Increase your Shopify store sales with WhatsApp for Business
Written byPim de Vos 
If you’re a Shopify-powered business with WhatsApp Business, next year and beyond will be an exciting time for you. E-commerce is seeing strong growth around the world as more people go online for everything from groceries to luxury goods. According to Statista.com, “In 2020, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 4.28 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022” and Shopify earned $2.9 billion of that $4.28 trillion.
At the same time, the WhatsApp messaging platform is getting more popular. Statista.com says that WhatsApp will grow from 68.1 million users in 2019 to 85.8 million users by 2023. Also, at the beginning of the COVID outbreak, 62 percent of businesses chose WhatsApp as their primary form of customer service.
All of this means you’re in an excellent position to optimize WhatsApp Business functionality on your Shopify platform and once you do, you can see an increase in your store sales.
Let’s jump right in. This post will cover the following:
· Overview of WhatsApp versions and their target user groups
· Benefits of having WhatsApp Business API on your Shopify store and how it increases sales
· Communicate effectively with WhatsApp messaging tools
· How can I add WhatsApp to my Shopify store?
· A comprehensive solution for your e-commerce business.
Overview of WhatsApp
There are different versions of WhatsApp, including the standard WhatsApp, WhatsApp Business, and WhatsApp Business API. The WhatsApp standard version is for single users to connect with friends and family, the WhatsApp Business version is for 1 business user, and the WhatsApp Business API connects multiple business users.
For the purposes of this post, we will focus on WhatsApp Business API because it’s geared toward customer service teams and has a wide range of functionality that helps teams to collaborate more effectively.
Benefits of using WhatsApp Business API in your Shopify store to increase sales
The amount of value that WhatsApp Business API brings to your Shopify store is endless. With WhatsApp Business API, you can:
· Establish instant communication with your customers – with over 2 billion monthly active users on WhatsApp, you can directly communicate with and get to know your customers better and faster.
· Send order notifications and welcome messages to your customers.
· Generate new contact leads – now that you have WhatsApp, you have opened the door to hundreds, maybe thousands of new customers who use WhatsApp as their main communication tool and you can gather their contact information for future marketing campaigns.
· Automate communication with templates.
· Increase customer engagement through sharing photos and videos with your automations – which improves customer satisfaction. An example might be sending an order notification that a person’s product is now in stock which includes a photo of the product so the customer can confirm if the pic is in fact the right product.
· Receive orders directly within the app, avoiding having to switch screens and making the buying experience more seamless.
· Obtain the official WhatsApp Business API green checkmark on your platform signaling you’re a credible WhatsApp business, which builds trust with your customers.
Communicate effectively with WhatsApp messaging tools
You can make communication with your customers even better using WhatsApp’s messaging tools like:
· Greeting Message – enables you to message customers automatically with a welcome message if they are messaging you for the first time or anyone that has not messaged you in 14 days or more.
· Away Message – automatically gets sent to anyone that messages you while you’re away.
· Quick Replies – allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to send frequently sent messages to your customers. For example, you can type “/thanks” and the message that goes to the customer is “Thank you for your business! We look forward to working with you again.”
· Labels – WhatsApp labels help to keep your conversations organized by categorizing them and making it easier to locate messages later, such as “New customer,” “New order,” “Pending payment,” “Paid,” and “Order complete.” You can also create your own labels according to your unique business needs.
How can I add WhatsApp to my Shopify store?
The most impactful way to add WhatsApp to your Shopify store is to integrate your Shopify account with Trengo. Trengo is a dynamic software that helps you to manage all your media channels, like WhatsApp, on a single platform.
Once you have Shopify integrated with Trengo’s inbox, Trengo connects your inbox using the WhatsApp Business API. Finally, with Trengo’s website widget, you can add a WhatsApp chat button to your Shopify-powered website which enables visitors to contact you via WhatsApp. This button “directly opens the WhatsApp application on smartphones, desktops and laptops.”
A comprehensive solution for your e-commerce business
It’s clear that WhatsApp’s Business API has a diverse functionality that provides the e-commerce business owner with a powerful business tool to increase both customer engagement and sales. It’s likely though that WhatsApp is not your only communication channel between you and your customers. Trengo offers a unique platform that takes all of your communication channels like email, Facebook, Google Business, Instagram DM, Telegram, Twitter, Voice, and WhatsApp Business API, and enables you to manage all of them on one single platform.
Trengo connects your inbox with the official WhatsApp Business API, giving you the capability to answer customers’ questions right from Trengo. Additionally, with Trengo, you can assign customer conversations to multiple agents, so that customers get answers quicker, producing a more satisfied customer, which increases brand loyalty and increases sales. Plus, with Trengo, you can create, customize, and install a chatbot that will reply to customers’ frequently asked questions and reply to customers after your operating hours, so no customer is left behind.
Other features that Trengo offers are adding a WhatsApp button to your website so customers can reach you directly through your site and the ability to create auto-replies, like your business hours, website address, and other contact information that can be customized for all your communication channels.
As a Shopify-powered business, there is a multitude of business tools at your fingertips. Knowing which tools to use and how they meet the needs of your unique business effectively is the key to increasing engagement, customer satisfaction, and sales, and choosing Trengo as your content management system and customer success platform is a smart choice
For more information on how to provide the best customer experience to your customers, visit Trengo.
