WhatsApp Business is taking the messaging industry by storm, bringing businesses closer to their customers than ever before. And if you’re serious about generating leads, serving your customers better and establishing a loyal relationship in turn, then you need to STOP using personal WhatsApp accounts when you talk to your customers and create Business Accounts with the WhatsApp Business App! 

In this ultimate mastery guide, we will talk about how you can get the most out of WhatsApp Business in 2020 while answering the following questions along the way:

1. What is the WhatsApp Business App?

2. How do you create a WhatsApp Business Account?

 3. Getting familiar with the WhatsApp Business App

4. Marketing on the WhatsApp Business App

A. Generating leads using links

B. WhatsApp Ads from Facebook Click

C. WhatsApp Business Broadcast

5. Customer Service on the WhatsApp Business App

A. Greeting message

B. Away message

C. Quick replies

D. Adding labels to messages 

E. WhatsApp Web 

What is the WhatsApp Business App?

WhatsApp Business was created with the small business owner in mind. Meaning, the app is best suited for businesses who want to instantly connect with their fairly limited customers. However, if your business needs multiple users sharing the WhatsApp Business account, then the WhatsApp API does the job as it is desirable for larger enterprises.

A quick instance of WhatsApp Business app’s relevance can be seen amongst Hong Kong’s computer vendors. Owing to competitive prices and the people searching for abstruse computer parts, the question ultimately comes down to the vendor’s current stock. And, since these businesses operate with limited staff and budgets, keeping electronic inventory becomes unfeasible. In such a scenario, WhatsApp Business provides an appropriate solution to computer vendors for addressing these queries of their customers in no time. 

Next up, we discuss the functions and uses of WhatsApp Business.  

How do you create a WhatsApp Business Account?

Similar to how the personal WhatsApp account works, you need a phone number and, of course, a phone to create an account on WhatsApp Business. The phone number will be unique to your account. So you’ll need at least a dual sim phone if you are to operate both your personal and business account with WhatsApp on that same phone. If not, then you’ll have to invest in a new phone altogether. And we hate to break it to you, but you can’t run both the personal and business accounts using the same phone number.

Once you’re through with these basic requirements, you can download the WhatsApp Business app from Google Play Store or iTunes App Store. Just like its counterpart, the WhatsApp Business app will ask you to verify your phone number first. 

The next step is important to note if you have been using personal WhatsApp app for business purposes. Once your phone number is verified, the app will ask you whether you would like to move your messages and media from the existing WhatsApp account to the WhatsApp Business account. Give it good consideration because, one, it is a very useful feature and, second, you’ll get the chance to do this only once. 

After this, you will be asked to input basic information about your business, its category, a description, and an address. You might like to have a profile picture too. You can see how we’ve done it in the pictures below and everything looks in place, except the verification part.

As it happens, our account does appear as a business account, but upon clicking on ‘Business Account’ people would be notified with a message that states, “WhatsApp hasn’t verified that this is a business.” Unlike Google’s My Business, WhatsApp doesn’t have any set method to verify businesses. And, as per WhatsApp, this is something that you cannot ask actively for either. Rather, they provide the verified business checkmark to notable brands by themselves. There is no request verification feature for it, as is for Instagram. 

Making the best of WhatsApp Business app

WhatsApp Marketing campaigns are not a new phenomenon and are being used more commonly these days. This goes without including those campaigns that are being run via WhatsApp personal accounts! Besides that, there are several other ways that companies are using to boost their businesses. So for the upcoming section, we will have a look at different functions achievable with the default features of WhatsApp Business app.

Generating leads

Whether you are looking to spread the word around for your business, or just want to inform people about the latest offers, WhatsApp Business is a great tool for marketing and offers an interesting route to kickstart your funnel. Let’s see how.

Lead Generation using links

Many internet marketers would agree that Facebook Ads is one of the best ways to create awareness amongst an entirely new audience, if not the best. But what if the audience isn’t cold? Maybe you have access to a good number of audience on your website or have a few thousand customer emails? How can you enable that audience to contact and engage with you through your WhatsApp Business account?

The functionality similar to that offered by Facebook Messenger’s reference codes is present in the WhatsApp Business too. Through the app, you can create links with which people can interact by sending pre-filled messages to your WhatsApp business account. For this, open your WhatsApp Business settings, go to the Business Settings, and then finally to Short Link. You can create a custom message in this Short Link screen. 

Now, when anybody would click this link, they will be redirected to a confirmation window. Then if they hit send, their WhatsApp will open with the pre-filled message in the text field that you had customised on the Short Link screen. 

That’s not all though. Since the message gets added as a reference to the link, you can create different messages for different use cases. Now, depending on a user’s first message, you can attribute them to an email you had sent or a website that they had visited. Isn’t it neat?

Segmenting Contacts & WhatsApp business broadcast

Getting your WhatsApp business account contacts up is only one part of the equation. What do you want to do next is to group them and send a WhatsApp Business Broadcast, which can primarily be done in two ways.

