What comes to your mind when you think of Instagram? Reels? Memes? Scenic photos? But even if we don’t realize, Instagram has become much more than that and has started to affect our buying behavior more than ever.
Instagram is the perfect place to start for any small-scale business. The number of active users on Instagram makes it a sheer marketing force to be reckoned with. Introducing your business to the world of Instagram can help you boost exposure, build your brand, and engage with your audience—all at no cost.
But is it possible for a small business with a limited budget and time constraints to engage with customers on Instagram while handling queries from all over the place?? By adding Instagram integration we have made it possible. Let’s consider a theoretical use case on how Katherine, a budding entrepreneur, makes the most out of it.
The rise of Lutum, a pottery company
Let’s say Katherine is the owner of Lutum, a California-based pottery company. Today, Lutum’s Instagram account has more than 60K followers and ships its craft to more than 63 countries around the world. But how did it all start?
Katherine was a housewife who got into pottery as a hobby when she joined a one-month pottery workshop in her area. Ever since, she has been practicing it and posting photos of her work regularly on Instagram. Over time, people started loving her work, and she started getting requests to buy it.
As she gained popularity, she thought of turning this hobby into a full-time profession. She named her business Lutum—meaning clay in Latin—and started an Instagram account for her page and listed her products there.
Katherine was getting a lot of queries from Instagram, but she wasn’t able to keep up with the production workload and customer queries. Slowly and gradually, she started losing customers as Katherine’s hands were all over the place and she wasn’t able to provide customers with a satisfactory experience. She realized no matter how good her products were, she wouldn’t be able to run the business if she didn’t respond to customer queries and engage with them. This was when one of her friends recommended the newly launched Instagram integration in Zoho SalesIQ.
After a seamless onboarding of the product and successful integration with her Instagram account, Katherine was able to set up a pre-chat form to capture key customer information and keep up with all her customer queries on time, during business and non-business hours. Not only that, the customer data was automatically transferred to her CRM, which helped reduce her manual data entry, eliminate redundancies, and speed up her overall process.
Over the years, her business has grown multifold and she’s also been able to set up a website to showcase her products. She continues to be a happy customer of SalesIQ, managing both customer support and engagement on her website and Instagram account.
SalesIQ for SMBs
By adding Instagram to our growing list of messaging channels like Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram, we continue to help small businesses improve customer experience, be it on an instant messaging app, website, or mobile app. Try out SalesIQ today with our 15-day free trial and paid plans starting at just $7/agent/month.
Check out the new integration and let us know if you would like us to add any features to it.
