It’s an every marketer’s dream to connect with their international/national customers in a personalized yet cost-effective way. Often times the solution is provided by emails, but they’re not so easy to use.
Businesses were feeling the need of offering great one-on-one experiences to customers. And to bridge this gap, Whatsapp launched its new feature to foster customer relationships, known as Whatsapp for Business.
WhatsApp has been the biggest hub for billions of users around the world to connect and chat with their friends and family. Businesses and marketers always want to foster customer relationships and meet them where they are. And with the addition of the business feature, WhatsApp has become one of the most important marketing channels.
While seeing it through a narrow perspective, it may seem like WhatsApp is just another messaging service, however when you look carefully, there are tools integrated in the app that are built for maintaining strong customer relationships and increasing lead generation.
More than 4 billion people in this world have a smartphone. Out of which, 2 billion people of them use WhatsApp and the majority of these people believe that WhatsApp is the easiest way to connect to the business.
This means your business’s most of the potential customers are using WhatsApp as a channel of communication.
So, if your business hasn’t started using WhatsApp as a marketing channel to communicate with its customers, then you are missing out on a great chance to sell and offer great customer support.
In this blog of Sampark Infoways, we’ll discuss how to create a Whatsapp business account and how it can be useful for businesses.
Table of Contents
What is WhatsApp by the way?
WhatsApp is an online messaging app, similar to Facebook Messenger, Viber or Hike. WhatsApp utilizes your wifi’s or phone’s Internet connection to allow you to communicate with other WhatsApp users. This app is an inexpensive alternative to local, national and international calling or messaging.
Initially an independent messenger company, WhatsApp was launched in 2009. But soon Facebook bought it in 2014. As of 2021, it’s still owned by Facebook.
There are many reasons why people use WhatsApp for personal or business uses and some of them are-
- It is absolutely free. However you might get charged for your data consumption.
- It is fast, seamless and reliable. If you have your internet in place via wi-fi or mobile data, you can use WhatsApp to communicate with users all over the world.
- It’s available almost everywhere. Stats claim that there are WhatsApp users in across 180 different countries.
- Along with texting, you can use WhatsApp for voice messages, calls, video calls, sharing photos, videos, documents, or your live location.
First things first- Create a Whatsapp for Business Account
Prerequisite – Prior setting up a WhatsApp Business account, you will require a smartphone running either of these two operating systems – Android or iOS, and a new number. If you want, you can use your existing WhatsApp messenger number for the WhatsApp business, you just have the same number to Whatsapp business.
1. Download the WhatsApp for Business app for Android or iOS.
You can find the app on Apple’s App Store or Google Play. You can also download it through WhatsApp’s site.
2. Agree to all Terms and Conditions
Make sure you read all the T&Cs before agreeing to it.
3. Enter your business’s phone number
Make sure you have chosen your country’s telephone code.
4. Fill in your details
After you’ve entered your phone number, you’ll be directed to a page where you need to fill in the important details like your business’s name, add a profile picture and choose a category that your business finds a niche in.
5. Learn more about the WhatsApp for Business tools
In this step, you’ll get to know about creating a product catalogue for your ecommerce or automated messaging.
Before you jump to features like automated messaging, ensure to include more information about your business. In WhatsApp Business, you can manage work timings of your business, addresses, websites etc. in the Business Profile category in settings.
Here are some more options you can edit through Profile section.
- Profile image
- WhatsApp business phone number
- Your business’s description and location
- Your business’s status
6. Now, start connecting with your customers
Now that you’ve created your account on WhatsApp Business, you can start using the app to communicate with your prospects and customers.
Also Read: Branding on Social Media – How to ace it?
Setup tools for WhatsApp for Business
1. Messaging Tools
Messaging tools provide the ability to foster key conversations with your customers and help you interact with them via automated messages. With this tool you can create automated greeting messages, away messages, and set up quick replies to answer frequently asked questions.
