WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app worldwide. It has over 2 billion active users are on the platform to communicate with friends, family, and businesses.

For businesses, WhatsApp is the ideal channel for personal, accessible, and informal conversations with their customers.

To introduce WhatsApp as a channel into your customer journey, one of the first steps is to add a WhatsApp chat button to your website. It’s easy to set up and the best way to keep the conversation with visitors going after they leave.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can add a WhatsApp chat button to your website.

Why you should add a WhatsApp webchat to your website

There are four main reasons why you should consider embedding WhatsApp on your website.

Keep in touch with visitors after they leave your website

When a website visitor reaches out via live chat, your team won’t be able to contact them after they leave. And with patience running thinner every day, customers tend to leave faster than ever. Unless your team has the time to instantly reply all day long (which they don’t).

But when a visitor gets in touch via WhatsApp, they get the same experience — without having to stay on your website to await an answer. This gives them a better experience, and it gives you more time to reply.

Avoid cart abandonment

People can abandon their carts for many reasons. Whether they still have some doubts or they simply forgot to follow through, it often doesn’t take more than a nudge via WhatsApp to persuade them towards a purchase.

When someone has doubts about purchasing a product, you can send a quick message including a similar item but with better features. And this gives your team the chance to both convert this customer and upsell. There are very few ways to optimize your conversion rate as easily as this.

Add a personal touch

Where live chat used to feel informal and personal, it has grown into a communication channel that many businesses treat the same way as email. This makes it less attractive for website visitors to use.

WhatsApp, on the other hand, is an app we all use to talk to our friends and family every single day. By inserting your business into that environment, you automatically build a more personal relationship with your customer. Especially if you can manage to reply fast and use the right informal tone of voice.

Help them with a booking

If you are a service provider, it may not always be clear which service a customer should book just based on your website. Using WhatsApp for bookings is an effective and easy way to help your customers choose the right service. It’s as simple as adding a whatsapp chat button on your website.

How to embed a WhatsApp chat on your website

There are three ways to let your customers contact you via WhatsApp as a chat on your website.

Click to chat
QR code

1. Click to chat

The click-to-chat feature lets customers click an URL in order to directly start a chat with another person or business via WhatsApp. You don’t need to save any phone numbers in your phone to do this. With the link, you simply open a chat and start typing. This works for the smartphone app as well as for WhatsApp Web.

With this feature, you could add a Whatsapp link to the website and hyperlink a sentence such as ‘WhatsApp us!’ to WhatsApp or create a WhatsApp chat button. You could also type out your phone number and hyperlink it.

A click-and-chat link is obviously fine to offer on your contact page, but it gets a little difficult when you want to offer WhatsApp throughout your entire online customer experience. Having to share this link on every single page will make your website look messy.

How to add a WhatsApp link to a website

To make a click-to-chat link, you need to edit this link: https://wa.me/[WhatsAppNumber]. Replace ‘WhatsAppNumber’ with the phone number you would like to use.

2. QR code

Having to add a phone number to your contacts to start a WhatsApp conversation can feel time-consuming for your customers. Especially when you want to offer this channel as a business, this isn’t a feasible way. Think about the steps a customer has to take:

First, they have to look up your phone number
Next, they have to save you as a contact. This includes the name of your company and phone number. If they need to do this for all the companies they are in contact with, their contact list may explode one day.
Finally, the customer has to navigate to WhatsApp, look you up, and only then can they start a chat.

This doesn’t take hours. But it also doesn’t make for a flawless customer experience. And that’s the goal.

That’s why some companies have started to create QR codes to start a conversation. All they have to do is create the code and place it on their website or printed marketing materials for customers to easily start a chat.

To create such a QR code, one must first create a click-to-chat link. This link can then be turned into a QR code via websites such as QR Code Generator or QR Code Monkey.

Rtn. Victor Ojelabi

Ojelabi, the publisher of Freelanews, is an award winning and professionally trained mass communicator, who writes ruthlessly about pop culture, religion, politics and entertainment.