WhatsApp Business: Using broadcasting messages

Enterprise Nation and WhatsApp have joined forces to educate and support small businesses on the benefits of implementing and using technology, such as WhatsApp's free business app.

This e-learning video is part of a free series designed to help small business owners connect with customers, showcase their product/service and respond to customer questions.

Broadcasting messages

With broadcast lists, you can send messages to several contacts at once. Find out more about this time-saving marketing feature and how to use it to your business's advantage.

Find out more about Enterprise Nation and WhatsApp’s partnership: WhatsApp Business app: How to manage customers and drive sales

Transcript

Hi, my name's Ellie and I work at WhatsApp. In this session, we're going to look at how we can use the WhatsApp Business app to engage customers. We're going to talk about what you can do and why you would do it using practical examples of using the features built into the WhatsApp Business app. So let's look a little bit more at what we'll cover today.

Broadcast lists are a one-to-many communication. With the broadcast list feature, you can send a message to several of your contacts at once. Broadcast lists are saved lists of message recipients that you can send broadcast messages to without having to select them each time. In a single broadcast list you can add up to 256 recipients.

Those recipients will receive the message as a normal message, but when they reply, it'll appear as a normal message in your chat list. Replies only comes to admins, not the entire group it was sent to.

To create a broadcast list, it's super simple. On an Android phone, tap more options which is the three dots sign on, and then tap new broadcast. If you're on an iPhone, go to your chat screen, tap broadcast list, and then tap new list. Search for or select the contacts you want to add. Then tap the check mark if you're on an Android, you tap create, if you're on iPhone. This will create a new broadcast list.

The broadcast features available on the app are perfect for small businesses that use WhatsApp for sales or for marketing purposes. You can create different lists for different purposes, so you can send regular broadcast messages.

You can use this feature for segmenting customers by interest, grouping your contacts into smaller lists to deliver the more relevant content according to their interests, or the level of engagement.

For example, you could create three audience lists, one for customers, contacts who frequently engage with your business. One for leads, contacts who've engaged with your business only once. And one for prospects, potential customers who have not yet engaged with your business.

As part of your usual business, your audience may change or your segmentation may require some list adjustments. You can edit your list so they reflect the most up to date interest of your contacts.

To edit, open your broadcast list. If you're on an Android, tap more options, the three dots icon, then tap broadcast list info. If you are on an iPhone, tap the information button. In the broadcast list info screen, you can change the name of your broadcast list by tapping edit or edit list. Add recipients to the list by tapping add recipient, and remove recipients by tapping edit recipients and the cross next to the contacts you want to remove, then tap the check mark.

WhatsApp wants to protect users from receiving spam messages. Therefore only contacts who have added you to their phone's address book will receive your broadcast message. If your contact is not receiving your broadcast messages check to make sure they've added you to their address book.

If a customer decides to reply, their reply will not be sent to other recipients in the broadcast list. Replies only come to the admins, not the entire group that was sent to. So their reply will not be sent to the other recipients in the list. If you want your recipients to participate in a group conversation, you should create a group chat instead.

In a broadcast list only the admin can see the recipients and the recipients cannot see each other. This way you don't need to worry about members of the list seeing someone else's contact information. In a way groups are like the CC on an email and broadcast lists are like the BCC. This makes broadcast lists more private.

The ability to analyse the success of messages is key in marketing. Broadcast list analytics helps you understand your customer's engagement and experience. This feature shows who and when received and/or read your message. This may help you understand how effective your messages are. To check your analytics, simply tap and hold the sent message and click message info.

So let's look at Organido again to see how they use broadcast lists. With WhatsApp Business, Organido uses broadcasting to let customers know when they release a new juice, but also to announce their specials for the week. They've created a broadcast list with all regular customers.

They ask customers if they would like to receive such information. This helps them avoid messaging customers who don't want marketing messages. As you can see from the message they created, it's simple, clear and about the weekly special. By having a pre-created list Organido can quickly and easily send a broadcast each week as it's just a short job to draft the message and send.

By sending these messages weekly, Organido has increased its weekly drink special by 25% and increased significantly the awareness of their new juices when they launch. Customers love being kept informed and for Organido, it's a free and easy way to market their products.

WhatsApp broadcast lists will save you precious time when you want to send the same message to many contacts all at once. But as a business, it's important that you have your customers consent to message them with business announcements.

Now that you have direct engagement with customers, taking care of that engagement is key. So first is recommended to gain people's permission. You could message people who have contacted you first or have requested that you contact them via WhatsApp. A good idea is to give people your phone number so that they can message you first.

If a user asks you to stop messaging them, it's best to remove the user from your address book entirely and refrain from contacting them again. If you add someone and they don't want to be included you could lose them as a customer. It's always important to respect people's choices. So some key takeaways of what we've covered today.

For your business, consider how and when broad communications could help. Practise how to create and edit a broadcast message, understand how replies are done and who reads your messages. Get permission to add people to your broadcast messages list first, and avoid spamming and hassling customers that don't want to be included.

To learn more about the WhatsApp Business App, visit whatsapp.com/business. Thank you.

Find more WhatsApp Business e-learning

• Why is WhatsApp Business so powerful?

• Getting started with WhatsApp Business

• Creating engaging content

• Building your engagement plan

• Sharing short links and QR codes