How to Do Inbound Marketing on LINE: How These Brands Drive High Conversions with LINE Official Accounts

As the user growth dividend fades, limited-time tactics on LINE—like giving away free stickers when users add you as a friend—no longer work. Even LINE's own LINE for Business blog has begun urging brands to adopt a long-term approach tied to their brand strategy in order to build awareness and attract friends.

So how can you improve your current LINE strategy? Try bringing in an inbound marketing mindset. By enriching your LINE Official Account content, using LINE's many built-in features, and leveraging how closely LINE fits into customers' daily lives, you can send segmented broadcasts to the friends who need them—and over time, create a virtuous cycle.

Below, we'll walk you through how to do inbound marketing on LINE, along with real LINE inbound marketing cases from well-known brands abroad.

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What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing theory first introduced by HubSpot, a SaaS company that offers an integrated platform for marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot's CEO likens a website in the digital age to an “ecosystem”: animals naturally gather where food and water are plentiful. If your “ecosystem” is rich enough in information to solve users' problems, more and more people will find your website through search engines, social media, other websites, and other channels—the most natural way to sustain a website over the long term.

So what makes inbound marketing successful? Before we dive in, let's briefly cover its opposite: outbound marketing. Traditional offline and online ad campaigns, cold calls, flyers, and text messages are all forms of outbound marketing. You can reach a lot of people at once, but because these messages don't necessarily hit customers' pain points, order conversion rates are much lower. And because you have to keep changing content or switching channels, you can't count on steady organic traffic—and marketing costs climb as competitors bid for the same audience.

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How Do You Do Inbound Marketing on LINE?

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Did you know you can do inbound marketing on LINE? As the messaging app with the highest penetration in Taiwan, LINE has as many as 21 million daily active users, and more and more brands have been investing in their LINE Official Accounts in recent years. But with competition growing fiercer, how do you stand out from competitors and use LINE's versatile marketing options to win users over as friends? Inbound marketing is an approach worth trying!

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1. Understand Your Target Audience and Build a Complete Brand Strategy

As we mentioned, a good “ecosystem” keeps drawing users in. Before building inbound marketing on LINE, you need to start from your brand's target audience and sketch out likely personas based on their backgrounds—traits such as “grew up in the digital age,” “interested in new technology and new things,” or “still values human interaction despite a busy work life.” Apply these to how you run LINE, and you can create effective content that gets your target audience to click.

In other words, aligning your LINE strategy with your target audience's personas is the first step to building inbound marketing on LINE.

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2. Create Value Through Conversations with Friends

Once you understand your audience's personas, use LINE's real-time, everyday nature to string messages together into conversations tailored to different audiences and scenarios, and engage friends one-on-one. For example, build a complete purchase flow: “friend added,” “member registration completed and coupon issued,” “relevant messages sent based on member data,” and “a call to action that drives clicks and purchases”—step by step, keeping friends engaged with your official account.

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3. Bring In Data Analytics to Measure Inbound Marketing Results

As online consumer behavior becomes more fragmented, how can you accurately understand customers' behavior profiles? This is where a digital marketing mindset comes in—for example, tracking the open rate and link click-through rate of every message you send. With the OakMega Social CRM analytics dashboard, you can view message performance by customer click behavior and by time range, get a fuller picture of all your data, and improve your LINE results in real time.

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These Brands Drive High Conversions with LINE Official Accounts

As LINE's birthplace, Japan has highly mature offerings—from consumer services like LINE Pay and LINE Mobile to LINE Biz-Solutions for businesses. OakMega reviewed three brands' inbound marketing success stories from LINE for Business Japan to show how different inbound strategies can boost customer stickiness and drive high conversions.

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Case 1: Beverage and Food Maker ASAHI

Using behavior tracking and data analytics to achieve inbound marketing and CRM management on a LINE Official Account

Japanese beverage giant ASAHI combined the large volume of consumer data built up through its brand recognition with data from the campaigns it has run since launching its LINE Official Account—such as coupons for completing satisfaction surveys, collecting points online for offline purchases, and OMO campaigns. It consolidated this data into a CRM database to understand each friend's behavior profile.

With friend data in its CRM database, ASAHI sends segmented broadcasts with relevant product information directly on its LINE Official Account and boosts engagement with exclusive coupons. Each friend's purchase behavior carries over through the official account instead of being lost when they switch channels. This not only enables customer relationship management but also uses an OMO strategy to achieve high-converting inbound marketing.

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Case 2: Beauty Salon L'la citta

Optimizing existing LINE Official Account pages and the booking flow to improve the experience for new and returning customers and increase visit conversion

L'la citta, a small local beauty salon in Niigata Prefecture, set out to raise its visit conversion rate by optimizing its existing pages and booking flow. It consolidated bookings from multiple channels into its LINE Official Account, added a clear “Book a visit” button to its rich menu to drive traffic, and used LINE's multi-page messages to cut down on message count. When customers open the chat, they can book simply by tapping the “Book a visit” button.

The salon also uses the LINE Official Account's membership points feature, making it easier to record and redeem customers' points, and sends segmented broadcasts with relevant messages to customers.

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Case 3: Online Language Learning Platform K Village Tokyo

Targeting prospective learners interested in Korean and Korean culture with content marketing to raise course sign-up conversion

Online Korean learning platform K Village Tokyo wanted to attract as many prospective learners interested in learning Korean or in Korean culture as possible. Before starting inbound marketing, it set KPIs for its existing friend count and number of students. It then used its LINE Official Account to drive traffic to its website, where it publishes a range of Korean learning content (articles, videos, fun facts about Korea), delivering it to prospective learners through a complete customer journey. Over time, this built up organic traffic, its LINE friend count grew steadily, and its course sign-up conversion rate rose sharply because the people inquiring were genuinely interested in learning Korean.

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In fact, running inbound marketing through a LINE Official Account is a lot like running a blog: it takes time to build organic traffic. The strategies used by these three Japanese brands are just a few of the possibilities. OakMega Social CRM is dedicated to helping brands engage friends on their LINE Official Accounts through inbound marketing and Social CRM, and to building one-to-one member databases. Compared with the LINE Official Account admin console, it offers more precise target audience analysis and behavior tracking fields, so brands can drive their inbound strategies more effectively, increase friend stickiness on their LINE Official Accounts, and achieve high conversions.