WhatsApp for Shopify: 5 Ways to use WhatsApp with Shopify for Enterprise Business
Marketing for enterprise businesses is easier said than done.
Compared to mid-sized businesses, enterprise marketing involves many layers as it caters to various customer profiles and involves multi-channel setups.
Moreover, with omnichannel experiences becoming critical to meeting customer demands, enterprises must embrace all channels, including WhatsApp.
But most enterprise businesses exclude WhatsApp from their marketing plans or don’t know how to use it right.
This blog discusses ways to use WhatsApp with Shopify for enterprise to provide a seamless customer experience.
Why should your enterprise business care about WhatsApp?
Being an enterprise business, your marketing plan may include multiple channels. Your website, various social media channels, email, and SMS might already be a part of your plan. But there’s one crucial channel you might miss out on — WhatsApp.
Enterprise businesses need dynamic tools that can help them scale activities to match their growing needs. You will need to run large-scale campaigns in an organized and streamlined manner. That’s where WhatsApp for Shopify comes in. We’ll tell you why it needs to make it to your marketing plan.
1. Vast demographic audience
Most people use WhatsApp for communicating – whether it’s personal or work-related. The platform had approximately 3.8 billion active users in 2023. However, now, WhatsApp is being used for marketing as well. Globally, 50 million people use WhatsApp Business. And its demographic segments cater to a wide range of audiences in all categories — age, gender, location, profession, etc.
WhatsApp can make your brand accessible to a broad demographic audience. Being an enterprise business, scale is critical to the nature of your business. You can leverage WhatsApp to reach this vast scale globally — market to all segments, all industries, a wide range of customer personas, etc. For example, a large audience would require you to use broadcasting to reach a broad cross-section of consumers. Shopify integration with WhatsApp makes it a breeze.
2. Addresses the complete customer lifecycle
Integrating WhatsApp with Shopify can help your business engage customers throughout the lifecycle — from creating awareness to post-purchase interactions. Moreover, Let’s look at how WhatsApp contributes to each stage of the customer journey:
1. Awareness stage
You can use WhatsApp broadcast messages and reach out to a wide audience to introduce your brand, products, or services. In addition, you can also share multimedia content, such as videos, images, etc. via your WhatsApp status.
2. Consideration stage
WhatsApp allows two-way communication, a must-have communication strategy. It enables direct conversations with potential customers, personalized one-on-one interactions, helps provide answers to customers’ questions, and provides any additional information. You can also create targeted groups for different customer segments and engage customers via discussions and relevant content.
3. Purchase and post-purchase
At the stage when customers make purchases and after-purchase, ways WhatsApp with Shopify integration can help you provide customer support and product assistance. Furthermore, you can also share exclusive content and offers to engage customers to boost loyalty. The other ways to use WhatsApp with Shopify is at these stages are to request feedback and reviews, cross-sell and upsell, promote referral programs, reward programs, etc.
3. Adds value to the marketing mix
Integrating WhatsApp with Shopify marketing mix alongside other channels, such as email and SMS, can enhance your overall marketing strategy by offering a more diversified approach to reaching and engaging with your audience. Here’s how WhatsApp can complement and add value to your marketing channel mix:
1. Real-time interactions with customers
You can send immediate, prompt messages to customers. This helps when you want to send time-sensitive communication. For example, a flash sale which is only for a few hours. For example, customers might not open the same message sent via email in time, but since WhatsApp is a more personal channel, it’s highly likely that customers will see the message.
2. Higher engagement
WhatsApp offers many interactive features, such as surveys, polls, quick replies, group chats, etc., which can improve customer engagement rates. Besides, this can provide better ROI to brands. For example, more people are likely to respond to a survey on WhatsApp than on SMS or email.
3. Better message response tracking
On WhatsApp, you can see whether your messages get delivered to customers, and whether or not they read the messages, via the two blue ticks. This gives you a better understanding of the success of your campaigns. This feature is difficult on email or SMS.
4. Comprehensive customer journey
When WhatsApp and Shopify integration is done well, it helps provide an omni-channel experience ensuring a consistent brand experience across various touchpoints. By strategically using different channels at different stages of the customer journey, you can guide customers seamlessly from awareness through to conversion and beyond.
5. Boost revenue and conversion
When brands use tactics such as FOMO and urgency, many customers tend to make impulse purchases. This helps increase revenue. By integrating WhatsApp with Shopify, you can increase such purchases. For example, when you want to send abandoned cart reminders with WhatsApp’s limited-time discount offers, WhatsApp can be more effective than other channels.
4. Better assistance
With WhatsApp, you can provide better support and assistance to customers. For example, most retailers choose live chat for providing customer support. But to interact via live chat, customers need to be on your website. Once they leave your site, they won’t be able to read your chats.
That’s why having a live chat feature is not as helpful as integrating WhatsApp with your Shopify store. With WhatsApp, your customers can always chat with you, on the go, at any time.
In addition, with WhatsApp, you have the chat history easily accessible. Besides, WhatsApp messages are sure to get read and customers won’t miss your messages.
WhatsApp on Shopify has all these benefits over live chat, which can help you provide better support and assistance to customers.
5. Better segmentation
Integrating with Shopify can help with better WhatsApp’s customer segmentation. It can enable you to personalize content and campaigns more effectively. Wondering how that works? Let’s find out.
1. Access customer profiles
You can access your customers’ profile, their order history, their chat history, queries, and other relevant data via WhatsApp. This data can help in segmenting customers based on criteria, such as, purchase pattern, demographics, location, among others.
2. Segmentation based on campaigns
By creating different targeted segments, you can create campaigns specific to the various segments. This way, you can create more relevant and targeted campaign messages to attract and engage customers, leading to better campaign results.
3. Automate segmentation
With WhatsApp, you can automate interactions. WhatsApp data can help you categorize customers into different segments based on various criteria. Moreover, you can collect customer feedback in real time, making automation of segmentation fast.
6. Better open and click through rates
WhatsApp messages have a 98% open rate, and clickthrough rates of over 50%. That’s because WhatsApp is on mobile, always handy, enables real-time updates, notifications, quick interactions between customers and brands, and supports attractive media such as video, etc. All these reasons impact its open and click through rates. For enterprise businesses that have high competition, WhatsApp can bring positive campaign performance insights.
Top 5 Ways to use WhatsApp with Shopify for enterprise
WhatsApp integration with Shopify is easy. Let’s go through the steps.
1. Add a WhatsApp icon to your Shopify store
You can enhance your Shopify store website with a WhatsApp icon by integrating a WhatsApp Business API interactive message button. This feature enables seamless connectivity between your customers and your business on WhatsApp Business, all with a simple click.
By integrating a live chat button on your website, you can establish direct communication with your customers, enabling real-time conversations and prompt responses to their inquiries. Simply put, instead of adding an unknown live chat widget, you add a WhatsApp icon in its place.
2. Add a WhatsApp chat button on your Shopify store
Another step to integrate WhatsApp with Shopify for Enterprise stores includes adding the WhatsApp chat button by downloading the Interakt app from the Shopify store. Interakt allows you to install a customized WhatsApp chat widget pop-up on your website. This widget can be personalized to match your preferences in terms of color, text, and layout, ensuring a cohesive and branded user experience.
How can enterprise brands use WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is versatile and enterprise businesses can use it for various purposes to improve efficiency and performance. Here, we look at some use cases of WhatsApp.
1. For effective responses
Use WhatsApp to answer frequently asked questions in a quick manner. For example, you can pick a set of commonly asked questions and set up quick replies.
2. Away responses
Another common use of WhatsApp for Shopify is using WhatsApp automation messages. When customers message you outside of business hours, on holidays, or when you receive a high-volume of messages, away messages help streamline the process as well as provide a good customer experience.
3. Send order updates
Sending timely and quick order updates is a big part of ensuring good customer experience. You can automate this task via WhatsApp updates.
4. Catalogs and collections
Another use of integrating WhatsApp with Shopify for Enterprise is to create catalogs and collections. Customers can browse your products via WhatsApp. This helps enhance customers’ shopping experience, as well as boost sales. Moreover, you can also send WhatsApp catalog links for easy sharing and include the ‘add to cart’ feature to make shopping via WhatsApp easier.
5. Revive abandoned carts
One of the biggest sales drop reasons is cart abandonment. With WhatsApp being a more personal channel, you have better chances of reviving those lost sales. Send automated reminders to remind customers of their carts.
Examples of enterprise brands effectively using WhatsApp
WhatsApp for Shopify is proving to be a versatile tool for enterprise brands, enhancing both customer-facing interactions and internal operations. In this section we look at some examples of how brands are using WhatsApp.
1. OYO
OYO wanted to improve its customer support by leveraging WhatsApp. The brand wanted their Guest Experience Managers to address user inquiries on this messaging platform.
Goal: The primary objectives of this initiative were to reduce costs by redirecting traffic from the call center, improve resolution time, and enable support staff to efficiently manage large-scale interactions.
How Interakt supported OYO: Interakt seamlessly integrated with OYO’s WhatsApp Business account. With this, the brand could facilitate simultaneous handling of multiple conversations, ensure swift resolutions, measure individual support agent productivity and efficiency, and provide valuable data on the key reasons prompting customers to seek support – building a customer support platform of their own.
Learn How Interakt helped Oyo to leverage WhatsApp for Customer Service
2. CEAT
CEAT’s customer experience and digital team wanted to have engaging interactions with its customers on a large scale.
Goal: To provide swift and immediate responses to potential customers seeking information on common tire-related queries about purchase and maintenance. In addition, to offer a user-friendly method for logging in and tracking complaints. Furthermore, CEAT aimed to keep both prospects and customers informed about the latest offers and promotions.
How Interakt supported CEAT: Developed a personalized WhatsApp chatbot to help generate sales-qualified leads by engaging customers, making product recommendations, and presenting discounts at opportune moments.
Leveraging Interakt’s proactive messaging solution, the CEAT team strategically re-engaged lost or dropped-off leads by sending pertinent updates through WhatsApp notifications.
Read how Ceat reduced their acquistion cost by 70% with Interakt.
How can enterprises get started with integrating Shopify with WhatsApp
Behind the success of every enterprise business, is a comprehensive tech stack that helps automate tasks and multiply marketing to scale. And for enterprise-level businesses, simply integrating with WhatsApp is not enough. You must also ensure your tool integrates well with other tools such as CRM, ERP, etc., for processes to be streamlined.
And that’s where Interakt wins. Interakt provides comprehensive WhatsApp API features that drive engagement, enhance customer experience, share analytics, and manage large-scale campaigns.
