From social media services uniting people according to their interests, Instagram has transformed into one of the most significant marketing channels. Or rather became it in addition, while remaining one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. Just to avoid sounding unfounded, according to Kepios’ research, the global active audience of Instagram has almost reached 1.5 billion people.
With an Instagram business account feature created by Meta for companies aiming to increase their engagement with customers, it is now easier to promote and sell on Instagram than ever. Brands may sell goods and services directly through their Instagram pages, which serve as shops. Business accounts on Instagram provide all tools necessary for social commerce, including product pages and real-time statistics for understanding visitors’ demographics and Instagram usage patterns. All of this can help to tailor marketing strategy and boost sales conversion.
However, there are plenty more fish in the sea — apart from Instagram, there are such social media platforms as Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat, as well as messengers, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, and others. For a business that wants to wholly harvest the benefits of engaging with customers across multiple channels, it is important to adopt an omnichannel communication approach. And this proves to be quite difficult: sales reps have to promptly reply to customer inquiries in several apps and manually input order details from these conversations into a single system, while managers are unable to see unified analytics of their teammates’ performance.
All of this can be achieved by employing an omnichannel messaging platform. Here is how using one helped a bakery chain to improve its customer relations and significantly increase sales.
The bakery’s success story
Located in Europe, OldTown Bakery is a chain of 15 cafés that sells specialty coffee, artisanal bread, and pastries. While the brand’s every store has a seating area, the bakery has put an emphasis on fast delivery and accepting orders online in the early days after launch.
“We want to make ordering fresh bread and pastries as simple as texting a friend. You send a message and 15 minutes later pick up an order on your doorstep,” says Michele, the company’s Business Development Manager.
To make ordering as simple as possible for customers, OldTown Bakery didn’t limit itself to an ordering form on the website, but also set up Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger accounts. This way, a person can send a direct message on any of these platforms with order details and delivery address, and the bakery’s employee redirects it to a nearby store.
How omnichannel communication platform helped business development
The word of mouth, good prices, and high quality did their job — the number of the bakery’s delivery orders showed stable growth. Soon, the chain started having trouble processing all inquiries on time, failing to deliver orders in the promised 15-minute period more and more often. Things got even worse when the marketing department launched a promotional campaign on Instagram, based on a professional photoshoot of pastry and videos of the bakery’s employees offering a glance into their daily jobs.
“If a month ago we received about 15 orders a week from Instagram, the promotional activity and growing customer knowledge about our brand increased this figure to 50. Even though we’ve hired two additional customer support specialists, our operation was still slow due to the increased volume. Some order requests were even lost and never fulfilled,” comments Michele.
What brought a change and helped to prevent growing customer dissatisfaction with increased order processing time was an omnichannel messaging platform. Among several options, the bakery chose Umnico — a London-based customer communication service that allows to:
- connect more than 25 most popular social media and messengers within a single interface;
- save the entire history of the client’s correspondence in their card;
- leverage sales automation to speed up inquiries processing and eliminate repetitive tasks;
- add templates and set up hotkeys for quick answers to frequent questions;
- attach any types of files to messages: images, documents, audio, and video;
- receive customizable notifications on incoming messages;
- analyze the audience and employees’ work.
“Adopting Umnico’s Instagram integration was one of the best choices for our business, probably next only to adjusting the recipe of pistachio croissants that are so beloved by our clients. With this software, we can comfortably manage a 3 times increase in the number of orders coming from Instagram and other social media, while maintaining the high standards of order packaging and delivery,” concludes Michele.
Adding an all-in-one messenger such as Umnico to a company’s roster of sales and support tools can take a business’s social commerce to the next level and improve the speed and personalization of customer interactions across all channels. A free trial provided to new clients allows them to evaluate Umnico features without making any financial commitments.
Jessica is engaged in brand exposure at LandscapeInsight. She brings forth content that helps both the reader and brands based on research and trends. You can reach Jessica at –[email protected] or on Our website Contact Us Page.
