Step by Step Guide on How to Set Up Whatsapp Marketing Campaigns on Shopify

If you're just starting with WhatsApp marketing, congratulations! You’ve taken a step forward to take your business to the next level. More than 5 million businesses use WhatsApp to market their products and services.

However, to see the results, you must first identify the important features and make the most of them in a strategic manner.

We've created a step-by-step guide to provide you with that guidance and support. We'll walk you through the entire process of setting up a WhatsApp marketing campaign from scratch.

Step by Step Guide to Setting Up WhatsApp Marketing Campaigns

If you’re excited about WhatsApp marketing campaigns, let us walk you through some steps to get started.

1. Build your Customer Base

It's critical to build your customer base before running a WhatsApp marketing campaign. Check whether or not your customer or subscribers exist on WhatsApp. However, if you're just getting started, you might not have customer data. So how do you collect some?

- Customers' contact information can be collected before payment when making an online purchase.
- When customers contact you for support, you might ask them to provide their name and phone number.
- Including a contact form on your website is another excellent way to collect customer information.
- If someone shows an interest in becoming a subscriber, get their phone number and ask for permission to notify them on WhatsApp.
- You can also run contests and campaigns that require buyers to share their phone numbers.

2. Segment your Subscribers

Now that you have a customer database you need to remember that not all your subscribers are going to be the same. Some subscribers might be inactive while some may have made a purchase once, twice or multiple times. As a result, segment your subscribers based on their journey with your company.

The goal of segmenting your subscribers is to develop a personalized marketing plan for each one. For example, you might encourage inactive consumers to return to your store by providing enticing deals and discounts. Similarly, you might make a special offer to one-time buyers to encourage them to make a repetitive purchase.

3. Install a WhatsApp Marketing App

Now is the time to install the WhatsApp marketing app once you've segmented your subscribers based on their actions. But why should you use a WhatsApp marketing app?

It makes it easier to set up your business account and allows you to automate campaigns for different use cases. However, be sure the WhatsApp marketing app you install is an official WhatsApp business API partner.

An official WhatsApp Business API partner will verify your phone number, automate campaigns for different use cases, including cart abandonment recovery, send broadcast messages, order placement & delivery status updates, payment confirmation, feedback, and much more.

QuickReply.ai, for example, is an official WhatsApp business API partner that not only helps with WhatsApp marketing but also offers a slew of other features to help you save time and effort.

4. Set Up your WhatsApp Business Profile

After installing the WhatsApp marketing app, you must register your phone number and create a WhatsApp business profile. You'll be prompted to enter information such as your company's name, logo, address, category, description, business hours, email, and website link.

Such information is useful to build credibility among your existing and new customers. Your customers should know who they are interacting with. Once your number is verified, you'll get a green tick against your name. It will be easy for people you message from your business account to recognize that the contact belongs to a verified business account.

5. Add your Segmented List

You'll see the benefit of segmenting your consumers because now you'll be able to easily add them to the WhatsApp marketing app. You have to select and upload your segmented subscriber/customer list to your WhatsApp marketing app.

6. Set Up your Broadcast Campaign

Finally, it's time to get your WhatsApp marketing campaign started. Running a WhatsApp marketing campaign may appear difficult at first, but you can succeed by adding value and running a promotion that benefits your customers.

Let's say you're having a holiday sale. Simply create a broadcast list of all users and inform them of the same. Similarly, if you want to inform customers about recent sales and discounts, you can start by creating a broadcast campaign.

Also read: WhatsApp Broadcast Best Practices for Better Engagement and Sales

7. Set Up Other Automations

As mentioned before, the benefit of installing a WhatsApp marketing app is that it allows you to automate campaigns for different use cases. It can be sending a welcome message and introducing your business to a new customer, or sending cart recovery, order status, payment related messages and much more.

A WhatsApp marketing app like QuickReply.ai also offers you chatbots that can engage with your customers while you’re away. Those pre-trained bots can send replies to your customers depending on their inputs. Aren’t you excited about this? Install QuickReply.ai and take a look at it for yourself.

Also read: Types of WhatsApp marketing messages your Shopify store needs to send for more sales

8. Automate your COD to Prepaid

Offering COD may appear appealing to attract your end customers, but you already know how often it is misused. Three out five stores experience high RTO and NDR rates on cash on delivery orders.

