Whatsapp has more than 2000 million active users! dame that’s a lot of people sending good morning messages which cute animal pictures, but imagine the marketing and sales potential this one app has. If you create a business profile on the WhatsApp Business API, you will be able to sell and advertise, as well as give quick replies to all your customers. You, as a business owner, can improve your customer experience, you can communicate with your repeated customers or attract new potential customers from anywhere where in the world all you need is an internet connection and a mobile phone or a laptop or wherever you use your WhatsApp.
In this blog, we will be talking about how business owners can use our national all-time favorite messaging app WhatsApp as a powerful business tool.
The question small business owners are now asking is: How can I use WhatsApp for business?
Let’s look at the 5 creative ways to implement WhatsApp in your business.
1) Using WhatsApp For Internal Team Communication
Whenever we tried to implement any new tool for internal communication at ProfitBooks, we got resistance from the employees. People are reluctant to ‘learn’ new things. The best thing about WhatsApp is that almost everyone uses it and it does not require any training. Another advantage is, I don’t need to explicitly ask the team to check WhatsApp as people are anyways hooked there their mobile phones.
We have formed groups of the Sales & Development team on WhatsApp and share instant messages for which an email is not necessary. It’s fast and fun to use.
With WhatsApp Web, it becomes even more, easier to type messages using a web browser.
2) Using WhatsApp For Customer Communication
Here is a sales tip – If you do your follow-ups on WhatsApp instead of direct phone calls, you will get 40% more responses. No one appreciates phone calls from unknown numbers but we are more likely to respond to personal messages. When we start using WhatsApp for customer communication, we noticed better response and engagement.
This also allows for being a little informal. For example, you have sent a quotation to your potential customer but haven’t heard from him, what do you do? You either call him or send a follow-up mail using formal language. Instead of doing this, if you just send a short message on WhatsApp asking about the status, you might get a quick response. this helps you establish a line of personal communication with your existing customer base or with potential customers
I’ve started seeing more and more small businesses using WhatsApp to announce new offers or send festival wishes to their customers. At ProfitBooks, we use WhatsApp’s calling feature to talk with our international customers.
3) Using WhatsApp For Customer Support
WhatsApp could be a great tool for customer care service simply because of its wider reach. Your customers would always prefer to send you a message over WhatsApp rather than calling a helpdesk number or raising a ticket.
NowFloats, a website development platform uses WhatsApp for customer support. Arush Chopra from JustHerbs has been offering skin and product consultations on WhatsApp. There are even new businesses like Wazapper that provide tools & APIs to set up customer support systems using WhatsApp.
However, offering customer support via WhatsApp may not be a good option for all types of businesses. Kritika from cloud telephony company, MyOperator warns that responding to every message on WhatsApp may not be practical for companies that get hundreds of customer calls every day.
So, choose WhatsApp as a customer support tool only if you have a lesser number of customer requests.
4) Using WhatsApp For Marketing & Promotion
Rajat Uppal, national marketing head, of Red FM, says, “WhatsApp is the new SMS. We’ve realized that WhatsApp can be a very strong marketing tool. It is a good one-to-one platform for direct communication with our listeners”.
You can use WhatsApp to send images, audio files, short video clips of your products, and text messages to users across the world. Unlike SMS or Email, there are fewer restrictions on the format and delivery chances are higher.
This doesn’t mean that you should spam your customers with WhatsApp messages. Ideally, you should use WhatsApp to connect with existing loyal customers rather than trying to reach new users. Everyone hates messages coming from unknown numbers.
If you want to get a good response, you will need to come up with creative ways to promote your business using WhatsApp. For example, Colgate invited people to send selfies of their smiles via WhatsApp, to a phone number displayed on the toothpaste pack. Motivation: a chance to be styled by brand ambassador Sonam Kapoor’s stylist!
Also, see – 8 Free Ways to Promote Your Business.
5) Creative Usage Of WhatsApp For Business
People have built new businesses using WhatsApp as a platform and some are using it to grow their business cost-effectively. Let’s look at some creative usage of WhatsApp that might give you a few ideas for the next project.
Concierge Service
This Mumbai-based errand-running service Russsh uses WhatsApp as a booking platform. You can book a cake, flower delivery, or courier service using WhatsApp.
Food Ordering Using WhatsApp
A lot of local restaurants are now offering their users an option to order food using a WhatsApp message. Customers can communicate their preferences instantly.
