Are you looking to get started with WhatsApp marketing for your business by sending bulk WhatsApp messages to your customers? To reach out to your customers at scale, WhatsApp can prove to be the best medium, even more efficient than email or any other communication channels out there.
In this article we’ll show you how you can send bulk broadcast messages on WhatsApp to your customers, the right way, using the official WhatsApp Business API and our free bulk WhatsApp message sender, WANotifier.
Before we jump into that, let’s first understand what WhatsApp API is exactly and why we’ll be using that for sending these broadcast messages.
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WhatsApp Business App vs WhatsApp API for Sending Bulk Messages?
WhatsApp provides two different options for businesses to communicate with their customers.
1. WhatsApp Business App
The first option is the WhatsApp Business mobile app that you might have already experienced. WhatsApp provides an app for businesses in which you can setup your business account and communicate with your customers as a business. This app is different from the standard WhatsApp app and comes with a unique set of features targeted towards businesses.
WhatsApp business mobile app is best suited for use at small scale when you do not have to send bulk messages or integrate WhatsApp with your site to send automated messages. For such advance use cases, WhatsApp provides Cloud API.
2. WhatsApp API
Though WhatsApp Business mobile app is great for general communication, it can be restrictive if you want to do more advance things like sending messages to thousands of contacts at once, running campaigns & tracking performance of messages you send, sending notification messages from your website for things like order confirmation and many such similar advance use cases.
For such scenarios, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp API also known as WhatsApp Business API, which you can use to programmatically send WhatsApp messages.
WhatsApp API is a paid API. You need to pay a small per-conversation fees to them to send messages using their API.
To use WhatsApp API, you need to know how to code or hire a developer to integrate it for you and is not as straight forward as installing an app on on your phone.
But you don’t have to worry about coding and all the technicalities to use the API, as we’ve got you covered!
Enter WANotifier: Free WhatsApp Marketing Tool
You can start using WhatsApp API for your business with no coding knowledge required using our tool free tool WANotifier.
WANotifier is a WhatsApp marketing software built on top of official WhatsApp API send and receive WhatsApp messages. All you need to do is setup your phone number with WhatsApp API and you’re ready to go!
Here’s everything you can do with WANotifier:
- Send bulk WhatsApp messages to thousands of contacts at once.
- Send transactional notification messages from your website when certain action is performed like new order placement, form submission and much more.
- Integrate and send WhatsApp notifications from 3rd party apps using the webhooks feature.
- View analytics and track performance of your notification messages to know how many contacts are opening and reading your messages.
- Send and receive messages to your contacts from a central Inbox.
- And much more.
There’s a lot more you can do with WANotifier. You can checkout all the features it provides on this page.
How to Send Bulk Messages on WhatsApp using WANotifier?
Here’s how you can start sending bulk WhatsApp messages in 4 simple steps.
Step 1 – Setup your phone number with official WhatsApp API
The first step is to connect your phone number with WhatsApp API by creating your free account with WANotifier.
You need to have a spare phone number available to setup with your phone number with the API. Also WhatsApp requires you to have a website and have a registered business with some kind of government documents so they can allow you to use their API.
You can read our detailed article on how to setup your phone number with WANotifier and WhatsApp API to get started.
After your WANotifier account is ready with WhatsApp Cloud API setup, you’ll be redirected to your dashboard. Once you’re there, you are ready to move to the next step.
Step 2 – Create a message template & get it approved by WhatsApp
Now the next step is to create a new Message Template. You can think of message templates as email templates that you send to your email subscribers.
The only difference is in case of WhatsApp Cloud API is that you need to create and get the templates approved by WhatsApp before you can send them to your customers.
Here’s how to create a message template:
- Go to Messages Templates > Add New page on WANotifier to create a new message template that you want to send to your WooCommerce customer when the notification will be is triggered.
- You can create a template with static body text or you can create templates with variables (think of variables as merge tags in emails).
- The difference here is you add variables like {{1}}, {{2}}, {{3}} and so on in body text when creating the template but you map these variables with actual Data fields, which you enabled in your plugin, when creating a Notification as shown in the next step.
- You can also add a separate text, image, PDF or a video to the template header, add footer text and also add buttons to the template footer.
- After making the template you submit it for review to WhatsApp.
It usually takes 24 – 48 hours for a template to get approved as it’s manually reviewed by the WhatsApp team. But once that is done, you can use the template to send to your customers as shown in the next and final step.
Step 3 – Add your contacts manually or bulk import using CSV file
The next step is add your contacts. You can either add your contacts manually one by one or import all your contacts at once using CSV file import.
