Are you looking to enhance your marketing efforts through Viber? Well, look no further, we’ve got you covered. In this blog, you’ll learn what Viber marketing is, its benefits and how to use respond.io to further boost your marketing efforts. Then, we’ll show you success stories of businesses using Viber marketing.
What is Viber Marketing?
Viber marketing leverages the Viber messaging app to revolutionize customer engagement. It's not just a platform for sending messages; it's an entire ecosystem for interactive and targeted marketing.
Viber marketing offers a more personal touch compared to traditional marketing avenues. It provides tools like chatbots, stickers and Viber Communities, transforming every interaction into an engaging experience. This platform isn't just about reaching customers; it's about resonating with them.
How is Viber Marketing Different From Traditional Marketing?
The landscape of marketing has evolved dramatically, and Viber advertising and marketing is at the forefront of this change. Unlike traditional marketing, which can feel like shouting into a void, Viber Marketing is akin to having a one-on-one conversation with your audience.
This approach transforms the marketing experience from a monologue into a dialogue, creating a more meaningful connection with customers. This direct and personalized communication ensures relevance and engagement at every touchpoint
Viber also supports a variety of formats – text, images, videos and voice messages – and caters to diverse content strategies, offering creative flexibility and enhancing customer interaction.
Who Should Use Viber for Marketing or Advertising?
Businesses using Viber should target Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. With its over 1.1 billion unique users, Viber offers an expansive stage for companies to showcase their brand, products, and services to a vast, engaged audience.
Benefits of Using Viber Marketing
Engaging in Viber marketing and advertising campaigns can be a costly affair. Thankfully, Viber offers a cost-effective solution with a high return on investment. Its ability to target specific demographics minimizes wasted effort, ensuring that your marketing messages reach the right ears.
Moreover, Viber’s immediate reach and digital analytics empower businesses with real-time insights, allowing for agile, informed marketing strategies. Now, let’s look at the benefits of Viber Marketing.
Viber Ads: Cost Effective
One of the most compelling advantages of Viber marketing and advertising is its cost-effectiveness. In comparison to more traditional marketing channels like print or television advertisements, Viber presents a more economical alternative.
Viber has a low barrier to entry with a flexible pricing model that scales with your specific needs and usage. Unlike many other platforms, starting a marketing campaign on Viber usually does not require a large budget upfront, making it accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. This makes experimentation with different messaging easier and more affordable.
Viber Ads: Targeted and Immediate Reach
By focusing on relevant customers, businesses avoid the scattergun approach often associated with conventional marketing. This targeted strategy not only saves money but also boosts the return on investment. With fewer wasted impressions and more focused outreach, marketing campaigns become more efficient and yield better results.
Additionally, unlike print, radio, or television ads, marketing campaigns on Viber allow customers to message businesses quickly. This immediacy reduces the time gap between customer interest and action, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Viber Ads: Higher Engagement Rates
Viber has exceptionally high engagement rates. This should give every marketer a reason to at least try Viber as a part of their advertising efforts. Here are three statistics you need to know:
- 90% of Viber messages are opened within 3 minutes.
- 70 million number of interactions every hour.
- 25% of Viber users tap on the buy button of the product ads they see.
While there are many other benefits to using Viber for marketing, the ones listed here can’t be ignored. However, before you proceed with marketing on Viber, make sure you take note of some of its limitations.
Limitations of Using Regular Viber App for Advertising
The regular Viber app's limited automation capabilities present a challenge, especially when dealing with high volumes of customer inquiries. Without connecting your Viber account to platforms like respond.io, businesses miss out on automating responses, which is essential for handling high volumes of inquiries efficiently.
Managing a large number of contacts and conversations is another challenge with the standard Viber app. As marketing activities scale up, the volume of interactions increases, potentially leading to missed messages or delayed responses. This limitation underscores the need for additional tools or platforms that can aid in more efficient contact management.
Then, there’s the absence of advanced segmentation. The ability to segment audiences is crucial for tailoring messages to specific groups based on criteria like demographics or behavior. Without it, businesses may struggle to customize their marketing efforts effectively.
Finally, Viber has updated its Bot Commercial Model. Previously, Chatbot owners only had to pay per-message fees after exceeding the 10k free chatbot-initiated messages quota. From 05/02/2024, new chatbot owners will be charged:
- A maintenance fee of EUR 100.00 per bot, per month.
- For every bot-initiated message per Viber’s rate card.
<call-out> Take note that Viber now explicitly prohibits businesses like forex and crypto, adult entertainment, political content, tobacco, weapons, etc. Viber also requires gambling, gaming, loan and microcredit businesses to provide further documentation to validate their legitimacy. <call-out>
Chatbot owners who create a chatbot before February 5, 2024, will not be affected by the updated Commercial Model. They will fall under the legacy Commercial Model.
Key Considerations for Effective Viber Marketing
Before diving into the world of Viber Marketing, it's essential to understand some key aspects that can significantly impact the success of your campaigns. From pricing models to marketing tools and ads to best practices, here's what you need to know.
Understanding the Viber Bot Pricing Model
As of September 2022, Viber Chatbots operate on a pricing model that's based on notifications. While the initial setup of a Viber Chatbot is free, businesses can send up to 10,000 chatbot-initiated messages per month without incurring costs.
However, beyond this threshold, Viber's Commercial Terms come into play, and businesses are charged per message.
