used to send automated messages about orders. Messages like these are not advertising messages, but important customer information and therefore do not require opt-in.

How much does online marketing with WhatsApp cost?

When it comes to the costs of WhatsApp newsletter campaigns, a distinction must be made between message-dependent individual costs from WhatsApp (or Meta) and general costs charged by the API provider for the software and other services.

Mateo's WhatsApp campaign prices are based on the scope of services you require and are agreed individually. Since we focus on small and medium-sized businesses, we work highly cost-efficiently and can provide you with an offer with an excellent cost/benefit ratio. Mateo does not charge high consultant hourly rates after the fact like many some marketing agencies, but offers a monthly subscription at competitive rates. Feel free to schedule a free consultation to talk about your marketing goals and get a custom quote.

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Online marketing with Mateo

Mateo offers a comprehensive service in online marketing with WhatsApp. The service portfolio ranges from setting up the WhatsApp API to individual tips for collecting opt-ins, maintaining customer data and creating newsletters to in-depth analyses. A fully comprehensive service that is customized to your company.

Mateo's software also offers customizable message templates that can be used to create WhatsApp newsletters in just a few clicks. With Mateo's central inbox, where customer requests from different communication channels can be centrally bundled and efficiently processed, it's easy to optimize customer communication with Mateo. Furthermore, the integration of numerous other tools into our software solution reduces your customer service workload. With Mateo, customer communication and marketing is always 100% GDPR compliant.

Our customers are enthusiastic about the marketing successes achieved through their WhatsApp newsletters. Parameters such as the response and opening rate as well as the sales growth achieved through the newsletters regularly create enthusiasm. Simply make a free consultation appointment to find out all the details. With Mateo and the WhatsApp newsletter, your company can start into the new marketing age.

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What is online marketing? And how can it be implemented with WhatsApp newsletter marketing?