One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

WeChat in China

04

WeChat – Multichannel or Omnichannel

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WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

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Final Thoughts

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Contents

WeChat is one platform that has absolutely exploded in popularity in the Asia-Pacific region. Developed by Tencent in 2011, the Chinese-based app has grown tremendously over the years with over 1 billion daily active users (10% YoY increase) sending 38 billion messages per day.

Commonly referred to as the ‘app for everything’, users on WeChat is recorded to spend more time on the app than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat put together.

If you’re a marketer or business owner hoping to enter this lucrative and increasingly accessible market - WeChat may be the best and most direct way to reach, build a relationship, and/or sell to a large customer/market pool.

One of the greatest attributes to WeChat’s immense success is its foundation of convenience and user-friendliness in terms of social communication, content sharing, and mobile payments. Given this realisation, this super app presents a fertile ground for you - be it as a local or global brand marketer - to extend brand awareness to an increasingly lucrative Chinese market.

Yet, WeChat is a crowded marketplace with over 14 million official accounts (corporate WeChat accounts) and exclusive lifestyle partners. Its closed platform nature spells limited opportunities for businesses to make it work with a user – if you’re not providing sufficient or quality value to your followers, they will simply choose to opt out.

To maximize marketing efforts on the app, WeChat should be treated as part of an omnichannel strategy rather than as a silo channel – allowing your marketing team a more consistent and seamless way to engage with the Chinese market.

Introduction

One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy | 3

daily active users

YoY increase

messages per day

1 Billion

10%

38 Billion

Just look at these striking numbers: 64% of its users open the app over 10 times a day, and 17% of them spend over 4 hours of their day on the app. WeChat’s pioneering business model has completely transformed mobile technology and social media in China – becoming the society’s norm for a mobile lifestyle. In China’s Tier 1 cities, user penetration rate is as high as 93%. Overseas businesses eager to capture a portion of this lucrative market may find it crucial to have a solid WeChat marketing strategy to elevate their brand presence – in particular, the luxury, retail and lifestyle brands targeting the mid to top percentile of Chinese consumers.

The popularity of social selling within the WeChat ‘centric’ society, and increased accessibility to billions of Chinese mobile

e-commerce consumers, have paved the way to a myriad of opportunities for organic marketing on a surprisingly personal level. In-app functions such as the WeChat Wallet and WeChat Shop further support these opportunities for mobile e-commerce, especially with a cashless society actively choosing e-payments for both online and offline transactions.

It is now easier than ever for foreign companies to accelerate the engagement and purchase process via this medium. Let’s explore how you can optimise marketing efforts on this super app with omnichannel management.

WeChat in China

4 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

WeChat in China

Known as a “super app” for good reason, WeChat has massively spun out from its humble beginnings as a personal messaging app. Since its launch, WeChat’s functional capabilities have absolutely imploded from strength to strength, and is today, an indispensable part of modern life in China.

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WeChat – Multichannel or Omnichannel

6 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

With the advance of technology and the evolution of strategies in today’s marketing landscape, comes a new wave of terminology with which marketers need to become acquainted with. Two new-age definitions that immediately come to mind are multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing.

What’s the difference between omnichannel and multichannel? Omnichannel and multichannel marketing are two very distinct and separate marketing strategies - even if both do focus on the use of multiple channels to reach consumers and potential consumers. The lines are blurred here, and the debate ever so frequent.

Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing refers to the ability to interact with potential customers on more than one platform. These channels could be

anything from a print ad, a retail store, a website, a promotional event, a product package, or word-of-mouth communication.

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel refers to the multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone, or in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience will still be seamless.

WeChat – Multichannel or Omnichannel

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WeChat – Multichannel or Omnichannel

Regardless of which channel the customer prefers to use, they typically demand a smooth, consistent, relevant and personalized experience with your brand. Omnichannel marketing strategies take that expectation into consideration, and build on the understanding that a customer may begin their journey on one platform, only to jump to another, and finally convert by way of the third. This approach is about creating a truly unified brand experience, regardless of number of channels or which channel it is.

The multi-channel approach looks to blast messaging out via the maximum possible number of channels. By walking through the importance of having WeChat as one of your channels for customer engagement, it is crucial to use it wisely – as managing it in silo could significantly lower your efficiency.

Unlike other social media channels, WeChat has strict control on the numbers of messages can be sent by the official accounts. WeChat Subscription accounts can send up to 1 push message per day to their followers and are grounded together in a dedicated folder appearing alongside your friends in the “chat” section of WeChat. WeChat Service accounts appear as friends in the “chat” section of WeChat. They allow 4 broadcast messaging per month.

Since multichannel marketing is about casting the widest net to get the most customer engagements, WeChat might not be an appropriate channel for this purpose.

Conversely, the omnichannel approach inter-relates every channel to engage with customers as a whole, to ensure they have a wonderful overall experience with the brand through each and every channel. The messages sent across channels should be consistent, as well as personalized. Companies with well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies in place achieve a 91% higher year-on-year increase in customer retention rate on average, compared to organizations without omnichannel programs in place.

