Marketing Insights

The Response Rate Is Dead! Long Live The Response Rate.

Soham Chakraborty
Soham Chakraborty3 minutes read

If you can measure it, you can sell it. Open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, forwarding rates…there’s a reason Marketers love talking about their KPIs. And why shouldn’t they? Knowing where all your figures fall is essential for running the most successful campaign possible.

But one metric that is rarely brought up these days is the ‘response rate’.

Often referred to as the ‘golden metric’, response rate tracks how many recipients actually felt engaged enough to write back to you. Doing so indicates the kind of consumer intent that directly translates into $$.

And yet, no one seems to be talking about response rates anymore! 

Why would marketers, who otherwise track all KPIs like their firstborn child, ignore the single most important signal of how engaged their customers are?

Because the response rate is dead.

Who Killed The Response Rate?

Though we would love to play Sherlock, this isn’t a mysterious whodunnit. 

To cut the long story short, what killed the response rate was a spammy transformation of Marketing Emails and SMSes into channels of one-way communication. 

It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case. Email and SMS were originally built for back and forth communication. People were meant to actively interact, not passively absorb information on these platforms.

But decades of spammy promotional Emails & SMSes structurally reshaped consumer psychology. So much so that the average response rate for Emails is down to a historic 1%! 

Should businesses then forget this ‘golden metric’ of engagement and just move along? 

Absolutely not.

Long Live (WhatsApp) Response Rates!

WhatsApp Messages are the exact opposite of Emails & SMSes: personal, conversational and straight in your inbox (unlike the dreaded promotions tab on your email).  

Since most of us use WhatsApp primarily to communicate with friends and family, we instinctively trust it as a channel.

WhatsApp Marketing leverages this consumer trust to generate an astonishing 40%+ response rate! 

But it’s not just about the numbers. WhatsApp is going to fundamentally transform how businesses view the customer pipeline. 

Imagine if customers could not only interact with personalized promotionals but also with transactional messages like booking confirmation, order tracking and subscription reminders?

We are entering a world where Marketing, Sales and Customer Support are no longer going to be neatly separated categories but are going to become parts of one giant engagement engine run on WhatsApp. 

How To Get Started with WhatsApp Marketing?

Book a demo with us today and one of our in-house WhatsApp Marketing Experts will personally walk you through the entire process!

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Soham Chakraborty
Soham Chakraborty

Soham is a content marketer on the Tars team. When he's not writing kickass blog posts like the one you just read he's reading obscure articles from history's foremost anti-enlightenment thinkers and writing treatises to send to his 3 substack subscribers.

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