What is Whatsapp Broadcast? And How do you use it? [Quick Guide]

In today’s digital world, businesses constantly seek innovative ways to connect with customers.

Whatsapp broadcast is emerging as a powerful tool to determine this goal.

This tool is the perfect solution for engaging large groups of people into one big chat and facilitating customer engagement and loyalty.

What’s the WhatsApp broadcast?

Whatsapp broadcast is a vivid tool that allows you to send one single message to multiple contacts at once, without creating different group chats. Businesses can save their contact list and send the same message to that same group of customers easily. Recipients would receive those messages as one normal message on their chat tab. Their reply will appear as a usual one-to-one message, and won’t be sent to other people on the contact list.

How is WhatsApp broadcast different from group chat?

Broadcast communication refers to “ ONE-TO-MANY” and group chat communication refers to “MANY-TO-MANY”.

An easy way to understand this is by email.

Broadcast functionality is similar to the ‘BCC’ field of the email, in which recipients can’t see the other members, who have received the same email.

And once they reply, it reaches only to the original sender.

On the other hand, Group chat is similar to the “ TO” field of the email, in which recipients can see the names of all who have received the same email and every message is visible to all members of the group.

What is Whatsapp Broadcast List?

Whatsapp broadcast list is a feature that allows you to save a group of contacts and send them the same messages every time, without selecting each contact each time.

This helps businesses to reach their target groups, by sharing engaging messages with a set of relevant customers.

This saves time and effort for business organizations ensuring that any important contacts aren’t left while sending messages.

Also, people who haven’t saved your business number in their contact list, won’t receive your messages. So you need to ask them to save the number, or they might ignore it thinking it is spam.

How to Create a WhatsApp Broadcast List?

Creating a WhatsApp broadcast list is very quick and easy.

It gives a streamlined way for forwarding the same messages to multiple contacts and everyone receiving it in a personalized way.

Also, Follow the steps given below:

Creating a broadcast list on IOS

Step 1: Select Chats, then Broadcast Lists, then New List.
Step 2: Select the contacts you want to add to the Broadcast List.
Step 3: Click Create.

Creating a broadcast list on Android

Step 1: Select More Options, then New Broadcast.
Step 2: Select the contacts you want to add to the Broadcast List.
Step 3: Click the green check mark.

Steps to edit a Whatsapp Broadcast List

Step 1: Open the broadcast list
Step 2: Tap the 3 dots or ( ‘i’ icon ) at the top right
Step 3: Select ‘Broadcasts list Info’
Step 4: Tap ‘Edit recipients’
Step 5: Add or remove contacts
Step 6: Tap ‘Done’

Steps to delete a Whatsapp Broadcast List

Step 1: Open the broadcast list – Go to your chats, and tap on the broadcast list you want to delete.
Step 2: Access broadcast list info: Tap on the 3 dots (or ‘i’ icon) at the top right corner of the screen.
Step 3: Delete the list: Select ‘delete broadcast list’ and confirm by tapping ‘delete’.

How to select contacts for WhatsApp broadcasts?

You have the complete freedom of choosing the contacts for the broadcast list.

However, there are a few things you should keep in mind as a business person while selecting the right contacts as your loyal customers.

Your customer’s previous purchasing history
The preferences and interests of your customers.
Your customer’s current position in the sales position.

What can I use Whatsapp Broadcast List for?

You can use the broadcast list for the following purposes:

Advertise your special offers, discounts, and events
Share coupon codes or vouchers
Encourage customers to take part in events
Announce new product launches
Alert customers if you have restocked some items
Apologize for any service disruptions

Boost Engagement With These Whatsapp Broadcast Tips:

Follow these tips to maximize your reach with WhatsApp broadcasts:

To make sure that your messages are forwarded in a timely and relevant manner, use audience segmentation.
Keep your messages short.
Adopt a warm, friendly approach, and build your brand’s tonality.
Always ensure to add a CTA (call to action) at the end of each message to encourage the audience to take further steps to boost your conversion rates.
Train your customer support team well, so that they can give prompt replies to the queries of your broadcast message.
You can also develop chatbots to foster the communication process with your customers.

Things to avoid while working on Broadcast:

Whatsapp is a secure messaging platform that protects its users from spam or unsolicited messages.

Therefore be cautious of a few things while using broadcast to avoid dealing with WhatsApp ban.

Don’t spam messages

Don’t send too many messages at once, cause it can trigger Whatsapp security measures and flag your account doing some suspicious activity.

If you’re sending promotional messages, then schedule your messages and mark your limitations for the day.

