Whatsapp marketingA COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE ON HOW TO USE

WHATSAPP TO STAY CONNECTED WITH YOUR CLIENTS

As a beauty professional, your business relies on the relationships you’ve built with your clients. Maintain a connection with your clients outside of their appointments in salon is crucial to nurture your relationships.

Apart from traditional phone calls, mails/emails and social medias, text messaging is on its rise as the most effective communication method for various reasons: no more waiting time on the line, real-time conversation and one-to-one connection.

“Customers today don’t want to call or email a business –they want to send a message. And since customers are on WhatsApp, businesses need to be too”

– Mitu Singh, product manager for WhatsApp Business.

Stay connected with yourcl ients

• 95% of text messages are read within the first 5 minutes, while only 23% of emails are opened

• 22% of text messages with value are forwarded on to friends and family

• The average redemption rate for a mobile coupon is 20%

• 2 billions users worldwide

• 180 countries and 60 languages

• 65 billions messages sent everyday

• Average time spent on WhatsApp perper day is 28.4 minutes

• 95% open-rate of messages withinfirst 5 minutes

• 5 millions businesses using WhatsApp

With 2 billion active users across 180 countriesand a high engagement rate, WhatsApp is the most sought-after messaging application.

Be where your customers are.

Few advantages present when compare to SMSmarketing: it’s 100% free; it supports multimedia to enhance your message creativity using images, audios, videos, smileys/animated GIF and files attachment.

WHY WHATSAPP

Since 2018, you no longer need to use your personal account to communicate with your customers on WhatsApp. WhatsApp Business has been introduced to enable small sized businesses to keep their professional and personal life separated, while having many new and improved features supporting client interactions such as Business Profile, Auto Response, Product Catalogue and Analytics.

If you used personal WhatsApp to talk to your clients, you can still sign-up for a business account using yourlandline or another mobile phone number, and migrate your chats to the business account.

Should I use my personal WhatsApp ?

GETTING STARTED WITH

WhatsApp Business

1. Download WhatsApp Business app on your phone and follow the prompts to register your phone number – it should be different than the number used for your personal WhatsApp and you can use your landline number as well.

2. Create a business profile by adding your business logo, your business name (max. 25 characters), your business category, postal address, website, phone number, email address, business hours and a brief description (max. 139 characters).

3. You should always keep your informationaccurate

accurateand up-to-date via Settings > Business

Settings > Profile.

4. Once WhatsApp has verified that your phone number belongs to your business, the green badge will appear next to your contact's name to confirm the authenticity of your business account. Your business profile will serve as your electronic

business card, which customers can easily forward to their friends and families to discover your business.

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

STATUS

Status allows you to share text, photo, video and GIF updates that disappear after 24 hours. In order to send and receive status updates to and from your contacts, you and your contacts must have each other's phone numbers saved in your phones’ address books. You can choose to share your status updates with all your contacts or selected contacts only.

Use status to share promotional codes, flash sales to be redeem at your business in the next 24 hours or to advertise special access to events/live feed and to demo your product, answer FAQs.

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

PRODUCT CATALOGUE

Showcase and share your products and services with customers by creating a catalogue.

The catalogue is displayed on yourbusiness profile and can contain maximum 500 products or services. Every product or service has a unique title along with optional fields including price, description, website link and product code.

Customers can choose a product or service they're interested in and share it with their friends or message you to ask questions.

BROADCAST

With broadcast, you can send important update to several of your contacts at once. Unlike a group conversation, the broadcast message will appear as a normal, one-to-one message in the chat screen. When a client replies to a broadcast message, other recipients in the broadcast list won’t see their reply.

Create several broadcast lists to segment your audience and send them targeted communication. Each broadcast list is limited to 256 contacts.

Important: only contacts who have added you to their phone's address book will receive your broadcast message. If your contact is not receiving your broadcast messages, check to make sure they’ve added you to their address book.

LABELS

Making it easier for you to organise your contacts or chats with up to 20 labels of different colors, so you can easily filter and find them again. You can also create broadcast lists for select audiences from your labels.

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

QUICK REPLIES

By using quick replies you can save and re-use the message you frequently need to send. This way you can easily answer your most asked questions in no-time by preparing upto 50 pre-written replies triggered by shortcut and suggested by keywords in your clients’ messages.

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

AUTOMATED MESSAGES

A day in a hairdresser life can be so hectic that it might be difficult to answer your phone all the time. Your customers, on the other hand, are expecting a response straight away. With WhatsApp automated messages, you can create an away message and a greeting message.

Away message can be setpermanently, for a defined period and outside of set business hours. It will be sent as long as your phone has an active Internet Connection.

Greeting message will be sent to all clients when they first message you or after 14 days of inactivity in their chat with you.