Follow the simple steps given below to bulk import your contacts:
- Open the Contacts > Import Contacts page.
- Then open our sample import Google Sheets file.
- After opening the link, you can either click on File > Make a copy to clone the sheet or click on File > Download > Comma-separated values (.csv) to export the sheet as CSV file.
- Fill in this sheet with your contact data. Make sure that you do not change the column sequence or names in the sheet.
- Important Note: In the WhatsApp number column in sheet, add phone numbers with country codes but WITHOUT the plus + sign. E.g. if the number is +91-98765-43210, you should add 919876543210.
- You can also add custom attributes to your contacts by replacing the columns named custom_attribute_1, custom_attribute_2, custom_attribute_3 etc or adding new columns. You can rename these columns to any other names and add as many such custom attribute columns as you want.
The column names must be in small letters and use underscore (_) instead of spaces. E.g image_url, billing_city and so on. - After your sheet is ready, export it as .csv file and select it in the Select CSV File field.
- Now click on the Import button and that’ll start importing your contacts.
Note: File formats other than .csv (like .xls or .xlsx) are not supported.
You can also manually add your contacts or add them automatically from 3rd party websites and apps using our webhook feature.
Step 4 – Create a marketing notification to send bulk whatsApp messages
The next step and final is to create a Notification. Think of Notifications as Campaigns. When an event is triggered on your WordPress site, the plugin will send a request to our website that will trigger this particular Notification to send the message template you configure based on your Notification settings.
Here’s how to setup a notification:
- Create a new Notification by going to the Notifications > Add New page.
- Select Notification type as Marketing.
- From the Contact Lists field select the list to which you want to send the notification.
- Now select the Message Template you created earlier.
- If you created your message template with variables, you can map those variables with the available contact data fields from the Assign values to template variables section. You can also add a Fallback value in case the Value field might come empty.
- If you created template without variables, you’ll not see this section.
- After this is done, click on the Save & Send button to send this notification.
That’s it. That will send the bulk WhatsApp messages to all the contacts present in your selected contact lists in bulk. If you face these issues or any other issue, feel free to reach out to us using the chat widget on this page. We’ll be happy to help.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I send 1000+ messages on WhatsApp?
You can send 1000+ messages on WhatsApp using WhatsApp API. WhatsApp API is officially provided by WhatsApp to allow businesses to scale their marketing on WhatsApp. Note that WhatsApp API can not be used directly and you need to use 3rd party tools like WANotifier in order to consume the API to send the messages.
Can I send bulk WhatsApp message without adding contact?
This is a common question asked by people who’ve earlier used WhatsApp Business mobile app for sending bulk messages in the past. Note that sending bulk WhatsApp messages using WhatsApp API works in totally different way and is not connected with your mobile app.
With WhatsApp API, you setup the number independently with the tool provider like WANotifier and then you need to upload your contacts to their CRM in order to send bulk messages. If you have used any email marketing software in the past, think of this like that where you upload all your emails and then run email marketing campaigns.
How can I send bulk files on WhatsApp?
When using WhatsApp API, you need to create message templates first that are sent to WhatsApp for approval. These message templates support both text and media (including image, video or document). So if you want to send any file to your contacts, you can create a message template with that file and then send this template to all your contacts.
Is WhatsApp API free?
No, WhatsApp API is official API provided by WhatsApp and is paid. You need to pay for every message that you send to your contacts. You can learn more about this from our detailed article on WhatsApp API pricing.
Is it legal to send bulk WhatsApp messages?
WhatsApp is a private company so sending bulk messages on WhatsApp is more of a authorization question instead of a legal question. In terms of authorization, WhatsApp has strictly unauthorized use of bulk senders with the free WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business mobile app. The only authorized way of sending bulk messages is to use WhatsApp API which is not free and you need to pay per message.
In a nutshell, if you come across a message sender tool that does not charge you per message and asks you to scan QR to setup your number, then that’s most probably an unauthorized bulk sender tool and you should stay away from it. But if the tool mentions WhatsApp API, shows an onboarding flow with official Meta branding and asks you to pay per message as per the standard WhatsApp API pricing, like WANotifier, then that tool is authorized and you can use it.
Conclusion
Sending bulk WhatsApp messages has been a challenging task until the introduction of WhatsApp API. You had to rely on unauthorized tools that were against WhatsApp policies and got your number banned. But with WhatsApp API and the correct tool like WANotifier, you can run your WhatsApp marketing campaigns in scale with peace of mind that you’re doing it the right way.
