WhatsApp Business For Small Businesses - A Complete Guide

After much speculation, WhatsApp officially, in late 2017 said that they would launch a separate business service (WhatsApp Business) app. It's March 2019 and the app is finally, widely available for download, and millions of small business owners are taking advantage of what WhatsApp Business has to offer.

Let's just take an in-depth look into what the business app offers over the standard WhatsApp app and then look into setting it up and getting your business profile up and running.

What Is WhatsApp Business?

WhatsApp Business

Before you swipe to your app store you should probably read on and understand what this app is about. Then you can decide whether you need to download and install the application on your device. WhatsApp Business was launched early in 2018 as an Android app dedicated to small and medium-sized business owners. Although there have been rumours about an iOS version launching soon, there is still is nothing available in the iTunes.... we checked

It’s an application designed to help business owners communicate with their customers, respond more quickly to messages, get analytical information and more. The application is very similar to the standard application that over 1.5 billion users have come to know and love. But instead of a personal profile, you have a verifiable business profile. With this business account, we entrepreneurs can create a WhatsApp business account with specific information about our business. We thought this was super cool, read on!

Who is WhatsApp Business for?

This app is really purely meant for businesses. It has been designed from the ground up to offer a concierge-like service for customers. It provides a platform for businesses to interact better with their customers by providing updates, support. It gives entrepreneurs the option to run their business from their mobile phones instead of heading elsewhere online. In short, the customer will use the standard WhatsApp, while the business owner or manager uses the WhatsApp Business.

Why Use WhatsApp Business?

This map shows the dominant messaging platform per region, need we say more?

App Usage per Region

Source: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/mobile-messaging-app-map-2018

We highly recommend using a dedicated phone for business and not using your private phone – it is best to avoid mixing friends and family with business customers.

Extra Features of WhatsApp Business

It's Still FREE!

It’s still FREE! One of the great features that this new app has kept from the standard app is that it’s FREE. It allows you to list your business and keep in touch with your clients at no cost.

Some of the features that WhatsApp Business offers over the standard app are:

• Business Profile: with information about your business name, address, hours of activity, category, website link, email and more.
• Analytics: statistics include how many messages were sent, how many messages were received and how many messages were read by customers.
• Tagging Customers: to make it easy to know what a customer is and whether it’s just an interested customer.
• Automated Messages: such as greeting messages, auto-reply messages, etc.

In addition, there are 3 verification levels of a business account:

1. Verified – WhatsApp verified that a trusted and official brand is the owner of this account. A verified account has a green markup in the profile.
2. Approved – WhatsApp has confirmed that the phone number of the account is compatible with the phone number of the business. An approved account has a grey markup in the profile.
3. Business account – WhatsApp did not approve or verify the account, but it is a business example provided by WhatsApp to show how the app might be used in practice. s account. A business account has a grey question mark tag in the profile.

Examples provided by WhatsApp to show how the app might be used in practice.

1. WhatsApp business reduces your business’ marketing costs. With a messaging app pushing out service messages SMS could soon become redundant as service messages, activation and more can also be made right on the app.
2. WhatsApp Business also eliminates the need for many small or personal businesses to pay for and run their own personalized apps.
3. Using WhatsApp business could prove to be a boon for users as well because the service will come from a known source and spam can very easily be filtered out.
4. If there’s one thing for certain, you can expect to see more and more businesses integrating WhatsApp business into their communications in 2019. Ads are coming, Businesses need to be there.

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