Creating a WhatsApp link is a straightforward process that should only take up a few moments of your time. It will, however, deliver huge benefits for your business across multiple departments. Soon you could be marketing on WhatsApp, driving sales on WhatsApp, and more. Once you begin to use them regularly, you’ll wonder how you survived without them in the past.
WhatsApp links are a great way to streamline your communication with customers. In essence, they work the same way that regular links do. When clicked they take the user to another destination. When a user clicks on a WhatsApp link, rather than being taken to a webpage (as would happen if you clicked on a regular link) the user is taken to WhatsApp and a chat with the target account is opened.
These links all begin the same way, rather than www. or a typical domain name, every WhatsApp link starts with wa.me/ this indicates that this is a WhatsApp link. Following that is the telephone number of the chat you’d like to open. For instance, the link to talk with Zoko would be wa.me/917306017571. Try clicking it and see what happens, feel free to have a chat with us!
If you’re on mobile, you’ll notice that your app opened straight away, if you’re on desktop you’ll have the option to use WhatsApp Web.
These links are completely free to create and are open to everyone.
There is a huge variety of different ways that you could use WhatsApp links within your business. In fact, any time that you would like a customer to connect with you from outside of the WhatsApp app, there’s an opportunity for you to use a WhatsApp link.
The factor worth considering is that many businesses aren’t currently harnessing the power of WhatsApp within their business. By taking the step and using WhatsApp in proactive business ways, you’ll be a step ahead of the competition.
When businesses are using WhatsApp, many of them are using it for customer service. Much like using a chatbot or a live chat via a website, WhatsApp allows customers to talk with customer service representatives in real time. This more relaxed, conversational approach is less stressful for employees and more engaging for consumers. When paired with a powerful dashboard or a CRM, entire accounts could be managed through the medium of WhatsApp.
Not many businesses would consider WhatsApp marketing a standard channel, but relatively new additions to the WhatsApp Business app and API have made WhatsApp a powerful marketing tool. It’s true that you’re not going to be able to run paid advertising within the app, but you will be able to directly market products, events, and updates via WhatsApp messages.
Imagine that your business is an eCommerce business and you have a sale coming up on a particular product. You could create a message explaining the sale, include links to your products for sale online, and (if you’re using the API) even include buttons. This could then be broadcast to hundreds of followers, each of which is informed by your valuable message.
Direct marketing doesn’t have to be events and short term. You could also use your content to deliver useful, valuable information. Even sending a type of WhatsApp newsletter could be hugely beneficial to your marketing efforts, and if you need to expand your contact list you could include a link on a pop-up.
Just remember that if you’re using the WhatsApp Business app, your broadcast limit is set to 257 members at one time, and they must have you saved as a contact. These limitations don’t apply to API users.
Born Primitive is a gym apparel company based in Virginia. Since using the broadcast feature in WhatsApp they’ve been able to deliver valuable messages to their customers with a huge 95% open rate. These messages have been so powerful it has led to a 20% increase in their web traffic.
Customers will likely have questions during the sales process. Having your sales representatives on hand to answer these questions, and guide customers toward a potential sale is a great use of WhatsApp.
Even if you’re not an eCommerce-style business, many businesses will find the ability to quickly send documents and images useful. Yes, you can do this via email of course, but the fast and engaging nature of WhatsApp is a useful string to have in your multichannel selling bow.
There are two ways to create a WhatsApp link,
The process of manually creating a link is incredibly straightforward:
If you want to include a pre-filled message for added speed, you’ll need to use URL-encoded text. This involves adding a ?text= after the number and then your message. For each space include %20. An example would be https://wa.me/1XXXXXXXXXX?text=I'm%20interested%20in%20your%20product.
If you’re embedding this link onto your website, it will look much better when formatted as a button, especially when using a button with the WhatsApp logo.
The manual process isn’t ideal thanks to the length of time it takes to create a link, plus there is a large margin for error. Instead, it’s recommended that you use Zoko to create a WhatsApp Link.
Creating a WhatsApp link is incredibly simple, takes a matter of moments, and has a huge number of use cases. There really is no limit to where you could implement this within your business.
There’s far more to WhatsApp than just links, if your business is ready to take WhatsApp to the next level reach out to Zoko for a free demo of our platform.
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