First, we have the tedious route. In your chats, navigate to the actions menu. Here you’ll see the option to select a new broadcast. After selecting it, you can choose a maximum of 256 contacts, much like WhatsApp groups on personal accounts. Once you’ve selected your contacts for broadcast, tap the checkmark on the bottom right and the app will create a new broadcast group. So far, the process will be a lot similar to what happens in personal WhatsApp accounts. However, the broadcast group of a WhatsApp Business account offers one significant advantage. 

Your broadcast group appears as a group for you only and not for the contacts you add in them. This means, that when a person would reply to your broadcast message, they will be having a conversation with you on the contacts chat, instead of the broadcast group. The broadcast group, however, will continue to remain in your chat list and you can keep broadcasting in that group without any problem.

Now, the second way is less cumbersome and it greatly reduces the probability of error. Using this way, you can avoid manually adding 256 contacts and instead assign a label to contact within its chat. Once you have labelled all your contacts, you can select labels from the actions menu and it will display all the labels that you had created. Now go ahead and click any label from that list. You will see all the contacts that you have under those labels and in the action menu of this screen, you can hit the Message Customers option and it will create a broadcast group of all those contacts. 

Although WhatsApp has not notified of any limits in the usage of its broadcast feature, many people have had their accounts suspended temporarily if they were sending and receiving more than 6000 messages or so per day. 

Customer Service

Usually, businesses have an in-office mobile phone that they use strictly for business reasons. This phone gets passed around and employees can perform different tasks on it simultaneously. However, if that’s not the case with your business, serving your customers via the WhatsApp Business account may get overwhelming if you’re to do it all on your own. Sure you can let anybody else use their dual sim mobile for this purpose but it will make matters only worse because customer service would become highly ambiguous! 

Fortunately, WhatsApp Business app offers some workarounds to save you time and trouble. 

Onboarding contacts 

The first message defines your whole conversation because that message will be like your first impression in real life. If you agree to this, you’ll also agree that contact onboarding should be done with great accuracy, no matter what messaging app you’re working with. 

Greeting Message

The whole idea of setting up a WhatsApp Business account is to get in touch with your customers instantly. Thus, a quick reply is a prerequisite for good user experience. WhatsApp Business app’s in-built Greeting Message feature is set up for exactly this only. 

Greeting Messages can be of many types. Which one of them is replied to a customer depends on different conditions. You can set up the Greeting Message by going to the Business Settings and selecting Greeting Message. On this screen, you can customise the message and choose the conditions under which they receive it. However, there are some settings that you may find to be unnecessary, say, the option to exclude or include strangers if you don’t have them on your address book. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Because you’re creating this message for the new, potential customers who are going to message you. Thus, like the rest us of, you might want to select ‘everyone’ for this feature. By design, a person would receive Greeting Message based on their chat with you. If it’s empty, which is the case when they are messaging you for the first time, they will get the message. In addition to it, if you delete their chat, then again they will get the Greeting Message if they contact you. However, they won’t get one if you just archive their chats instead of deleting them.

Away Message

Messaging app interactions can be useful in setting the expectations for the time it will take to respond to a customer’s message. For this, we have got the WhatsApp Business App Away Message.

Whether for a custom schedule or outside your business hours, away messages can be pretty useful if you’re going to be unavailable for a stipulated time. And for all those times, you can have the away message automatically enabled and triggered whenever a user messages you on your WhatsApp Business account. You can fix both days and time for the away message, or you can just choose to show it outside your business hours. The business hours can be set up from your profile and the away message will be sent automatically when you’re not at work.

One thing to note about the away message feature is that it will be delivered in along with the greeting message if you have the latter enabled as well and the customer messages you in your away hours. Thus, craft these two messages carefully because there’s a good chance someone may receive these two together.

Responding to contacts

In case your WhatsApp Business is successfully adding to you rainmaking efforts, and you’re the one handling the account, you are going to have quite a hard time replying to all the messages by yourself. Luckily, WhatsApp Business has provided several tools to make your job easier.

Quick replies

The 50, super useful, Quick Replies that you get with your WhatsApp Business account are the real deal. To create them, select Quick Replies under the Business Settings. On this screen, you can see the existing quick replies and add new ones up to a total of 50. Besides the message, you will be able to add up to 3 keywords and a shortcut.

Now, when you’re in a chat, you can bring up a quick reply by typing ‘/‘ and the first 3 keywords that will display the quick replies to choose from. To make your experience better, the app will automatically show the quick reply on top which has keywords that are present in the message that you are replying too. 

Adding Labels

As we discussed a while ago, WhatsApp Business allows you to assign each chat with a contact to a label. What’s more, is that you can even label individual messages for sorting through the scores of messages that you’ll probably receive. This labelling is vital for messages that will be useful in the foreseeable time, such as labels for pending payments, new orders etc.

To assign a label, select a message and hit the label icon appearing on top of the chat window. Now you will be able to see that message in the label menu, along with all other messages which have been assigned the same label. 

WhatsApp Web 

The highly effective WhatsApp Web for personal WhatsApp accounts works for the WhatsApp Business as well. Because if you’re going to reply to multiple messages at a time, nothing beats the good old keyboard!

Also, recommended you read…

Ultimate Guide To WhatsApp Business API