We are in messaging age – almost 75% of the world on messaging. Moreover, messaging apps such as WhatsApp have incredible engagement rates: – 98% of mobile messages are opened and read (mostly within 3 seconds).
The best part is that this channel isn’t yet exploited for commercial usage, so there almost no spam. Moreover, according to Nielsen’s Facebook Messaging Survey, 67 percent of mobile messaging app users said they expect to use chat more for communicating with businesses over the next two years. Therefore, this channel is ripe for a marketer.
Based on Law of Shitty Clickthrough rate, we certainly shouldn’t miss this channel. As time passes and more marketers start using this channel, the engagement will probably drop and certainly be costly. In facts, as we speak, big business have started using WhatsApp to converse with customers.

Whatsapp Broadcast

Creating WhatsApp broadcast is one of the best ways of marketing on Whatsapp for content distributions.
While creating Whatsapp group is relatively easier, it has many disadvantages:

• No privacy of number: Any new user can see the contact numbers of others and even message group’s people personally
• Chances of hacking: There are a lot of ways to automate scrapping of numbers from WhatsApp group if you are a member
• Intrusive: WhatsApp Group will lead to multiple notifications and unwanted conversations, which might irritate your users.

However, in case you are interested, here is how you can create Whatsapp Group Invite link. Once the link is created, you can just put this on website and facebook page in order to acquire users.
But for the reasons mentioned above, in this article, we will talk about Whatsapp Broadcast Group. A lot of content platform are using this to distribute their content.
In essence, there are 3 steps:

• Create a link to send messages to your Whatsapp Business account
• Create an automatic reply
• Engage on daily basis by adding to Whatsapp Broadcast group.

One company that has successfully executed this is Bloomberg. They have launched invite-only Bloomberg Quint’s WhatsApp service. You can join using this link and check out.
Recently, at Sqrrl, we also launched similar service for content distribution. We use broadcast service to deliver one news that affects your every day. You can join using this link and check out.

How can business automate the creation of Whatsapp Broadcast?

With the Broadcast List feature, you can send a message to several of your contacts at once. Let’s talk about these 3 steps to operate broadcast groups in details.
Before we start, I must point why we can’t follow the general route – add contact numbers to broadcast list and send a message. That’s because only contacts who have added you to their phone’s address book will receive your broadcast message. However, this process could be followed for WhatsApp groups.

Step 1: Create a link to send messages to your Whatsapp Business account

In order to start sending messages, you need users to add your number to their phone’s contact list. WhatsApp does provide a way to add a click-to-chat link to your website, email signature, or social media pages that makes it easy for people to start a conversation with you. By clicking the link, a chat automatically opens. Click to Chat works on both your phone and WhatsApp Web.
To create your own link with a pre-filled message that will automatically appear in the text field of a chat, use https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=whatsappphonenumber&text=urlencodedtext
Please note:

• WhatsApp Number should be the full phone number in international format. Omit any zeroes, brackets or dashes when adding the phone number in international format.
• urlencodedtext is the URL-encoded pre-filled message.

Example: https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=918447737025&text=Hi%20Ajitesh
You can easily write URL-encoded messages using following rules:

• URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a “%” followed by two hexadecimal digits.
• URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a plus (+) sign or with %20.

You can also use this tool to create your URL-encoded messages.

Step 2: Create automatic replies

In the WhatsApp business, you can create a greeting message to introduce your customers to your business.
How to do? To set a custom greeting message, go to WhatsApp Business app Settings > Business settings > Greeting message.
When a customer messages you for the first time or after 14 days of inactivity, you can set the app to send them a custom greeting message automatically. As most of these users will be sending you message for the first time you can send an automatic message.
Here is a sample auto-message:

“Welcome to . One final step-
WhatsApp users – please save this number to start receiving updates.
You will receive 5-8 updates a day.“

This message also ensures that user will save your number, ensuring that your future message will land in his inbox.

Step 3: Engage on daily basis by adding to Whatsapp Broadcast group.

The final step is to keep the audience engages. One the best way to do this is to add people to your WhatsApp broadcast group and ensure that you are sending content regularly. Ideally and particularly for news, one should engage at a fixed time. This will build expectation for the user and subsequently increase engagement.

Whatsapp Click to Chat Feature Usage – Success Stories

WhatsApp Click to Chat feature can be used in multiple ways for marketing. I came across this awesome example of WhatsApp marketing using Click to Chat – Whatscook. A Brazilian company invited users to submit their phone numbers along with a picture of the contents of their refrigerator. Real chefs prepared recipe based on this picture and then even shows users how to cook through pictures, videos, and other WhatsApp features.