A quick guide to selling on Telegram

When customers have a great experience connecting with your business via their favourite channel. They will be more likely to make a purchase. Mastering sales via popular messaging channels can help your business to increase awareness and scale significantly.

So how do you create a great sales journey on those favourite channels? Today we’ll have a look at popular messaging platform: Telegram.

In this post, we discuss how Telegram can help you increase sales, receive payments for products, and other possibilities your business account will offer. After following the steps of this quick-guide you'll be ready to start selling on Telegram.

Telegram helps businesses to boost sales

With over 550 million active monthly users, Telegram is a popular global messaging platform. With so many customers spending time on the app, businesses will gain a lot by adding Telegram to their other customer communication channels. For all customer facing teams, including sales.

Because once your team starts a conversation and customers would like to continue talking on Telegram, your team can. And they will have the possibility of nurturing the customer via their favourite channel until they convert.

The benefits of selling on Telegram are:

• Wide reach: with millions of active users on the platform, businesses can reach more prospects and get repeat sales from existing customers by continuing the conversation via their channel of choice.
• Low cost per sale: your sales team can offer relevant products and services to Telegram users based on preferences. The app’s features such as specific channels will help you segment and target customers.
• Retargeting: your team can send targeted content to prospects coming from Telegram via other platforms such as Google to push the purchase.

So which Telegram features will help you to sell products?

Telegram has many features that can help your marketing and sales teams to push prospects through the funnel, achieve business goals and hit sales targets.

Start by exploring these Telegram features:

• Multiple devices: the Telegram app can work on multiple devices at the same time. This is a great feature that allows more than one employee to manage customer conversations.
• Sophisticated bots: Aside from the regular chatbot that can hold simple conversations, Telegram Bots can perform more advanced functions such as pushing content and receiving payments. This can greatly help your sales and customer support teams to provide customers with better experiences.
• Easy connections: Customers are sometimes reluctant to share their personal information, especially with businesses they do not know or trust yet. Telegram makes interacting with customers easy because all you need to connect with a user is their username.
• Video marketing: Unlike several other instant messaging apps, Telegram allows you to send multimedia content of any size, as all files are stored in the cloud. This gives businesses a great opportunity to convert customers using proven video marketing strategies. Which 76% of marketing teams point to as a useful strategy to increase sales.

Start selling your products on Telegram

Selling on Telegram can be very profitable if done correctly. By creating a clear path for customers to reach you, connect with you and ultimately make a purchases, you can maximize everything the Telegram channel has to offer.

1. First, set-up a Telegram for Business integration

Reading about how Telegram can boost revenue, you would like to get started and add this channel to your other customer communication channels sooner rather than later. But in order to unlock all the Telegram features you will need a business solution provider.

A business solution provider will connect the Telegram channel to your inbox, via the Telegram API. Same would go for making use of WhatsApp Business, and adding that channel.

Via a Telegram and WhatsApp business solution providers such as Trengo you can make use of a smart customer engagement platform i.e. a smart inbox. That combines all your channels, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger and more, in one overview. So that you can manage interactions with customers all in one place, instead of switching between different tabs. And where you can make use of those channels specific features, such as Telegram chatbots etc.

2. Then fill out your Telegram profile

You want to connect with all the possible prospects on Telegram. And to ensure that prospects know it’s you, fill out your Telegram profile. Don’t forget to fill out your brand information, opening hours, logo and address. This way, once prospects find you they will know in one view what your business is about.

3. Next up: automation

Once you complete your profile, customers are able to find you. And when they do connect with you, you want to let them know immediately that you have received their message and will respond as soon as your team is able.

Customers don’t have to wait for a reply from your team if you set up automation. Use for instance Telegram auto-replies or Telegram bots that help to establish keep the conversation going and strengthen your relationship with customers.

A Telegram e-commerce bot

The best Telegram ecommerce bot for any business will differ depending on the specific capabilities needed.

So consider what would serve your service and sales teams best:

• Babelgram: will help translate messages within a group or inline within a chat. So you can connect with anyone from any location.
• Skeddy: can send out custom reminders. So you can make conversations personal.
• Yellow.ai: can help your team to build conversational virtual assistants, similar to chatbots. So you can service customers with automation.
• Gmailbot: will enable you to receive and send messages via Gmail through Telegram. Can help the customer journey if you already work with Gmail.
• Botfather: do none of the bots work for you? You can also create your own bot

3. Connect all your webshop data to channels such as Telegram

After you’ve connected with your target audience and you’ve started pushing your products, you want to make sure your entire customer journey goes as smoothly as possible. From the first contact to recurring sales.

An e-commerce integration can be very needed. Because once your team has really started selling via this channel, you want to make sure they have all the information they need in one overview. So whenever a customer contacts you via Telegram about a purchase, your sales or service team has direct insights into the history and payment information of this customer. Paving the way for a great customer experience.

So to make sure your webshop and all your customer channels are connected, you need a smart inbox. As mentioned before Trengo will allow businesses to connect with customers via multiple channels while working from one inbox. Including in this inbox all customer data, profiles, order numbers etc.

Trengo supports various e-commerce integrations with platforms such as Magento, WooComerce, Lightspeed, Shopify, Picqer, and Bol.com.

Example: how to integrate your Shopify webshop with Telegram

Let us for instance show you how to integrate your Shopify store with Telegram.

Start by integrating your Shopify store into your smart customer engagement platform Trengo. The process is pretty easy, and you only have to do it once.

Once your Trengo inbox receives all relevant customer information from your stores, such as product and billing information, order number, payment method, and even order history, you are all set up to provide your customer with the best experience. Because when a customer contacts you via Telegram, you will see all their data in a flash!

Or integrate WooCommerce and Magento with Telegram via Trengo

With Trengo, you can also integrate Magento and WooCommerce. For step-by-step guides on how to integrate Trengo with a specific e-commerce platform so that you can use it when communicating via Telegram, check out Trengo’s Help Center:

• Magento 1
• Magento 2 Sidebar
• WooCommerce

4. How to receive payments for products that you're selling on Telegram?

Last but certainly not least! Once you’ve gone through all of the steps. Of setting up your inbox, connecting Telegram, useful automations and your webshop you have everything in place to lead prospects and customers through the funnel.

An an important step of course is to collect payments. Via Telegram this can be done in 5 easy steps.

1. Search for Botfather and use the /mybots command to select the @merchantbot offering the goods or services
2. Open Bot Settings and click on Payments
3. Choose a payment provider, and you'll be redirected to the correct bot
4. Enter the correct details with the prompts given. Then go back to the chat with Botfather
5. You will now be able to see available providers with their names and tokens. The token will help you connect to the Bot API

Learn more about payments on Telegram and connecting the Bot API.

Start selling on Telegram

Immensely popular messaging apps are great customer channels for your business. As they offer you access to great numbers of customers.

Once customers start contacting you via their favourite channel, make sure you go through the steps in this quick-guide to set your entire customer journey up for success. From your customer service to your sales teams, you want everyone to offer the best possible experience to customers.

Unlock all Telegram features, webshop integrations and many more of the most popular channels to give sales a boost.

Try Trengo for free for 14 days.