5 steps to get WhatsApp ready for Black Friday

By Maxine Hess

Writer | WhatsApp marketer | Creative

Events

WhatsApp Marketing

You already have your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing strategy ready, but have you thought of WhatsApp? Add this to your marketing mix now and ensure better retention.

Black Friday (November 29), Cyber Monday (December 2) are, as usual, coming quicker than you expected. After the summer cools down, the offers heat up.

You've probably already prepared your marketing strategy, but we urge you to put WhatsApp in it. It's an exciting new channel that's easy to slot in with your existing campaigns, and that will give you that extra sales push you need.

It's possible for your brand to do Black Friday on WhatsApp and we will fast-track you into our software to make sure you get going on the right foot.

Get charles now, be onboarded fast, and you could be promoting your Cyber Week campaigns on WhatsApp this year

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WhatsApp is a great addition to your marketing mix. For short, snappy messages

and amazing open rates.

2 years ago, our unstoppable client SNOCKS challenged itself to bring in over €250k in revenue with WhatsApp alone and gain 100k WhatsApp opt-ins through charles. Which they succeeded in (and some) 💪

In 2023, our customers did even better. 2024 is set to be an exciting one for WhatsApp, with so many large consumer brands like Jack Wolfskin and Dermalogica already set up with WhatsApp and the charles platform.

How to get WhatsApp Business ready in 5 steps

Your customers already have WhatsApp on their phones. You just need to piggyback onto it. Get our WhatsApp software now, build an audience and enjoy WhatsApp for Black Friday (and beyond). Here's a handy timeline:

Choose a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (ASAP)
Get software and integrate with your systems (ASAP)
Get as many customers as you can on WhatsApp (now to November 29)
Learn how to use WhatsApp as a business channel (now)
Play and have fun! (lead up to Black Friday)

1. Choose a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider

The WhatsApp Business Cloud API is now available to everyone, which is great. However, unless you're a developer, you'll find it hard to make use of it.

That's why companies like us exist. We give you better functionality, the ability to share chats between teams, work on your desktop, create automated campaigns and more. Essentially, we provide the link between the API and the ROI.

Business Solution Providers (BSPs) like us give you the right software, technological know-how and chat expertise to use the full potential of WhatsApp Business.

Your BSP will help you:

Set up a WhatsApp Business account
Integrate its platform with your existing systems like Shopify, Slack and others
Learn how to use the platform
Understand how best to chat with customers on WhatsApp
Make a success of WhatsApp marketing campaigns
Start and grow your WhatsApp audience
Continually grow revenue with this channel

You pay per WhatsApp message, so your business growth is in your solution provider's interest. Because your success is tied together, you know you've got a WhatsApp expert working hard for you who cares about your business goals.

Your customers already have WhatsApp on their phones. You just need to piggyback onto it.

We're proud to be a WhatsApp BSP and Meta Partner. You can see our WhatsApp BSP partner page here.

Shopify Integration with WhatsApp - drag and drop product into chat

The charles platform is clean, bright and easy to use.

Here, a chat agent is dropping a product into chat with a customer.

Check out our checklist on what to look for in a WhatsApp BSP.

2. Get software and integrate with your systems

You'll need to get your WhatsApp Business platform installed and this will need to be integrated with your existing systems.

With charles, you can be set up within hours to chat with your customers through any channel. See our WhatsApp integrations here.

List with icons of web applications

Your software should integrate with your existing systems like Shopify (charles makes this easy!), to

minimize disruption and maintain the data and messenging systems you already have

So if you start now, you could be testing your first campaigns very soon.

This is plenty of time to build an audience (more below), send test campaigns, gather customer data, train agents and get to know the platform.

3. Get as many customers as you can into WhatsApp

You can't do a Black Friday WhatsApp campaign if you have no phone numbers. The first thing you need to do is get customers into WhatsApp and opted in to chat with you (in a GDPR compliant way).

How many people should you get into chat? It depends on your business but we would say between 150-500. 50 would be too small an audience to be worth the cost.

There are many ways to invite and incentivize customers into your WhatsApp Business channel. We call them "Chat-ins."

