5 May 2021

How To Broadcast Messages To A Group Of Users On WhatsApp

Did you know that with NovoChat, you can broadcast messages to a group of users on WhatsApp? Follow this step-by-step guide on how you can do it!

Huang Jing Jie (JJ)

CEO & Co-founder

Reading time: 4 minutes

Hey guys 👋 I’m back with another tutorial!

In this tutorial, we’ll explore potential use cases for broadcasting messages, and steps on how to do it.

💡 If you want to find out how you can send 1-on-1 outgoing messages on WhatsApp, check out my previous tutorial on that!

Use Case:

1. Promotions for Retail/Ecom/Hotels

If you run an e-Commerce or retail store, sending mass promotional emails is nothing new. Especially on events like New Years or Black Friday, you’d be sending A LOT of those emails.

But, email tools can be impersonal. Also, open rates and click-through rates are no longer as high as you thought they were. Big oof. 🙃

This is where NovoChat comes in. Instead of sending promotional emails, how about sending promotional messages via WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger?

We found that chat apps result in much higher open and reply rates. That’s because, for one, 3.6 billion people are using smartphones. Secondly, text notifications will appear on a device’s home screen, which gives you much greater visibility to the customer.

The benefits are endless, so I won’t go on rambling here… But just know that by sending promotional text messages, see your promotional campaigns and conversions skyrocket. 🚀

2. Nurture cold leads

Every business has ‘lukewarm’ leads. They are customers who are on the fence and are on the verge of becoming a cold lead.

(If you need to know what are the differences between a cold, warm, and hot lead, we have an article on that. 👀)

But, how many businesses can actually nurture these lukewarm leads back into warm leads? And, all while doing it through a lead nurturing email sequence?

As a SaaS company, we can confidently say not many. To be honest, we’ve been unsuccessful too.

But we’ve tried switching it up. We used WhatsApp to nurture cold leads instead of endless emails that garner non-committal responses. And as expected, our open rates have improved and we see more of them slipping back into the ‘warm zone’.

Well, it is super easy to communicate with you via WhatsApp or Messenger rather than over emails. 🤷

3. Announcements for customers

As customers (and also business owners) ourselves, we’ve probably had the instance where we head down to a store to get something only to find out the store is closed… 😭

We’ve just wasted a trip and we also didn’t get what we intended to get.

So, what can be done to prevent this?

Yup, you guessed it. With NovoChat, you can send announcements about closures, late openings, special events, etc. Closed for the new year? Send that as a message!

This way, your customers are informed about when they should come by.

Step-by-step guide to broadcast messages to a group of users

If you don’t have the time to go through all the steps, I explain them in this short 3-minute video! 👆! 👆

Step 1:

Once you’ve logged into your NovoChat account and selected your workspace, navigate to ‘Broadcasts’ in the left tab and hit the ‘New Broadcast’ button.

Step 2:

Set up your broadcast campaign details:

Broadcast name
Scheduled time (immediate or at a certain date & time)
Broadcast channel

After selecting your preferred channel, you’ll need to choose between broadcasting to:

1. Existing contacts

2. New contacts

Step 3:

If you’re broadcasting to existing contacts, just select the recipients from your contact list. But if you’re broadcasting to new contacts, you can either manually upload them (by tying their numbers) or uploading a list (CSV) of contacts.

For the CSV. file, you’ll have to follow our CSV. template of ‘Phone’ ‘Message’ and upload it into NovoChat.

Notice that we do not have the placeholders for the name or other variables besides phone number and message. This is because you can customize the message to be unique for each phone number.

Thus, you can make the names and other placeholders unique in the CSV, before adding them as unique messages to upload into NovoChat.

Once you’ve uploaded your CSV., click ‘Proceed’. You’ll see a preview of the messages sent out to the recipients.

Double-check and make sure that all the numbers and messages are correct.

Once they’re good to go, click on ‘Send Now’ and launch the broadcast campaign! If you’re not ready, you can always save this as a draft and launch it at a later time.

And that’s it! I hope this has given you a clearer idea of how you can use NovoChat to broadcast messages.

See you in my next tutorial! 👋

P.S You can also use NovoChat to send Slack notifications to your team!

Huang Jing Jie (JJ)

JJ is the Co-Founder of Novocall and NovoChat. When he’s not busy building the Novocall brand, he spends his time watching crime shows and documentaries.

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