Promote your WhatsApp channel by email

Why start with email?

A new channel starts empty, and the hardest part is the first few hundred subscribers. Your email list solves that: these are people who already bought from you or already agreed to hear from you. You are not buying reach, you are moving an audience you already own onto a channel where messages actually get read.

It also costs one email. Not a campaign, not a budget — one send to a list you already have.

Do I need an integration with my email tool?

No. What goes in the email is an ordinary link and, if you want one, an image of a QR code. Every email tool can handle both, so this works the same whether you send from Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Shopify Email or anything else. You build the email where you always build it.

How do I get the link and the QR code?

From a flow that uses the Chat-in trigger. Both are generated for you:

1. Create a flow under Flows.
2. Click the Starting point block and select the trigger event Chat-in.
3. Build the messages the new subscriber should receive, then save.
4. Open the flow detail view: copy the URL, download the QR code.
5. Paste the URL behind the button in your email, and activate the flow before you send.

The mechanics are covered in full in Flow trigger: Chat-in — including why the prefilled message matters.

Activate the flow first. A live link into an inactive flow is a customer who writes to you and gets nothing back.

Link or QR code — which one?

• Use the link as the email's main button. Most people open email on the same phone that has WhatsApp, so one tap is all it takes.
• Add the QR code for desktop readers, who cannot tap through to the app on the device they are reading on.

Including both costs nothing and covers both readers.

What does a good email look like?

Short, one purpose, one button. The email has a single job: get the tap. Anything else competes with it.

• Name the benefit, not the channel. "Get restock alerts first" beats "We are now on WhatsApp" — nobody subscribes to a channel, they subscribe to a reason.
• Say what they will actually receive, and how often. Vagueness is what makes people hesitate.
• One button, above the fold, with a verb on it: "Message us on WhatsApp".
• Set the expectation that WhatsApp opens with a message ready to send. It removes the moment of hesitation before the tap.
• No second call to action. If the email also promotes a sale, the sale wins and the channel loses.

How do I know the subscribers came from the email?

Give the campaign its own flow. Each Chat-in flow has its own URL and QR code, so the entry point the customer used is what identifies where they came from. If you reuse the flow from your packaging inserts, you will never be able to separate the two.

Does an email subscriber become a WhatsApp subscriber automatically?

No, and that is the point of doing it this way. Permission for email is not permission for WhatsApp. The customer has to write to you first, and your flow then asks for the confirmation — which is why the Chat-in route exists rather than an import.

Which level a contact needs before a marketing flow may reach them is explained in opt-in levels. What makes the consent itself valid is a legal question rather than a setting in Keaz — our guide to collecting WhatsApp opt-ins the GDPR-compliant way covers that side.