<call-out>Importantly, these costs can vary depending on the destination country. <call-out>
This pricing model necessitates careful planning and budgeting, especially for businesses aiming to use chatbots extensively.
Utilizing Viber's Diverse Marketing Tools
Viber offers an array of tools to enhance your advertising strategies. Viber Broadcasts and QR codes are particularly noteworthy. Broadcast messages can be sent either through the Viber app, limited to 50 contacts, or via a Viber Bot Account.
However, when integrated with platforms like respond.io, broadcasts can be sent to unlimited recipients. This is especially powerful when coupled with advanced targeting features like Segments in respond.io.
Leveraging Viber Advertising and Push Notifications
Viber Ads are a powerful feature for increasing visibility within the app, especially for reaching users who are not yet in your contact list.
Additionally, Viber's push notifications offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional SMS. Businesses can deliver interactive messages to more people. This makes them ideal for a range of business communications, including marketing, sales and transactional updates.
Complying with Viber’s Policies
A crucial aspect of marketing on Viber is adhering to the platform's messaging rules. For example, you can’t import a contact list and then message customers. You need to get customers to message you first before you can interact with those contacts. These guidelines are designed to prevent spam and uphold good marketing practices.
Now that you’re familiar with Viber marketing and advertising basics, let’s see how you can take it to the next level when you connect your Viber account to respond.io.
Supercharge Viber With respond.io
Respond.io is an AI-powered customer conversation management platform that has powerful features to get your operations going.
Generating Leads with Ease
Although Viber assigns User IDs based on phone numbers, you can’t just import contacts from a CRM. As we mentioned earlier, you need to get customers to message you first. This is a limitation created by Viber to avoid spam marketing.
There are a few helpful tools to get customers to message you first. You can send chat links, place QR codes in your physical store, install a Viber chat widget on your website or attract new customers with Viber advertising. All these tools are available on respond.io.
Streamlined Lead Qualification
Qualify leads efficiently with respond.io's by setting it up in the Workflows advanced automation builder.
Alternatively, you can use respond.io’s AI capabilities, called Respond AI, to automatically discern and qualify leads, reducing the need for constant sales team intervention. This automation not only streamlines the process but also ensures that potential customers are engaged promptly and effectively.
Targeted Promotions with Viber Broadcasts
Once you qualify leads, you can segment your audience and send bulk messages using the Broadcast module.
<call-out> If you are using the Viber app, you are limited to sending a broadcast to 50 contacts. <call-out>
Imagine reaching out to hundreds or even thousands of customers with messages that resonate with their specific interests and interactions – all made possible with Viber Broadcasts. If you do have a huge influx of customers from your promotions, you can use Respond AI Agent to answer common questions and route contacts to the sales department for closing deals.
Engaging Customers with Viber Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns are a powerful tool to nurture customer interest over time. Craft a series of engaging messages scheduled at optimal intervals. This strategy keeps your customers engaged and builds anticipation, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
With respond.io, setting up a sequence of automated messages via Viber is straightforward. Once again, the Workflows is the star of the show.
Each of these features is designed to make your customer engagement more effective and less time-consuming. By integrating Viber into your strategy through respond.io, you're engaging customers in meaningful and productive conversations.
Finally, let’s look at the successes businesses have had using Viber marketing.
Viber Marketing and Advertising Big Wins
Viber Marketing has become a key strategy for businesses to reach and engage with customers effectively. Its ability to deliver personalized and interactive content makes it ideal for various industries.
Let's dive into some success stories that showcase the transformative impact of Viber Marketing.
TRS.INK: Navigating a Health Crisis with Effective Communication
During the the Covid-19 pandemic, TRS.INK recognized the urgent need for swift and reliable communication with patients. Their strategic use of Viber's broadcasts and one-on-one messaging capabilities led to impressive outcomes:
- Remarkably, they reached over 132,000 people, ensuring vital information was disseminated quickly and efficiently.
- The campaign achieved a staggering 99.9% delivery rate, illustrating the power of Viber in reaching a wide audience with crucial health updates.
Comfy: Boosting Retail Engagement and Sales
Comfy a leading retailer in Ukraine, faced the challenge of reducing shopping cart abandonment. By integrating Viber ads and promotions into their marketing strategy, they crafted a solution that combined immediate reach, rich media, and compelling call-to-actions (CTAs). This innovative approach led to:
- An impressive 30% increase in conversions, significantly outperforming traditional SMS marketing.
- A notable 10% boost in overall sales, demonstrating the effectiveness of Viber in enhancing customer engagement and driving retail success.
WWF: Spreading Awareness for Tiger Conservation
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) embarked on a mission to raise awareness about tiger conservation. Viber's unique features, like stickers and chatbots, became pivotal in their campaign, leading to exceptional engagement:
- The campaign saw 1.7 million sticker packs downloaded, spreading the message of conservation far and wide.
- A staggering 3.2 million users were exposed to WWF's message through these stickers.
- The WWF chatbot generated over 21.5 million interactions, indicating a high level of engagement and interest in tiger conservation.
These stories highlight the versatility of Viber advertising and marketing across industries and its effectiveness in achieving marketing goals. From healthcare communication during a global crisis to boosting retail sales and promoting wildlife conservation, Viber Marketing has proven to be a game-changer in the realm of digital engagement.
Are you ready to transform your Viber marketing strategy? Sign up for a free respond.io account today and discover the full potential of your marketing efforts.
Further Reading
If you enjoyed reading this article, here are more Viber blogs we think you’ll enjoy: