LINE Marketing: Closing a Sale Isn’t Difficult if You Follow These Steps!

Online businesses today have many channels to choose from, and most of them are free. It is natural that everyone turns to these free channels which include everything from social media channels to e-commerce platforms. In this article, we will be talking about LINE Marketing, which is one of the tools that many businesses use to help close a deal. It has many features, and most importantly, business operators can use it to communicate with customers easily. You can read more about the features and tools of the LINE OA application, and the LINE Ads Platform, in our previous articles. 

What is LINE MARKETING?

Literally, it’s marketing on the LINE OA platform which is a popular social media platform for business people. The platform allows you to chat, send coupons, gift vouchers and advertising messages to contacts. LINE Marketing also includes advertising on the LINE Ads Platform, which is LINE’s platform for advertisements. In this article, we will share the techniques that you can use and adapt for your business. 

Doing LINE Marketing is one of the essentials that is overlooked by many business operators. Most of them use other channels to attract customers e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other websites, and then close the deal using LINE OA; this is not uncommon. However, if you want to improve efficiency and increase repeat business, paying attention to even the smallest details could help. 

1. Select the necessary functions

Other than using the platform to attract customers by posting advertisements, there are many features for you to learn about to help maximise your performance. However, for LINE Marketing, you don’t have to use every tool the platform offers, you can just choose the ones that are useful for you. The important thing here is consistency. 

Rich Menu

A very powerful and useful tool, which you must keep up-to-date, especially when it comes to promotions, which is LINE Marketing’s forte. The Rich Menu is the first thing customers see when they enter the shop’s chat. Hence, if you don’t have the time or staff to update this part of your account with new information consistently then we suggest you only add primary information that tends to stay the same, such as product details, services, prices (not including promotions), payment methods etc., or if you have another channel like a website that has information that is more up-to-date, you can link customers there for more details without submitting queries (it is very likely that these customers will then make purchases). 

Card Message

A worthwhile tool that helps you send many messages at the same time. One of the features of this tool is that, of course, a link can be inserted. You have to be careful with this feature though and ensure that you’re happy with what you’re sending, because there are times when the product images do not match with the destination links, which creates a bad experience for customers.  

Reward Card & Coupon

A very useful feature that many businesses are using. It allows you to issue points on LINE as incentives to customers to help boost sales.  

2. Win over the customers with continuity 

For a business that has admins to reply to messages from customers, this is very important. You may set the rules, for example: “before replying to any messages, staff must go back and read the previous messages from that particular customer”. It may seems trivial, but if it appears that you know what you were previously talking about, e.g. the customer asked about the products two months ago, today they sent a message to you again and you reply with the product they were interested in, it will gain the customer’s trust, which can only result in good things! 

Image: Taodang Music Shop

3. Promotional seasons = golden hour!

One of the well-known basics when doing LINE Marketing is that businesses or brands should not broadcast messages too often or frequently, because it can be a nuisance which leads to customers blocking you. But how often is too often? This depends on your business and your target audience, however, as a benchmark, 2-3 times a day is considered the maximum. 

Promotional seasons such as Black Friday, and special dates like 11.11, are a good opportunity for you to boost sales with promotions and to advertise these by broadcasting to your customers. Most people save up for these seasons and the one thing they want to know is where the biggest discount is. However, even though it is a good time to send out promotion details, your messages shouldn’t be too frequent. If you have a lot of campaigns, we suggest using Card Message to send all of them at once, or sending a few at a time 2-3 days prior to the event to prepare your customers.

Image: Lazada

4. Complete details in one image

Although LINE is a platform for texting, it doesn’t mean that people want to read long messages. You should keep your information short and concise if you can, and put everything in the image with a link attached, so that interested customers can access it for more information. This method means that you’re not forcing information on those who are not yet interested but you can make it available in case they would like to access the information at a later date. 

5. Don’t drop the ads

With any marketing channel, doing just one method of advertising closes the door to more opportunities. LINE Marketing is no exception. Even though there are many tools to try to offer customers the best experience, posting LINE Ads should not be ignored either, especially now that you can create an advertisement yourself through the LINE Ads Platform. Or if it’s not your area of expertise, you can hire a company that provides LINE Ads services. The reason that we recommend you to post LINE Ads alongside doing LINE Marketing, is that it is another great way to gain new customers outside of your key social media platform. 

If you sell products online or operate a business that has LINE as a go-between to communicate with customers, these LINE Marketing techniques should be enough to guide you to improve your online channel and keep up with your customers’ spending habits.