Don’t broadcast from a brand-new account

New accounts are under some supervision and scrutiny, hence start your work at a slow pace.

Gradually once your account is established, start increasing the number of messages month by month.

Avoid broadcast messages to Unknown contacts

Most users are cautious of receiving messages from unknown contacts. Hence you need to determine your target audience and ensure to add them to your contact list.

It’s also very important that the people you add to your list are aware of your business and have saved your number in their contacts.

Then plan out on optimizing your promotional messages which you are going to forward to your community.

Benefits of using Whatsapp Broadcast

The benefits of WhatsApp can help you to reach multiple contacts at once, and share updates, announcements, promotions, and events.

Consider the top four strategies to make an effective communication strategy.

Quick and easy to use

With WhatsApp broadcasts, you can send one message to multiple contacts with a few clicks.

You don’t need to copy and paste the same message to each contact. This helps businesses to efficiently work.

Maintain the privacy of contacts

In group chats, every recipient can see what the other person is messaging.

But WhatsApp broadcast helps to maintain privacy, of the privacy of every recipient and all the messages of the recipient can only be seen by the business owner.

Facilitate one-to-one interactions

After you’ve sent a message, recipients can have a one-on-one conversation with you.

Therefore sending WhatsApp messages facilitates developing long-term relationships with your audience and encourages further interaction with your brand.

This gradually fosters trust between the sender and recipients.

Enhances engagement and delivery rate

Once your recipient has saved your number in the contact list, they will receive all of your Broadcast messages.

Email promotion messages are considered spam a lot of times.

Hence there is no need to deal with fussy email spam filters, which would help you increase the delivery rate of messages.

Free to Use

WhatsApp broadcast list feature is free to send the same messages to 256 contacts at once.This can become a potent tool for sharing your promotional messages.

It helps new businesses to implement this easily in their marketing strategy, instead of paid social media campaigns first.

5 Limitations of Broadcast on WhatsApp Business

Although WhatsApp broadcasts are one of the quick ways to reach many, there are a few limitations to take into account while preparing your strategy:

Limited Contacts in each Broadcast List

You can include up to only 256 contacts in each of your broadcast lists.

So if you need to send the same messages to more people at the same time, then you should look for alternative methods.
Broadcast reach is limited to saved contacts

If recipients haven’t saved your number, they won’t receive a message.

This is a security measure of WhatsApp so that there are no spam messages and users are protected.

However, this also constraints your marketing or promotional messages which you send frequently to attract your new potential clients.
Broadcast Lists aren’t interactive

If you want group engagement then WhatsApp broadcasts aren’t effective.

It is because the recipients cannot see what the other people are replying to the messages that you have sent.

So if you’re looking for group engagement on WhatsApp then it would be beneficial for you to create a group chat to foster conversations.
Absence of scheduling feature

Unlike other social media platforms, WhatsApp broadcasts don’t provide the attribute for scheduling.

So this won’t be a barrier for small-scale businesses, but it can be a hassle for large-scale businesses to deal with manual sharing of messages, as it can create a problem for time management for the marketing strategists.
Limitations to data analysis and performance metrics

The broadcast feature is only limited to reviewing who has received or read messages. It doesn’t provide any other data to analyse beyond this.

Hence if you’re looking into deep-dive data, like conversion rates, click-through rates, etc, then you should consider other social media platforms.

What is the Whatsapp Business API?

Whatsapp business API is a premium and paid service, designed especially for medium to large-scale businesses who want to send bulk messages to a huge chunk of clients.

This feature integrates with CRM systems and e-commerce platforms, to offer advanced functions like chatbots and bulk messaging.

Large-scale customer interactions are facilitated by this. It even offers personalized messages, data analytics, and other progressive features.

Ideally, it’s a paid solution for large organizations that seek efficient customer experience management.

When to consider WhatsApp Business API instead of broadcast Lists?

If you are a small business then WhatsApp broadcast lists can be the best solution for you. As 100-150 clients can save the business number into their contact lists.

However, if you’re a large-scale business you need an alternative which is Whatsapp Business API.

It’s because you need advanced features of Whatsapp Business API to send regular messages to more clients, use automated features like scheduling the message, analyze the data, and check the performance metrics of the messages you have sent.

In Conclusion

WhatsApp broadcast is the best feature for sending rapid messages to your inner circle.

While it is efficient for quick messaging, it has limitations for in-depth reach and engagement.

So this can be an effective platform for sending quick updates and promotions to 100-200 people, but large-scale organizations should go for Whatsapp Business API, enabling personalized messaging and getting data analytics insights.