- Greeting message – Automated greeting messages help you in introducing your business to your customers. Here are the following steps on how you can create a welcome message for your business.
Go to Business Tools > Greeting message > Switch on Greeting Message > Tap on the edit icon and add your message > Tap on “Save” to save the changes.
- Quick replies – Quick replies help you save and reutilize messages you often send so you could easily answer frequently asked questions in no time. You can effortlessly access a quick reply by typing “/”. You can assign various quick replies by using “/” e.g. /intro
Go to Business Tools > Greeting message > Switch on Greeting Message > Tap on the edit icon and add your message > Tap on “Save” to save the changes.
- Away message – These messages are the messages which are sent during the hours in which your business is closed. It helps your customers when you can be available and create a fine customer experience.
Go to Business Tools > Tap on Away message > Enable away message > Select the edit icon and add your message > Configure the schedule and add recipients > Tap on “Save” to save the changes.
2. Labels
With the help of label option, you can effortlessly organize your conversations, to make it easy for finding your chats and messages. You can make labels with various colours, and you can insert labels to an entire chat or to certain messages within a chat.
Also Read: 7 Tips on Building a Strong Presence of your Business on Instagram
Using WhatsApp for Business
WhatsApp can help you in your business efforts through a couple of different ways. It is a powerful app to have in your marketing toolkit. You can increase visibility, automate communication, and keep your workflow organized.
As the app is free to use and manage, you would not need to spend money on downloading new software. Let’s now hover over some other ways to use WhatsApp as an asset for your company.
1. Increase the visibility of your business.
As stated above, like Facebook, WhatsApp lets businesses set up their Business page on the app. A business profile offers important details for prospects and customers, such as the business’s location, category, website, description and contact details.
If you want, you can also add a catalogue to your WhatsApp profile.
WhatsApp’s catalogue tool lets you upload your products in bulk, so customers can know about your various offerings through the app itself. This tool helps your customers to get an idea of what they can buy from your business.
Having a page for your business boosts the number of possible customers interacting with your business using the app.
For example, one of your customers wants to explore what your business offers, but he/she doesn’t feel like searching it on Google. If your catalog is ready and up, he/she will be able to access your offerings on the app itself, reducing effort by a great margin.
You can use catalogs to display a new product line, or feature your most popular products to entice your audience members.
2. Reduce the response time.
By using WhatsApp for Business, you can interact with customers directly. You could even automate messages through a chatbot, so your customers can have satisfactory answers for their questions.
As stated above, you can save ‘quick replies’ for your customers. This feature minimizes the need to type, or copy-paste answers to common questions.
One way to use quick replies is providing with it a content offer. For instance, you can create your welcome message and ask about your new offerings, (“Warm Greetings! Would you like to know about our latest addition of products?”), and add a quick reply that directs them to your catalogue, or another page or promotion.
3. Communicate with colleagues or employees
The benefits of using WhatsApp for Business aren’t just limited to communicating with customers. It’s can also be used to stay in touch with your employees. In fact, WhatsApp is used by more than 70% of professionals for communication at work.
WhatsApp’s group chat feature allows you to send messages to up to 256 people at one time. You can send PDFs and other documents up to 100MB over WhatsApp business.
4. Network with other professionals
At last, WhatsApp can be used to communicate with other corporates in your as well as other industry. WhatsApp’s video call tool can be used in an official networking capacity, similar to Zoom or Skype.
You also have the option to sync WhatsApp for Business with your desktop; this feature increases seamlessness across devices and removes the dependence on one single device.
Final Words
So now you know why WhatsApp for Business could be a great tool to meet your business objectives. WhatsApp for Business is an amazing way to improve customer service, and streamline communication with both your customers and your employees.
Meet your business goals rapidly with expert digital marketing services from Sampark Infoways – an all round IT solutions provider and digital marketing company in Raipur. Visit site to know more.
