WhatsApp Marketing Automation: A Complete Guide

The most popular tool, WhatsApp, might be great for customer conversation, but as your business grows, the number of messages increases. Messages, follow-ups, inquiries, and support queries begin piling up faster than your agents can keep up.

It’s no longer optimizable shortly. Delays occur, follow-ups get skipped, and your staff falls behind its targets. Introduce WhatsApp marketing automation!

It allows you to take care of conversations, qualify leads, reply to messages immediately, and manage routine tasks without swiping up. In this article, we will explain how WhatsApp business automation exactly works, discover many implementation choices, and let you pick the right strategy for your firm. 

But at first, let’s have a brief discussion about a basic question.

What is WhatsApp Marketing Automation?

WhatsApp marketing automation is the method of using automation tools or the WhatsApp business API (usually linked with a CRM software) to share automated messages, handle customer conversations, and run WhatsApp marketing campaigns – everything without manual efforts.

When you manage everything manually, follow-ups get delayed, updates do not target customers, and your team wastes time repeating the same tasks. The outcome? Frustrated prospects and missed bookings.

But with automation, routine conversations and updates run on autopilot, which saves you a lot of time and energy.

WhatsApp Marketing Automation Benefits

Companies today are under continuous pressure to reply faster and scale engagement without growing headcount. WhatsApp automation supports the industries to solve complicated problems by taking manual effort out of the queue. There are some benefits of including such a feature in your business. 

1. Drive More Engagement

WhatsApp automation lets you connect with your prospects using a channel they’re mostly active on. With open rates as high as 98%, sending WhatsApp bulk messages is significantly more likely to be seen or responded to than other traditional email or SMS.

2. Lower Support Workload and Respond Faster

According to research, delayed replies are the leading cause of customer dissatisfaction and abandoned purchases. The tool allows you to ignore that risk by regularly managing routine tasks, like FAQs, confirmations, and updates, hence your team can focus on conversations that need more attention.

3. 24/7 Availability

Buyers can wish for quick replies, also outside of business hours. But with automation, you can offer round-the-clock guidance through auto-replies and keyword or event-based messages, making sure your business stays responsive regardless of time zones or staffing.

4. Cost Savings

Rather than hiring additional teams to handle high chat volumes, organizations can use automation to manage common problems and updates at scale. It minimizes support costs significantly while handling a high level of responsiveness.

5. Consistent Customer Service

When texting is handled manually, quality differs from one conversation to the next. Automation makes sure each client receives accurate, timely, and stable replies, creating a more consistent customer experience on the board. 

Setup Considerations for WhatsApp Automation

To take advantage of WhatsApp marketing automation’s features, businesses have to use either the WhatsApp Business app or WhatsApp Business API. 

1. WhatsApp Business app

This is designed mainly for small businesses who seeking to handle one-to-one customer conversations. It’s free and easy to use, but it doesn’t provide a way to handle engagement at scale, making it the wrong choice if you have a large customer base.

2. WhatsApp Business API

This platform enables you to use all marketing and customer service features of WhatsApp to handle interactions at scale. Unlike WhatsApp Business, this is a paid service with costs that differ based on countries and conversation categories like marketing, authentication, and service. For updated cost, see Meta’s pricing.

Big teams searching to automate WhatsApp flows and campaigns would need to use the platform. Though the setup process and managing the tool need time and engineering resources, mainly when automating messages for thousands of users.

This is why most of the teams partner with a Business Solution Provider for their WhatsApp marketing needs. BSPs like Getgabs or GetItSMS are the companies that Meta has certified as official WhatsApp partners. 

Partnering with a BSP provides some key advantages, such as:

• Help to set up your WhatsApp business account and direct you through the other steps in the setup.
• Allow to handle WhatsApp contact lists and campaigns with a simple UI, rather than only programmatically.
• Support to get WhatsApp message templates approved and give you a suitable place to use them.
• Allow to create WhatsApp automations.
• And a lot more.

Basically, BSPs help with setting up, automating, and handling WhatsApp campaigns much simply.

Best Ways to Use WhatsApp Marketing Automation

The versatility of WhatsApp enables you to use the messaging app in tons of marketing strategies. Below, we are going to explore nine of the best automation use cases that can guide you to drive revenue and create profitable customer relationships.

Before we discuss this, note that Getgabs offers easily personalized WhatsApp message templates for each of these scenarios. You can use our platform to trigger automated messages depending on all kinds of events and user actions with a simple drag-and-drop editor. 

Let’s start with understanding how to leverage the WhatsApp marketing automation feature. 

1. Onboard new users

The very first automation strategy is the most well-known way to implement – all you have to do is trigger a message each time a new user signs up to get messages on WhatsApp from you. The communication may be simple, like thanking users for signing up or logging up, telling them what they can expect, and sharing a link to your site or app.

If you’re trying to increase the way to first buy, you can even add an incentive. For instance, you can share a limited-time offer or free gift that new users can take advantage of whenever they initiate a purchase within a few hours.

