One-to-one and at scale at the same time. How Rakuten Viber is changing marketing

Viber konstantin-kostadinov
Konstantin Kostadinov
Senior Sales Director CEE & CIS at Rakuten Viber
One-to-one and at scale at the same time. How Rakuten Viber is changing marketing

As a marketer, you’re always looking for new ways to reach and connect with your customers. In today’s tech-driven, mobile-first world this increasingly means using messengers to get in front of your audience. Rakuten Viber is a messaging app that is becoming increasingly popular as a digital marketing tool. It allows brands to communicate with potential and existing customers in real time and engage with them in a variety of ways, including through text, images, and video. Hardly any other marketing channel can boast the effectiveness of this messaging app. 

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to use Rakuten Viber for marketing and how to get the most out of the platform.

Rakuten Viber Chatbot, Lens, and Conversational Business Message

First, let’s start with the core point of difference that makes Rakuten Viber a powerful tool to reach and connect with your customers like never before. 

Rakuten Viber is incredibly versatile and can be used for large-scale reach while always providing one-to-one interaction. You can send Rakuten Viber business messages to hundreds of thousands customers and always be sure it will reach an individual on their phone. Unlike, for example, print magazines or TV ads, where you expect to reach an audience, but you can’t be exactly sure how many people will see your ad, and how long they interact with your content, despite all advances in martech and measurement.

 

Rakuten Viber provides an advantage like no other platform can: one-to-one messaging at scale.

 

With Rakuten Viber, businesses can send one-to-one messages to millions of their customers quickly, easily, and at a low cost. This is a game-changer for businesses and marketing teams who want to reach their audiences on a personal level. With Rakuten Viber, they can do just that.

Here are just a few of the ways you can use the messaging app to connect with your target audience:

Rakuten Viber Business Messages

There are three types of Rakuten Viber Business Messages: Promotional, Conversational and Transactional.

Let’s look at each one in detail.

Promotional messages can be sent to the entire customer base, or a particular target segment. Rakuten Viber messages are highly personalized and can be customized to the individual preferences of groups as defined in your Customer Data Platform, or you can even create messages unique to each customer! You can use promotional messages to deliver important announcements, special offers, or to share your brand’s story. This is a great way to stay top of mind and an excellent tool to drive purchases, increase sales, reward loyal customers, drive traffic to your website or Rakuten Viber Chatbot.

By using Rakuten Viber you can have a 1:1 dialogue with your customers. Conversational messages are designed to start a conversation and create an engagement with your audience. These messages can be used to assist customers and increase conversions, manage bookings or orders, provide post-sales support, request feedback, run competitions, and more. With Rakuten Viber, you can also use chatbots to automate part of the customer service.

Transactional messages are designed to send important information about the purchase, such as a confirmation of order or a notification that their product has been shipped. Transactional messages are also perfect for sending reminders, such as an appointment reminder, or a meeting alert.

No other marketing channel can offer you a similar approach of the audience reach at scale, and with a guaranteed one-to-one conversation.

Read more about How To Open a Rakuten Viber Business Account

Large-scale marketing campaigns

Rakuten Viber makes it easy to reach large groups of people with your marketing communication, even if this audience is not a part of your CRM or CDP. A wide range of advertising solutions is available for digital marketers, including banner ads, videos, and other types of advertising unintrusively placed in chats, calls, post-calls, Explore screen, More screen, and the desktop version. Define your target audience, and we'll help you deliver your campaign. 

Our recently launched branded Lenses help businesses connect with the Gen Z audience, and Rakuten Viber Stickers are a great tool for viral advertising that creatively leverages interactivity to increase visibility and engage the company's current and prospective customers.

Just like with Rakuten Viber Business Messages and Chatbots, Rakuten Viber Advertising Solutions is uniquely positioned to reach large audiences across geographies and interests, but also ensure the interaction is one-on-one, at the screen of a mobile device or a desktop version of Rakuten Viber. 

Servicing every customer individually, but connecting with millions at the same time

Thanks to Rakuten Viber’s built-in features, it’s easy to provide top-notch customer service via the app. You can use Rakuten Viber’s conversational live chat feature to answer customer questions in real-time, or you can use the app to send automated messages (like appointment reminders or shipping updates) to your customers. Rakuten Viber provides a quick and easy way for you to stay in touch with consumers – and resolve any issues they may have. You are able to expand your customer support reach and provide outstanding service no matter where your customers are.

A prime example of using Rakuten Viber for Business solutions to reach more new customers and provide great service to existing ones, is foodpanda (now Glovo) – a mobile food delivery marketplace which operates in over 50 countries.

The brand wanted to drive awareness in Bulgaria, position themselves as innovative, dynamic and open minded, and improve customer experience using a modern digital communication tool. As the solution, foodpanda took advantage of Rakuten Viber advertising and messaging solutions to drive audiences and increase engagement with their brand new chatbot. foodpanda released two sticker packs and allocated a media budget to promote them, targeting Rakuten Viber users via ad placements. In addition, their chatbot provided customer care, facilitated food orders and offered 1-2-1 personalized messages. The campaign has been a tremendous success, with a large spread across Rakuten Viber Bulgarian users. Find out more about this success story.

Results of brand awareness and engagement with Rakuten Viber ads, stickers, and a chatbot

Here is why Rakuten Viber is changing marketing and is a powerful marketing tool for brands:

1. Connect with customers one-on-one, which builds trust and rapport.

2. Reach customers at scale, thus increase the chances of conversion.

3. Generate leads and sales through chatbots and other automated processes.

4. Increase brand awareness and reach new markets.

5. Drive traffic to your website, app, chatbot or channel.

6. Increase engagement with your brand.

7. Engage customers in a more interactive way through rich content, including branded stickers and video.

8. Enhance customer service and support.

9. Provide a more personal touch than other marketing channels such as social media, and make customers feel more valued.

10. Track engagement and analyze data to better understand what customers want and need. Privacy is the top priority for Rakuten Viber – no messages are ever accessible to anyone except for the two people exchanging those messages.

Rakuten Viber is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world with over 1 billion Android downloads. It is a revolutionary solution for marketing, and it's why we're seeing more and more brands using Rakuten Viber to reach their customers. Over 8500 brands use Rakuten Viber messaging solutions to connect with their customers. 

Companies can send messages to millions of people at once, and they can target their messages to specific groups of people and be sure that every message is open on the customer’s device. This means that brands can reach their target audiences more effectively and at a lower cost.

Rakuten Viber Case Studies

Learn how brands use Rakuten Viber: