What is an opt-in?
An opt-in is when your consumers provide you with their phone number and they agree to receive messages from your business via WhatsApp. Before you send a consumer an outbound WhatsApp message, you must first collect opt-ins.
Things to remember when collecting opt-ins
- Make it clear to your user that they agreeing to receive messages from your company via WhatsApp.
- Clearly mention the business’ name that the user is opting in to receive messages via WhatsApp
- Comply with applicable privacy laws
A customer can contact your support team directly through a WhatsApp message thread to ask to receive notifications or they can provide you the consent via third-party channels.
It's crucial to remember that you're responsible for storing opt-ins and ensuring that each consumer you contact via WhatsApp has accepted to receive communications from your business via WhatsApp.
How to collect WhatApp Opt-ins on your Shopify Store?
The easiest and most seamless way to collect WhatsApp Opt-in is when your user is doing the checkout. Shopify already has a mechanism to collect email marketing consent from your users. You can just use the same functionality and extend it to take consent for WhatsApp Opt-in.
Since for WhatsApp campaigns, you would require a mobile number. So, you will have to change your checkout pages to ensure that you are capturing mobile numbers during checkouts.
A step-by-step guide to capturing WhatsApp Opt-in for Shopify Store
1. Go to your store's Shopify admin
2. Go to Settings from the bottom of the left panel
3. Go to the Checkout page.
4.Go to the Customer contact section, and select the option that allows customers to checkout using "phone number or email", as shown in the screenshot below:
5. On the same page, Go to the Form options section on the same page. Set Shipping address phone number as Required.
6. On the same page, Go to the Email Marketing and select both checkboxes.
7. On the same page, Go to the Checkout Language and click on Manage checkout language.
8. In the Manage checkout language page, go to Checkout marketing and update the text of Accept marketing checkbox label as shown below
You can customize the texts to include all your channels and the kind of messages you wish to send.
Some samples are
- Send me order updates on WhatsApp
- Send me order information, promotional offers, and deals on Email, SMS, and WhatsApp
- Send me updates on WhatsApp and SMS
8. On the same page, update these fields too
9. On the same page, scroll to the top and click SAVE
10. Once you have done all the steps, your checkout page will look like this