Hence, you can use WhatsApp to automate COD to prepaid and minimize your losses. After a COD order gets placed, you can send out an order confirmation message on WhatsApp. You can also use the WhatsApp marketing app to incentivize COD customers to prepay for their orders. This way, you can reduce up to 13% NDR using WhatsApp COD to prepaid automation.

Learn more about converting COD orders to prepaid using WhatsApp marketing here.

9. Plan Out your Win-Back Campaigns

You don’t want to miss out on your inactive customers because they’re also a part of your target audience. But how can you encourage or motivate them to act? Planning re-engagement campaigns is the best solution.

Think about different marketing strategies, discounts, and offers for these customers. You already have a separate list of these subscribers; hence WhatsApp marketing app makes it easier for you to reach out to them.

Learn more about customer retention and win-back campaigns on WhatsApp here.

10. Get Analytics on WhatsApp Marketing

If you're excited about starting WhatsApp marketing campaigns, we're confident you want to scale your business. But to serve that purpose, you need data. Like any other marketing channel, you want to measure the results of the WhatsApp marketing app, right?

A WhatsApp marketing app's main benefit is that you get powerful analytics on your WhatsApp marketing campaign. You can see basic analytics reports about the number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received. With an app like QuickReply.ai, keeping a close watch on the performance of your campaigns becomes much easier.

11. Optimize your WhatsApp Campaigns

Once you get analytics on WhatsApp marketing campaigns you can optimize your marketing strategies to drive more conversions. You can even ask for feedback from customers to improve your strategy. This will give you valuable data to retain customers, grow and sell more.

For best practices on running WhatsApp marketing campaigns to get more sales, follow our blogs here.

Different Ways of Using WhatsApp Marketing Campaign

If you’re new to WhatsApp marketing campaigns let’s make it easy for you. Here are different tactics through which you can channelize an effective WhatsApp marketing campaign:

1. One-One Chat

In this option, you can directly engage with your customer on a one-on-one basis. It’s similar to a normal chat function. You can make the conversation more engaging by supporting text messages with audio, video, GIFs, etc.

2. WhatsApp Broadcast

This is the most preferred method of running WhatsApp campaigns. Here you create a broadcast list based on your customers and engage with them accordingly. Let’s say you want to create with your most trusted customers. You can simply create a broadcast list of these customers and send them a promotional message. The benefit of using WhatsApp broadcast is that you can reach multiple customers at once.

3. WhatsApp Groups

With this option, you can create a group of all the customers and share a message with all of them in a group. You can send photos, videos, and documents to the group. Everyone in the group can see and respond to it.

The only limitation with WhatsApp groups is that it can be difficult to keep a track of messages since everyone can engage here and it’s tough to manage privacy.

Click here to read more about WhatsApp Broadcast vs. WhatsApp Group.

Conclusion

Proactive communication is one factor that can set you apart from your competitors in 2022.

WhatsApp allows you to communicate with your customers one-on-one.

We're delighted you chose to begin with WhatsApp marketing campaigns. But to make them successful you need a perfect WhatsApp marketing app. QuickReply.ai comes with smart automation and useful features. It’s the best WhatsApp marketing app that offers you 40+ pre-trained bots that eliminate bulk of customer queries.

Get started with Quickreply.ai now!

FAQ's

Q1. How to start your WhatsApp marketing campaign?
Ans. You can follow the below tips to start your campaign:1. Think about the services you can offer and specify your audience.2. Choose an official solution partner to get access to the WhatsApp API.3. Develop a customer service strategy. 4. Start getting contacts. 5. Follow the rules.‍

Q2. How do I automate WhatsApp marketing?
Ans: Here is the step-by-step process for Whatsapp automation:Step1: Identify your business service and its target audience.Step2: Choose an official solution partner for Whatsapp API.Step3: Build a good customer service and marketing strategy.Step4: Get contacts.Step5: Abide by the guidelines.‍

Q3. What is called as Win-Back Campaigns?
Ans: A win-back campaign is a series of emails sent to try and re-engage them. It is also referred to as a re-engagement or reactivation campaign. Typically, this campaign uses an automation sequence that starts with a light "gentle push," continues with rewards, and then ends.