Medical Consultation
Family doctors have now started offering consultations on WhatsApp. Of course, it can’t replace an in-person visit but you can always text your doctor and ask about common medical queries. Apart from this, medical stores now accept photos of prescriptions and delivered medicines.
Government Services
The Delhi Police last year launched a dedicated helpline powered by WhatsApp: 9910641064. On the launch day, they received more than 23,000 messages and complaints via this number. The Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation (GSRTC) is providing Volvo bus helpline service through WhatsApp. The service is available for complaints and suggestions from Volvo bus passengers and information related to the buses.
Bonus point
Don’t we all love an onion ring in our plate of fries or some extra red sauce with our momos? We know we do. So here is one more bonus feature we would like to mention.
6) Catalog
You can use WhatsApp to add product catalogs of your goods and services along with pictures, prices, product codes, and other details. This will help your customers to buy or acquire your services from WhatsApp itself and the process to activate this catalog feature is very simple. Just go to your WhatsApp business profile go to settings and add catalogs simple, but this simple process will help you increase your sales and product visibility.
Watch how to set up and use the ‘WhatsApp Business app.
Conclusion
WhatsApp is a powerful tool for any business owner. Whatsapp will make your business communication smoother and ensure customer satisfaction. Whatsapp is a very versatile and extremely powerful tool for any business owner. We recommend getting a WhatsApp business app and getting your business verified on it to build trust among your customers.
We at ProfitBooks also believe in developing a trusted relationship with our customers, (hence we also have a WhatsApp verification) and we also offer a “forever free” plan for startups so that they can take care of your all accounting needs.
Also, Read
25 Free tools from Google that you never heard of before.
How to use Facebook for business.
How to use LinkedIn For Generating Leads
8 Free Ways to promote your business
Struggling With Finances? See How ProfitBooks Can Help
Top 12 FREE Software For Small Businesses
Yes you can! Whatsapp brodcasting is very good feature for messaging to friends or with customers and easy to use just create a channel and add friends from your address book and start sharing any thing like message video photo and also PDF file.
Hey, Can i run any whatsapp broadcasting channel for sharing Ebooks/pdfs with my friends?
Nice Article . It’s very true that with what’s app as a social means of communication is started becoming a platform for business communication too. So with that respect I have been successful in developing a software that can automatically send messages on what’s app. The message can be any note of information , it can be a bill, a quotation , product details , despatch details etc. A single person can receive multiple msgs and a single msg can be sent to multiple people. All done automatically
Thanks for the information. Great insights!
hiii …r u doing any work by using whatsapp?
Really Nice Article I love it
Glad you liked it!
That’s a cool way to use whatsapp, thanks
Why not encourage them all to get on it as it is free. This would be good for you as well.
It would be really great if we could use Watssapp to send the appointments to patients through it instead of expensive sms but the problem that you can’t be sure that all patients have Watssapp accounts even though I think 90% of them actually do
Hi
I wish to use Wattsapp for my Shared Urban Rickshaw Transport project.
I wish to put Wattsapp Desh on Rickshaw and wish to know locations of every passenger waiting on road for my rickshaw.
They will share location and i will get detail, how can they know where is my rickshaw, without pushing back from my desk to waiting passenger?
Or i have to push my location everytime passenger shared me his waiting location?
Apart from this, i wish passenger to know Estimated Arrival time of next pick up rickshaw they r waiting for?
Can anybody help me to create this Model and we can help Driver as well Passenger for Ease of Urban Transport for citizens?
Regards
Ramesh Moliya
Wattsapp: +91 9913799027
For employee communication, WhatsApp should work fine. You can create an internal group to exchange ideas and updates easily. It’s working for us fine.
Approved
Thanks,
Harshal Katre
Sent from phone, please excuse typos and brevity.
I was talking about employees to employees and the direction
It depends on the type of person you are talking to. If you are into Enterprise sales and talking to top executives, WhatsApp may not be a good communication medium. But if you are a small company and dealing directly with customers, WhatsApp can help a lot. People appreciate personal touch.
I have some reluctance I find using what’s app informal and unofficial don’t you think using it will create bad communication; misinterpretation, incomplete information because people might not be sure who needs information or where to send important messages.
Totally agree with that, recently I came across with the company which use WhatsApp as its core tool for business, it gives WhatsApp tutor via placing a purchase booking. You should surely check it out for your kids
https://www.wapptutor.com/
Thanks for the information, Whatsapp is easy, fast and one of the most effect way out for Promote any type of Product and Business or any type of Information…
http://www.pckure.com
Nice explanation. it would be great help if you provide info for small business