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

ANALYTICS

Get insights into essential metrics such as how many of your messages were successfully sent, delivered, and read to understand your clients’ engagement and experience.

DESKTOP VERSION

The WhatsApp Web version is clearly more convenient when you need to text a lot of customers over a day than using your phone.

https://web.whatsapp.com/

MAKE THE MOST OF

WhatsApp Business features

WhatsApp is all about creating a quality experience for your clients. You may only contact people on WhatsApp if They have given you their mobile phone

number. They have agreed to be contacted by you

over WhatsApp. They have initiated the conversation with

you on WhatsApp. Even better, they have your contact

number saved on their mobile phone (mandatory to receive your status update and broadcast messages).

If you start sending unsolicited messages using WhatsApp, you can be “blocked for life”. WhatsApp marketing is a pull strategy where the first move is made by your clients. So make sure your clients know you are available on WhatsApp and offer incentive to new clients to start the conversation with you.

WhatsApp Business policy

Important - you must respect all requests (either on or off WhatsApp) by a person to block, discontinue, or otherwise opt out of communications from you via WhatsApp, including removing that person from your contacts list. For more information about WhatsappBusiness policy, read here.

Always ask for your clients’ mobile number as first point of contact over email address, when they book anappointment over phone, email, online or face-to-face.

For online, offer a tick box so they can opt-in for WhatsApp communication and promotion.

For face-to-face, also offer a tick box on paper or inyour digital point-of-sale system but make sure you collect their consent by a written/electronic signature.

In both cases, it is important to have a specific tick box for WhatsApp versus generic “all channels” communication and to store securely their opt-in.

Collect more opt-ins during salon anniversary, open days or any other events. If clients are reluctant to opt-in, try to offer an instant discount on their visit or a travel size products as incentive. What is common nowadays is to host a Social Media contest or giveaway in which the condition to participate is to enter their mobile numbers and opt-ins.

H O W TO CO L L E C T

Your cl ients' numbers and consent

Receive our update and promotion via WhatsApp

In itiate a WhatsApp conversationH O W T O G E T YO U R C L I E N T S

First rule of WhatsApp: you able toengage only with customers who want to connect with you. Therefore you need to make sure your clients are aware that you are available on WhatsApp.

Get a short link that your client can use to start a WhatsApp chat with you. Advertise this link on your website, Google my Business profile, Social medias, in your email/newsletter signature, SMS and mention it in your phone responder.

Your clients need an incentive ? Host asocial media giveaway contest with thecondition to participate is to click on the short link to send a default “keyword” or to provide an answer to a question viaWhatsApp.

💥💥GIVEAWAY💥💥Answer the following question via WhatsApp to get a chance for a complete hair transformation (color/cut/styling) for FREE. 🗓🗓 “In which year our salon in LA opened its door ?”� WhatsApp +1 111-222-3333The winner will be announced this Sunday 5pm. #giveaway #giveawaycontest#hairtransformation #Lasalon

B E S T P R A C T I C E

WhatsApp

DON’T SPAM. MESSAGE JUDICIOUSLY

While we encourage the use of WhatsApp to connect with customers, this doesn’t give you permission to spam them with WhatsApp messages. Ideally, you should use WhatsApp to communicate with existing loyal customers for such things as notifications, alerts, announcements, or one-to-one conversations.

Only send during normal / expected hours. One of the many benefits of text marketing is to inspire immediate action from your subscribers. It's unlikely that anyone will take action in the middle of the night.

THINK BUSINESS CASUAL

WhatsApp is where many consumers interact informally with their friends, so being trustworthy, familiar, and creative in your business messaging is essential. Your messaging campaigns should reflect (and respect) the personal tone of this channel, but caution to stay professional. Take advantage of the multimedia WhatsApp support (audio, video, image, GIF, smiley) to create more engaging messages.

GET TO THE POINT

Keep your responses short and to the point on WhatsApp. Customers who chat on the app are probably on-the-go and intermittently (ok -sometimes obsessively) looking at their phone. It’s best to keep replies as concise as possible and must be easy to read at-a-glance. If your reply doesn’t fit on a smartphone screen, it’s too long.

FOR CLIENT CONSULTATION

Why not offer your clients a free virtual consultation over a video call, supporting phone or online appointment booking. In between appointments, you can share with your clients their personalised hair care and styling “prescription list” and check-in with them if they need to restock.

FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

More customers are willing to pay higher prices for better customer service - leverage customer service as your competitive advantage and use WhatsApp to offer that personal touch when answering any customers’ queries pre/post appointments.

FOR FEEDBACK COLLECTION

With high engagement rate on WhatsApp where 95% messages are opened within the first 5 minutes, it is an excellent channel to collect review/rating for your business.

Best WhatsApp use cases for salons

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