Blessing Osadolor, our UK Customer Success Manager, works with clients every day to increase their success in WhatsApp. Here are her tips to get 1,000s of customers into WhatsApp before Black Friday:

"Use your email subscribers: these are your customers already, you have their email address, and they expect to hear from you. Send an email saying, "Hey we're on WhatsApp now, come and say hi!" Add a wa.me link link to send them straight to chat. Set up an automated opt-in flow so you a) reduce your work and b) make sure you're GDPR compliant.

Use your thank you page: you can add a link to WhatsApp here. Tie it together with delivery updates, which customers really appreciate having on WhatsAppp. And use the thank you page of your email newsletter.

Replace your email newsletter with a WhatsApp chat bubble and start having conversations instead of one-way Klaviyo sendouts.

Add posters in store: put a QR code and a discount on them to get people into WhatsApp. Put them near the checkout and offer a receipt through WhatsApp. Get creative here to catch attention. This can be very effective because you then know a customer's location if they make a purchase with your in-store discount.

Put a banner on your website. You could offer exclusive early drops for Black Friday for people who sign up for WhatsApp, for example.

Post an Instagram story announcing that you're in WhatsApp and offer a discount or a competition when customers sign up for your WhatsApp messages.

Use paid ads: this way you can target the right people. It could be existing customers or people who match your ideal customer profile (ICP). You can also use your Black Friday campaign creative for these.

But do this soon! The cost of paid ads goes astronomically high right before Black Friday and the holiday season. Now is the time to get people into chat and save ad spend."

With the right touchpoints and opt-ins, you can get 1,000s of customers into chat before Black Friday

4. Learn how to use WhatsApp as a business channel

You may use WhatsApp already to speak with family and friends, but it's different when you're talking as a business. You have a responsibility to get the right opt-ins and talk to your customers in a respectful way.

Your BSP should support you here. At charles, for example, our Success team helps you take your first steps:

Product onboarding: we show you the different features of our platform and the full potential of WhatsApp for your use case(s). Clients are usually very excited to see what's possible at this stage.
Guides: we give clients readymade guides, like our "Chatiquette" guide on do's and don'ts of talking with customers in WhatsApp.
Readymade WhatsApp messages (called "templates" by WhatsApp):
We help brands get going with examples of how they could word messages. For example, to a customer who responded "No" to an offer:

No worries. Can we ask you why you didn't want this discount? Can we do something better?

If you change your mind in the future, your discount is still here for you!

Button: Get discount

Proactive check-ins: after a couple of weeks, we check to see how you're using our platform. Can we help you identify more sales opportunities? Could we optimize your marketing campaigns? Are you writing your messages according to best practices? Are you sending enough campaigns/too many? Did you set-up your opt-in flows properly?
Continual nurturing: WhatsApp is about relationships and growing your business in the long-term. We work hard to help you get more customers into chat, get more from the relationships you already have, reactivate customers, learn more about your contacts for better segmentation and more.

charles success team at DMEXCO

At charles, you have a dedicated Success team ready to help you get more from WhatsApp as a channel.

5. Play and have fun!

Enjoy playing around on your new platform and see what does and doesn't work.

Send campaigns to yourself to see how it feels to receive them. Get feedback from your colleagues. Once you're feeling confident, send some small test campaigns to a small number of customers.

How long should the text be? Do questions work? How much can/should you automate? How many emojis? Image or no image? CTA at the top or bottom?

We'll help you with this, but you know your brand and your customers better than anyone. Above all, stay true to you and enjoy finally being able to have personal, direct relationships with your customers, in a space they already love to be.

Test text length, offer amount, time of send, wording and more

There's still time to make WhatsApp the star of your Black Friday marketing strategy. Just be sure you start as soon as possible so you can be familiar with this new channel. We're here if you need us.

Let's get you started

Tell us about your business and we'll make you a 30-min presentation with use cases we think would generate revenue and help build relationships with your customers on Black Friday, based on your business goals. Talk soon!

Disclaimer: the information in this article is based on our experience and expertise and is not offered as legal or data privacy advice. For full information on your legal obligations under GDPR, please go to the European Commission's official GDPR site.