2. Share special occasion messages

Celebrating special days is a proven way to get users’ attention. This automation is also easy to set up as long as you’ve collected data about users’ birthdays, first shopping, anniversaries, or other special occasions. 

Also, adding a limited-time deal is an effective option to make these conversations more powerful.

3. Use customized price drop and in-stock alerts

WhatsApp is a popular platform for turning users who’ve already shown some interest. For example, if they’ve explored specific categories and items on your site, you can securely consider that they have some kind of interest that you can use with WhatsApp.

There are two useful automation strategies that you can leverage here:

• Price drop alerts, which trigger when an item that users are looking to buy gets a price reduction.
• Back-in-stock alerts, which trigger when a product the clients are interested in gets in stock.

4. Create excitement for new launches

The automation is a good way to develop excitement for new launches and services you’ll be giving in the upcoming times. It’s also very easy to integrate, as you just need to trigger the message a few days before the launch. Also, you can make a series of automated messages to introduce new products – for example, one week, two days, and 24 hours beforehand.

You can change the strategy by just sharing the message with your special users. It’s a good way to give them special treatment, especially if you add free shipping or a discount for the first few shoppers.

5. Recover abandoned carts

Another proven automated workflow practice is for the ecommerce industries. Likewise, this one is also developed for the fact that users have shown an intent to buy without completing their shopping. You can try to get customers to recover their carts with other time-based offers, including:

• Offer free shipping if the shopping is complete within a specified time.
• A discount if the shopping is completed within a particular time.

If you’re working with a solution like Getgabs, you’ll already have automatically created the contacts who abandoned their carts. What you have to do is think about when to trigger the message. 

6. Reminders for upcoming events

WhatsApp automation is used by businesses that provide scheduled solutions and events, like flights, hotel stays, webinars, doctor appointments, and more. Create an automated WhatsApp flow to notify users of the upcoming events the previous day. You can even attach important details, like boarding passes or a check-in guide, hence buyers don’t have to switch between apps when they visit.

7. Attract buyers with exclusive offers

Everyone knows discounts are the best way to interact with clients and drive shopping. Yet, they also eat into your profit margins, hence it’s essential to use them correctly. With this, you’re not only promoting discounts to clients who would’ve bought a product otherwise. Rather, but you’re also securing your margins by targeting only a particular set of customers who’re likely to engage with discount offerings.

8. Encourage repeat purchases

Converting leads into paid leads through WhatsApp is a vital use case for promoters. Though retaining those clients and encouraging them to make more purchases is also more important to grow profitability, return on investment, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).

There are many automated practices you can implement. One of our customers’ favorites is the replenishment journey. The practice includes triggering automated messages at times when clients are likely to be interested in a product.

9. Collect customer feedback

With automated WhatsApp marketing, businesses can set up messages automatically sent to customers to ask for their reviews or feedback about the service. Brands can even send surveys to new leads who have just signed up to their website. Likewise, you can collect data on what the customer expects from you and ensure to improve in the future to align with their interests.

Helpful Tips to Begin With Automated WhatsApp Marketing

To simplify the process, below are some powerful tips to help you begin with WhatsApp marketing automation.

Start easy: Do not automate all the tasks at once. Start with basic messages such as booking confirmations, reminders, and then slowly add others.

Customize as much as possible: Use names, dates, and preferences to share customized offers. Make it conversational, hence doesn’t feel like spam.

Map the customer journey: Recognize different touchpoints, before, during, and after the service. Mapping the shopping journey helps to plan what to send and when.

Set up workflows and triggers: Implement automation workflows, AI chatbots, and real-time triggers to manage things, including itinerary changes, cancellations, or feedback collection automatically.

Don’t skip a multichannel approach: Customers switch between WhatsApp, calls, email, and social media. With a multichannel integration journey, you keep all leads in a single place. 

Track and improve: Track the conversion of the message and check campaign performance. Double down on what’s working to increase your WhatsApp marketing ROI.

Manage automation with a human touch: Not all queries must be a bot. Keep complex or high-value engagement for your team. Ensure the messages come through as human-like communications and not robotic.

Use WhatsApp Marketing Automation Today with Getgabs

Getgabs provides the tools you require to develop, customize, automate, optimize, and track WhatsApp marketing campaigns. You can leverage our tool to share individual WhatsApp messages and automate them based on each kind of event.

For instance, Getgabs can help you to send automated:

• Appointment reminders.
• Cart recovery prompts.
• Account updates.
• Price drop alerts.
• Transactional messages (e.g., order confirmations, shipping updates, and payment updates).

Conclusion

Before ending the discussion, WhatsApp marketing automation is all about simplifying the communication for you and your clients. It takes care of the routine agents, hence your team can work on other real-time connection-making.

Thus, if you’ve already chosen to automate, you’ve made the right choice. It’ll save your time, keep customers engaged, and bring in more repeat purchasers. And if you haven’t already, it’s good to explore it. Start small, test a few automated workflows, and check how it benefits your business.

A lot of businesses are already using Getgabs to foster their operations and offer exceptional customer service. Explore it now for your firm; book a free demo and see it in action.