💰 How has WhatsApp Doubled its Business in India?

Business

16 Sep 2024

📳 WhatsApp, the free messaging app that has made people quit SMS, is now the most popular digital business platform for effective customer engagement.

With a user base of over 500 million in India, you will rarely find someone who does not have WhatsApp on their phone. Family groups, client groups, study groups, school groups, and society groups; every form of social interaction happens on WhatsApp.

Therefore, why not engage in business interactions?

Well, WhatsApp Business saw 300 million downloads in India as small business owners wanted to reach consumers where they spend most of their time. In the last few years, the Meta platform has expanded its business in India with a host of business offerings. Moreover, Meta also saw the revenue from WhatsApp Business doubling in India in the last year!

Continue reading to know how the free messaging app is monetising your presence on the app.

📱 WhatsApp is Sticky

While we cannot comment on the world, India certainly loves WhatsApp. Have you noticed, you are getting more and more e-commerce order updates, hotel bookings, bank, and insurance offers on WhatsApp? In fact, more than 60% of people on WhatsApp in India message a business account. This interaction is called click-to-WhatsApp ads.

Businesses can find their audience on Facebook, Google, and Instagram, and when they hit click-to- WhatsApp, the chat continues on WhatsApp. While you can message for free, businesses pay a fee for WhatsApp messaging.

The platform is monetizing its business messaging through a new pricing policy. Instead of charging flat ₹0.48 per conversation (which it used to earlier), it divided the messages into four categories: utility message (₹0.1/message), marketing messages (₹0.7846), authentication messages (₹0.11) and service conversations where the user initiates the conversation (₹0.2906).

Businesses are paying this price because the platform has a high success rate. Haptik, which creates business commerce platforms for brands within WhatsApp, claims that JioMart receives 1,500 average daily orders on WhatsApp, with a 68% repeat rate and 15% conversion rate.

No wonder revenue for this service has doubled in the past year.

📧 WhatsApp is more than just a messaging app

Seeing the success of WhatsApp for Business, the platform has introduced various other features.

WhatsApp Flows: The interactive, automated chat interactions that allow users to select products, book appointments simply by chatting.
WhatsApp Payments: Users can pay through the messaging app itself. Launched two years ago, the WhatsApp payment feature saw its volumes double in the last six months.
Book tickets: This year, WhatsApp launched a feature to book tickets for Bangalore metro, which attracted 6 of 9 metros on the platform. It also introduced DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus ticketing on WhatsApp and saw 6 million ticketing transactions, exceeding its target of 2 million.
Meta-Verified Badges: WhatsApp has unveiled Meta Verified badges for small businesses. This feature provides impersonation protection, account support, and premium features to amplify their brand online.

🤖 AI on WhatsApp: Coming Soon

Meta is also testing artificial intelligence (AI) offerings to enhance user experience. Among these are AI agents. WhatsApp users will be able to call the customer service agents of businesses in the context of already active chat. The agent will be aware of the chat conversations and will help them address complex queries like flight cancellation support or buying an insurance policy. It is actively being tested with Indian businesses and is expected to launch in the first half of 2025.

They will also bring in AI assistants, piloting in the US and Singapore, to help small businesses, design personalized ad creatives on WhatsApp.

The bottomline

These features of WhatsApp are also expected to be good for the small businesses. WhatsApp has launched an initiative called ‘WhatsApp Bharat Yatra’ to provide, engage, and train over 20,000 small businesses in Tier-II and Tier-III cities across 10 locations in India. It will be interesting to see what new ideas the app brings up to keep its users—both personal and business—engaged in the long term.

Did you find this insightful?

Binge worthy news...

💹 Jewellery stocks see ‘golden’ gains -

With the rising gold prices and global interest rate cuts sending gold’s YTD returns over 16% – surpassing Sensex’s 15% and closing in on Nifty’s 17% – jewellery stocks surged between 4 to 18.5% with TBZ hitting the 20% upper circuit and Motisons Jewellers up 7.5%. Read More

📉 Patanjali Foods’ stock sees 4% dip -

Shares of Patanjali Foods dropped by 4% on Friday morning following a block deal of 1.2 crore shares (3.3% of the company’s equity) worth ₹2,223 crore. Read More

🚅 LIC increases stake in IRCTC -

Shares of IRCTC rose 3% on Friday after LIC raised its stake in the railway company by 2.02% to 9.29% from 7.27% (since December 2022). Read More

🃏 Nazara acquires PokerBaazi -

Nazara Technology shares jumped by almost 4% after the gaming company acquired a 48% stake in Moonshine Technology, parent of India’s largest poker platform PokerBaazi, for ₹982 crore in one of the biggest domestic gaming deals in India. Read More

This newsletter/e-mail is meant solely for educational and/or informational purpose of the recipient