How to grow your WhatsApp audience fast before Black Friday [6 opt-in ideas]

WhatsApp marketing is a powerful marketing channel. But how do you get subscribers fast? Here are our 6 top tips to get 1,000s of customers into WhatsApp before Black Friday.

If you're a consumer brand looking for a competitive edge this Black Friday, WhatsApp marketing is the ideal solution.

Not only can you expect amazing open rates (90% on average), once a customer is with you on WhatsApp, they tend to stay. With a high relevance, low frequency strategy, it's easy to keep them interested in the long-term – which leads to stable revenue-generation for your brand, and less investment on attracting new customers. You'll also notice how your marketing campaigns will improve customer retention.

But, even if you have the best WhatsApp software on the market, there's one thing missing: phone numbers.

You can't do an amazing Black Friday WhatsApp campaign if you have no WhatsApp contacts.

Here's how to get 1,000s of customers into your channel fast in a GDPR-compliant way.

How big should you grow your WhatsApp audience for success? 

How many people should you get into your WhatsApp channel before Black Friday? 

It depends on your business but we would say you need at least a few 1,000 to be worth the cost.

There are many ways to invite and incentivize customers to grow your WhatsApp Business channel. At charles, they're called Chat-ins. 

Part of our job is helping our clients get more opt-ins so they can

generate more sales on big shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday

When should you get started?

You have until October to get started with WhatsApp and grow your channel. But you should start as soon as possible. 

Beforehand, make sure you make a clear strategy that:

• Takes into account the following ways to get clients opted in
• Ensures compliance with GDPR
• Thinks about how you'll keep your audience engaged after Black Friday

After all, WhatsApp is a personal channel and if you only send discounts, you'll lose your customers quite quickly.

Here's where to focus your efforts on getting WhatsApp subscribers before Black Friday:

1. Convert email audience into Whatsapp audience

These people are your customers already. You have their email address, and they expect to hear from you.

Send an email saying, "Hey we're on WhatsApp now, come and say hi!" Add a wa.me link link to send them straight to chat.

Offer a discount or pre-access to offer a further incentive. It's important that you offer something in WhatsApp that they can't get in your email channel.

Set up an automated opt-in flow so you a) reduce your work and b) make sure you're GDPR compliant (more on that later).

A wa.me link is easy to set up and leads to your brand's WhatsApp chat. First, your customer sends you a prewritten message in WhatsApp. This triggers an opt-in flow. So it's all done automatically.

2. Add a WhatsApp opt-in on your thank you page

Your thank you page after a purchase is the perfect place to get a WhatsApp opt-in. Customers especially appreciate WhatsApp delivery updates. Afterwards, when they're happy to have received their purchase, you can ask for a marketing opt-in – perhaps together with an additional discount.

You can even consider replacing your email popup on your website with email – or change it depending on whether the customer in on mobile or web.

First, you can offer to send delivery updates in WhatsApp on the post-purchase thank you page. Later, you can ask for a marketing opt-in. 

3. Put posters up in-store with QR codes leading to WhatsApp

Add a QR code and a discount on posters and flyers to get people into WhatsApp.

Put them near checkout and offer a receipt through WhatsApp. Get creative here to catch attention. This can be very effective because you then know a customer's location if they make a purchase with your in-store discount.

We often use QR codes to get our customers into our WhatsApp chat, like this one from OMR. It's best to offer a reason to scan, like updates or a discount. 

4. Add website popups and banners linked to WhatsApp

You could offer exclusive early drops for Black Friday for people who sign up for WhatsApp, for example.

Brands like Jack Wolfskin have great success using WhatsApp popups and banners on mobile, and email opt-ins on desktop. It's best to theme these around seasonal events for maximum opt-ins.

5. Link social posts to WhatsApp

Post an Instagram story announcing that you're in WhatsApp and offer a discount or a competition when customers sign up for your WhatsApp messages.

You can also get creative like a campaign we devised for our customer, Katjes, where Instagram subscribers had to guess how much candy was in a jar and give an opt-in to enter the competition. 

Our opt-in campaign for Katjes was very successful in building the brand's WhatsApp subscriber base with a simple competition mechanism.

6. Boost your paid ads and link to WhatsApp

With paid ads, you can target the right people. It could be existing customers or people who match your ideal customer profile (ICP). You can also use your Black Friday campaign creative for these.

And do this soon. The cost of paid ads goes astronomically high right before Black Friday and the holiday season. Now is the time to get people into chat and save ad spend.

How to grow your WhatsApp audience with GDPR-compliant opt-ins 

Part of being GDPR compliant in WhatsApp when growing your WhatsApp audience, you need a "double opt-in." This means you get a customer's consent twice to make sure they really want to hear from you on WhatsApp.

An example of a double-opt-in flow on WhatsApp is:

🔓 1st opt-in: A customer taps a chat bubble on a website asking if they want to receive marketing communications in WhatsApp. The customer types in their phone number, taps and a prewritten message appears on their phone that they then send to the brand, like: "Hey [company], yes I want your marketing communications in WhatsApp." 

🔒 2nd opt-in: The company then sends a second message saying, "Are you sure?" with YES and NO buttons. Only when a customer has clicked "YES" is the company legally allowed to send messages.

This is an example of an automated opt-in flow for BRAINEFFECT – designed in our WhatsApp automation feature, Journeys. Note that this brand uses the opt-in flow to gather customer information – giving a discount in return.

See "How to make a WhatsApp opt-in (with GDPR info)"

Ease your life with WhatsApp automation

Our clients use our Journeys feature to automate WhatsApp conversational flows on our easy-to-use open canvas.

This helps them:

• Save time, effort and money
• Ensure consistency of messaging
• Reduce reliance on chat agents being on hand to answer queries
• Automatically store tags to build customer information (for better targeting in future)
• Ensure more tailored, personalized conversations for customers
• Lead people to the right product without having to be at your desk
• Be more approachable than using a chatbot – these are all WhatsApp messages you can write yourself – so for your customers it feels natural, on-brand and human.

In Journeys, you can write WhatsApp messages, add call to action buttons, store automatic tags, lead customers to the right answer or product and more

WhatsApp automation is the most powerful feature of the WhatsApp Business API and our Journeys user interface makes it easy and fun for eCommerce brands to use.

Plus, we offer support to help our clients get the most out of it and analytics to measure success and continue optimizing.

WhatsApp automation can even manage the entire customer journey from lead to purchases to loyal customer. See our post on "How to convert leads to brand advocates with WhatsApp automation" to learn how it works.

So you can have all these flows working for you in the background, earning you money, while you work on other things.

And it's the simplest, most stress-free way to grow your WhatsApp audience fast.

To find out more about our WhatsApp automation solution, get in touch.

More Black Friday WhatsApp guides

% Black Friday retention guide: How to turn one-time deals into all-time customers

🤫 5 tips for WhatsApp success for Black Friday

🤩 5 ideas for WhatsApp campaigns for Black Friday

💰 9 WhatsApp marketing campaign hacks [with Black Friday 2022 results]

Let's get you started with WhatsApp

Tell us about your business and we'll make you a free 30-min demo. We'll show you our WhatsApp solution and show you use cases that will generate the most revenue, based on your business goals.

Remember, the sooner you start with WhatsApp, the bigger the audience you can gather by Black Friday. Check out our in-depth guide to Black Friday on WhatsApp here.