Sales over messaging apps: The lowest hanging fruit

Sales happen where customers are and customer conversations moving to apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger more often. Apps that aren’t easily integrated with CRMs. This article will help you stay organized and harness the power of messaging apps for sales.

Selling on WhatsApp Business App

Depending on where you are in the world, WhatsApp is likely becoming more prominent in your sales efforts. If you’re located in Europe, Asia, Africa or South America, where WhatsApp has the vast majority of the market share, you’re probably starting to use WhatsApp to chat with clients than email.

You’re probably using your personal WhatsApp account to chat with clients, and this causes many problems, doesn’t it? All your contacts are intermixed with your personal contacts, and you can’t get a moment’s rest because your clients can see when you are online. There is a solution to most of these problems, and it’s called WhatsApp Business App.

WhatsApp Business App is available on iOS and Android. If your phone has dual sim capability, you can even run your personal WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business App on the same phone. The business-focused app works almost exactly like your personal WhatsApp with a few key features to make running a small business easier.

Short Links help your customers start a chat with you. Let’s say you’ve got a popular website or an Instagram page where you want people to be able to start a conversation with you on WhatsApp. You post your number, but that makes contacting you a hassle. In WhatsApp Business App, you can create something called Short Links. Short Links are just like regular URLs, but when you click on one, it opens WhatsApp on your phone or WhatsApp Web and takes you directly to the chat. This makes messaging a business over WhatsApp extremely easy.

WhatsApp Broadcast is another tool that is only available in WhatsApp Business App. It allows you to send a mass message to up to 256 contacts at once. The best way to use this tool is in combination with tags. During your chats with clients tag customers with their interests or what you think they might be interested in. Then when a new product comes online, a new feature is developed or you have an end of the month sales push you can broadcast to contacts who need that little extra push to buy.

Away Message is a simple but powerful feature that will keep your clients from texting you in the middle of the night. All you do is set your business hours and the away message you want to deliver. Then, when someone messages you in the middle of the night, they will receive your short message that indicates you are currently outside business hours and won’t be replying until the next business day.

If you’d like to check out these WhatsApp Business App features and more in detail don’t hesitate to check out this guide to WhatsApp for Business.

Here is a clever way to share your screen on WhatsApp.

Converting Website Visitors To Facebook Messenger Contacts

Live chat is great for business, especially if you’re just starting and you need to get a feel for what your customers want. Live chat makes it easy to convert your hard-earned website traffic into actual conversations, which creates an opportunity.

With all its benefits, live chat can become a pain for everyone if you aren’t responsive enough. Customers expectations are dashed, and you lose your chance to chat. What if there was a live chat that let you message visitors back after they left your site? There is, it’s called the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin.

The Facebook Chat Plugin works together with your Facebook page and Facebook Messenger. It is a way to add Facebook Messenger to your website. The best part is, it’s completely free.

Aside from the Facebook Chat plugin, Facebook also provides a set of tools that mimic the functions of a modern-day CRM or customer support platform.

Facebook Inbox gives you a way to chat with your web visitors on the web. You can find it by navigating to your Facebook page and clicking the Inbox button on the top menu. Facebook Inbox allows you to work in teams; anyone who has permissions to edit your Facebook page will be able to go in and chat with web visitors. It will even let you know who sent each specific message.

This tool also gives you a way to organize all the contacts you collect with your Facebook Chat plugin. You can add labels (tags) to contacts and leave notes about your plans for them in the future. Once you’ve finished the conversation, you can mark them done or put them in a follow-up list for later. Facebook has even added a feature recently that lets you mark someone as paid.

Pages Manager gives you the ability to chat with your contacts on the go. It’s available on iOS and Android. It’s not as powerful as Facebook Inbox on the web, but you’ll still be able to chat with your contacts, mark them done or add them to the follow-up list.

If you’d like to learn more, here’s an article that explains how to add Facebook Messenger to your website.

About the author

Iaroslav Kudritskiy is the COO at Rocketbots overseeing growth and operations. An MBA graduate, with previous positions in online advertising, he is keen on the developing role of messaging apps in business to consumer communication.