Is WeChat a big part of your China Marketing?
Most foreign businesses want to know if they can automate their daily China marketing with WeChat like they do here in the west with email automation. The answer is not exactly. You simply cannot accomplish the same level of automation as you would with email automation.
But, on the flip side, WeChat does offer some automatic marketing tools that you can use to automate certain part of your customer service as well as some of your marketing.
Automation Tool #1: Basic AutoReply:
The most basic way to automate your marketing is to use the standard auto-reply functionalities that WeChat official account offers. With the out of the box WeChat official account, you have 3 ways to accomplish this.
Auto Welcome Reply
Just as it sounds, this is pretty straightforward. You can set a predefined welcome message that will be sent out automatically every time a user follows your WeChat official account.
Auto Reply Based on Keywords
This is where you can setup predefined auto-replies for various of different keywords the user (follower) may message you with. For example, you can set a predefined message that replies “What can I help you with?” whenever a user message you with keywords such as “hi”, “hello”, “need help please”.
There are two ways to match your auto-replied with user keywords. It could be an exact match, meaning your auto-reply will only be the trigger if it matched the user’s message exactly. Or you can use a broad match meaning your auto-reply message will be the trigger if the user’s message contains at least one of the keywords you have listed as a trigger.
Automatic Message Responses
This is the message that will be automatically sent to the user if it doesn’t match any of the keywords you listed. In other words, this is like having a standard voice mail.
With WeChat official account right out of the box, it is only possible to send the same auto-reply to every user who did not trigger one of the keyword auto-reply messages. However, if you integrate your WeChat official account with a 3rd part tool or plugin then you can preset multiple Automatic Message Response for different user groups or tags.
Automation Tool #2: Enhanced Auto Replies
This is not really a different way to auto-replied your users but rather an extension to keywords based auto-reply provided by 3rd party plugin.
With enhanced auto-replies, your integrated 3rd party plugin will collect all the keywords your users use to message you on your WeChat official account and provide a frequency analysis report to help you make a better decision as to how to predefined your automatic keyword replies.
For those of you familiar with AdWords, think of this like optimize your keyword bidding strategy based on the Search Query Report provided by AdWords.
Automation Tool #3: Chat Bots
WeChat does not provide Chat Bots with their official accounts. In order to use Chat Bots, you must integrate your official account with another third-party chat bot provider. Unlike auto-replies that comes standard with any WeChat official accounts, chatbots take the automation to the next level.
Chat Bots uses the idea of artificial intelligence and attempts to imitate a real one-to-one conversion with the user. Chatbots can carry on conversions, answer questions, ask questions, tell stories, and even be enjoyable.
Automation Tool #4: Automatic Tagging and Grouping
Before we move on to the other WeChat official account marketing automation tools it is important to talk about Automatic Tagging and Grouping plugins provided by 3rd parties.
Tagging and Grouping allow you to segment your WeChat official account followers into different groups. For example, if you have 100 followers on your WeChat official account be it subscription or service. You can tag 50 of them as “girls” and the other “50” as boys.
If you integrate third-party plugin you can automate this whole process. If one of your followers click on a certain button the plugin will automatically apply a tag to that user and move them into a different segment or group.
Automation Tool #5: Tag and Segment Push Message
Only available on verified service account
There are also a lot of confusion around the idea of “Push Message” or “Broadcast Messages”. It is true that “Push Messages” can be sent to your WeChat followers on a one-to-one basis without any previous interaction from the follower.
But “Push Messages” are really just publishing your WeChat content be it video, article, or other rich media, and this is the same for both Service and Subscription accounts. The only difference is with service account you can only push 4 times a month but with a subscription account, you can push daily.
If you don’t use a third-party plugin, you can only push one version of content to every single follower of your WeChat official account, meaning everyone see the same piece of content. But, if you used a third-party plugin you can different content to different segmented groups of your WeChat followers.
Let’s say you have segmented your WeChat followers and you have one group of “Male followers” and another group of “female followers”, obviously you don’t want to send the exact same piece of content to both groups, right?
Now, remember we mentioned above that you can automatically tag and group different WeChat followers. So, with a third-party plugin, you can now send two different version of your content to the “male followers” and the “female followers” separately. This way each group of followers will get a more relevant piece of content.
Automation Tool #6: Service Message Bulk Push
available on any verified WeChat official account
Service messages or “Response Messages” are messages that you can send if one of your followers interact with your account in the last 48 hours. This interaction can be clicking on a menu item, sending you a support message, or like a welcome message.
Normally with out of the box WeChat official account, you’ll have to manually reply these messages one by one, with a third-party plugin, however, you can message everyone who has interacted with your account in the last 48 hours in bulk.
Automation Tool #7 Template Message Bulk Push
Only available on verified WeChat service account
Most foreign businesses misunderstand the idea of “Templated Messages”. They think that they can use templated messages as their marketing automation to send out messages to the user one-to-one, but this is not exactly true.
Above is a screenshot of the various types of templated message in action. On top of that templated messages are highly restrictive on how the message will appear to the user. You must follow strict industry specified template provided by WeChat, this is why it’s called “Templated Messages”.
In China, WeChat templated messages are used mostly in forms of reminder or sending receipts to the user making a purchase. For example, if we look at the above screenshot the first templated message is a reminder to play “mahjong” on Jun 25th, 2017 12:00 PM. The second templated message is a reminder of a meeting.
Final Words About WeChat Marketing Automation
Unlike email marketing automation, WeChat marketing automation has its limits. After all, WeChat is first and for most a messenger and not a marketing tool. Tencent does not want to sacrifice user experience just so marketers can run an automated campaign and spam WeChat users all day long.
If you really want to integrate some form of marketing automation in China, we highly recommend looking into SMS/Text automation as it is how most Chinese companies automate their marketing in China right now.