Under omnichannel placement, a brand’s WeChat official account, mobile app, website and in-store experience are all reflective of one another. Marketers should be able to see different channels as one. For example, in a loyalty program, the membership points in an individual customer’s account is synchronized with their WeChat account from the redemption system so that the brand can schedule timely and more targeted messages to this individual.

SINGLE CHANNEL MULTI CHANNEL OMNICHANNEL

Subscription Account or Service Account?

Subscription Account

Content centric consumer activation and interaction. Limited features, but best content reach

Service Account

Full consumer experience capabilities. Best for post-sales interaction and sophisticated activation

▸ Best when publishing >4 articles/month

▸ Daily push, but notifications are placed in the “Subscription ghetto”

▸ Content is searchable on Sogou search engine

▸ Original content can be certified and re-shared by other accounts with mention to the original publisher

▸ Revenue from reader “tips”

▸ Revenue from display ads on articles

▸ 4 push‘s/month, push appears as a regular notification

▸ Follower segmentation

▸ QR code tracking

▸ Native e-commerce and payments

▸ Coupons, loyality programs

▸ Can connect to a customer service team (multiway chat)

▸ API access for follower input processing

▸ Advertise on WeChat

▸ Content not serarchable on Sogou

8 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

WeChat – Multichannel or Omnichannel

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy 86% of shoppers are regularly channel-hopping across at least two channels, and even more brands. In our tech-savvy era, one-size-fits-all can no longer maximize your customer engagement and revenue on investment.

You have to opt out from the linear path to ensure you are treating each individual among the 1 billion daily active users individually and personally based on their digital behaviour and history.

In this chapter, we will look at how to implement WeChat in the omnichannel marketing strategy to accelerate personalized communications as a seamless customer journey on a single platform.

Unified Customer Profile

Identification is possibly the most valuable data that comes with an omnichannel marketing strategy. Thankfully, each WeChat user has a WeChat ID, that gives you some idea of who your leads are through this digital verification.

With an omnichannel approach, when you match the user’s WeChat account with their online/offline identification details (such as in-store frequency data, location, national ID, phone number etc.), you get a fuller picture of the person behind each user. This allows you to create a unified persona for more tailored interactions across varying channels.

If you have more than just an official account in WeChat, such as a mini program, or you’ve linked a mobile or web-based app to your WeChat account, you are able to retrieve deeper user data within WeChat. For this, you have to know a little bit about OpenID, and UnionID.

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

10 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

OpenID OpenID is an unique encrypted WeChat ID for each user of an official account. Different official accounts will store a different OpenID for the same user. When subscribed users interact with a specific official account, that brand can then obtain the user’s OpenID to access their basic user information (e.g. demographic and geographic details).

UnionIDUnionID is a unique ID to identify a single user under the same WeChat open platform account. It offers a mechanism for brands to get the user’s data from multiple platforms (e.g. mobile application and website) and attribute actions back to him/her

UnionID provides brands the holistic opportunity to understand, approach, convert and retain consumers by providing them a smoother onboarding, boost sales across marketing and scenario-based promotion and more accurate customer segmentation and targeted advertising (with the user’s authorization).

For example, after a user has given your official account the permission, you will receive a special API calling certificate (authorization access_token). Based on this access token, the official account may call APIs and obtain the user’s basic information (when a user authorizes WeChat login on a hotel & travel app, WeChat can push travel related ads accordingly).

Personalization

Once you are able to identify and match your WeChat followers with their respective IDs, you gain an additional opportunity to have a greater

Given the fact of only 10% of official WeChat accounts get 90% of users’ view and interactions, the only way to achieve true customer engagement is to make every interaction as relevant and personalized to the individual as possible. Thus, it is crucial for marketers to understand user behaviour, to be able to send personalized messages, in order to be in that lucky 10%.

Segmentation Segment followers based on lifecycle stages or consumption patterns, and create personalized messages that you can blast out to these groups at timely intervals - not only for selling, but for unique content and/or special campaigns.

WeChat is a platform where a user can choose to be as involved as they would like to be. Companies with official accounts may set up triggers with automatic replies to a user reaching out for information. However, we all know that call centres’ robotic responses are more of an annoyance then a welcomed communication in our need for personalised interaction especially when seeking for instant support.

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Official Account Contact Section Registration and Binding

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Don’t be robotic on your WeChat account – it’s a direct path to a deserted land.

In fact, these interactive triggers and interactions can present excellent opportunities to get involved and offer relevant information to users actively seeking it.

Loyalty Program If a brand has a loyalty program, make use of WeChat’s functionalities, and integrate it with the membership pool. It would save consumers’ much valuable time to download an additional app to access their member profile, points earned, program details, or

redeem items, thus saving much unnecessary hassle on their part.

To make all these happen, you have to know your leads, which bring us back to the importance of having a unified profile where the database is. Depending on the type of WeChat account– service or subscription, there’s only a certain amount of posts that the brands can blast out per week/month. Most companies are unable to produce personalized content due to a lack of user insight, and often their content posts fail to strike a chord with their followers.

With access to a clear-cut database, and a well-planned-out segmentation strategy, there is an abundance of customization and

User Case Example: First Time Buyer campaign

Marketers place tremendous effort in acquiring new customers.

However, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase a company’s overall profits by up to 95%, according to Harvard Business School.

The first engagement with a first time buyer is crucially important (first-impressions

count) as it is a great opportunity to turn the first time buyer into a repeat purchase

customer.

When the first-time buyer has completed the purchase either online or in store, they

would receive a thank you message via WeChat, together with their relevant purchase

information such as shipping status and invoice.

In addition, since WeChat service accounts can only push 4 broadcast messaging

per month, it is important for brands to send relevant information to their followers

wisely. For example, based on the first purchase, it can predict which product

categories the consumers might like, and where the brands should push relevant

product information to them.

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

personalization that can be done to optimize the marketing budget, campaign returns, and also hit sales’ KPIs while minimizing the effort of your teams through effective communication and a solid data management structure.

Automation throughout the entire Customer JourneyWhile using WeChat as a marketing channel, think of its in-app capabilities and what you as a marketer can do with them if you

know more about your social followers. How will you make use of WeChat’s functionalities to offer a more customer-centric experience, and build a closer, more intuitive relationship with them?

In theory, the customer journey should be linear. A customer would progress through a set number of stages from start to finish, with little variation in between. It is vital to understand how the customer experience can vary within each stage of the customer journey, the implications of it, and what each customer sees at every stage.

User Case Example: Loyalty Membership Renewal Campaign

With a linked loyalty program, a member can follow their favourite brands via

WeChat, where they can access their profile and keep track of their membership

activities. With each following purchase, and newly earned points, they will

also receive a personalized message via a trigger to their WeChat

account with details of their latest membership status – keeping

them constantly engaged.

This goes the same way for a membership renewal campaign.

When a users’ membership expires, the brand is able to send

reminder messages via WeChat to the respective member, and

remind them of their membership expiry date to keep them within

the brand environment. And at the same time, smartly offer some

promotions to allow the members to redeem their points and stay

within the program. For example, something simple like with extra

dollar spend, extend your membership for another year, to enjoy all

the exclusive discounts.

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

12 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

Here are some ideas where WeChat comes in handy as one of the channels:

▸ Customers will follow brands’ WeChat accounts based on interest, and receive the personalized and relevant social feeds and promotions.

▸ Once the customer makes the first purchase, they will receive invoice and shipping status, etc via WeChat.

▸ Brands can keep their customers updated on the latest membership status, offers and redemptions.

▸ Higher accuracy integrating both online and offline activities for higher conversion.

▸ A segment/automation campaign for defecting customers can be triggered to win them back e.g. we miss you campaign.

Managing the customer journey in a single platform

In a single marketing automation platform, it allows you to implement your omnichannel marketing strategy to deliver a personalized customer journey, and ultimately maximize their lifetime value based on the acquired lead and customer data across marketing channels.

Apart from the execution level, the single platform also frees your hands and time from drawing reports manually from overwhelming data like purchase records etc. for your management levels, while providing a comprehensive overview anytime you access the backend.

WeChat should be part of the Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

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WeChat is one of the few social platforms globally where a brand can manage the customer journey well throughout all stages and migrate revenue-generating behaviour offline to online, all while supporting value-added communications and meaningful interactions. Adding this super app to your omnichannel marketing strategy could revert you those missing pieces of data and deeper insights from the WeChat ‘centric’ market.

From the get-go, WeChat has been positioned as a closed social network. Thus, traditional digital marketing strategies will not work, and is not meant for the super app. WeChat presents more opportunities for targeted marketing and access to a pool of high potential leads. Convenience, quality content, personalized touches and social sharing can all be in one platform to pave the way forwards for brands looking to succeed on WeChat.

Insert WeChat to complete your marketing strategy with a marketing automation partner like Emarsys which delivers truly personal and consistent customer interactions across offline (physical stores, SMS) and online (email, social, web, and now WeChat), through the innovative and easy-to-use integrated dashboard. To learn more about how we can help you achieve your marketing goals, visit Emarsys.com.

How Emarsys can help achieve the WeChat KPIs:

▸ Contact identification, binding WeChat open ID with identified profile

▸ Multichannel integration – using WeChat as one of the communication channel to enhance better customer engagement

▸ It allows to do customers’ behaviour analysis in a single platform

▸ One platform to manage multiple campaigns across channels.

▸ Personalization on WeChat content

▸ Efficiency sending WeChat messages by segmentation

Book a demo

Final Thoughts

14 | One Billion Customers Can’t be Wrong: Why WeChat Should Be A Part Of Your Omnichannel Strategy

Resources

https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/

https://technode.com/2018/05/15/wechat-impact-report-2018/

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-11/10/content_34372396.htm

https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/22799/wechat-official-accounts-snu/

https://www.emarsys.com/en-hk/resources/blog/multi-channel-marketing-omnichannel/

https://www.businessinsider.de/wechat-has-hit-1-billion-monthly-active-users-2018-3?r=US&IR=T

https://open.wechat.com/cgi-bin/newreadtemplate?t=overseas_open/docs/oa/getting-started/account-types#getting-started_account-types

https://chinachannel.co/wechat-official-account-features-whats-possible/

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