How to create and add a WhatsApp link to emails, websites or email signatures?

A WhatsApp link in your email signature, website or blog? Why not! Such a link will allow other people to contact you via a WhatsApp message or call. In today’s world, we tend to shorten the distance in interactions between companies and customers or business partners. Also, we now have many different communication channels at our disposal, the most popular being email, phone calls and social media messaging apps. So, how about extending your contact opportunities? In this blog post, I will show you how to create and add a WhatsApp link to an email signature, but feel free to use your WhatsApp link anywhere else.

As a bonus, I’ll show you a super easy way to take your email conversations to your mobile WhatsApp.

A WhatsApp logo or a linked text in your email signature

If you want to let other people know you are using WhatsApp, you can either add a WhatsApp logo or a simple hyperlinked text like “WhatsApp” or “Contact me on WhatsApp” to your email signature. How you do it depends on your personal preferences and on the email signature design policies in your organization.

If you need a WhatsApp icon for your email signature, you can use one of those provided below (right-click on it and select “Save picture as” to download it to your computer). Each WhatsApp icon is in .png format:

You can also go straight to our free email signature generator. It comes with a number of different WhatsApp icons.

Create a WhatsApp link

You don’t need to use any WhatsApp link generator to get your own link. To create a WhatsApp link, you just need to use your phone number in one of the following link formats:

https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone={your phone number}&text={some predefined text}
https://wa.me/{your phone number}?text={some predefined text}

To have a working link, choose one of the formats and:

1. replace {your phone number} with an actual number connected to a WhatsApp account.
2. replace {some predefined text} with an opening message. It’s optional, but this way, when someone clicks your link, their WhatsApp message in the chat with you will already include the text you specify. The recipient can either use it to start their message or discard it. There’s more than one way to use it. For example, you can add a message like “Hi John! Let’s continue our email conversation here.” to break ice and encourage people you communicate with to write something back. Or you can add some context, or prefill the chat with a promo code.

Important: Type your phone number without spaces or special characters like brackets, hyphens or the plus sign. For example, if your phone number is (+28) 202-555-000, you should provide it as 28202555000, so that the link looks like this:

https://wa.me/28202555000?text=Hi! I got here from your email signature.

And since spaces aren’t really supported in URLs, paste this into your browser’s address bar and press Enter to have it automatically converted to the right format:

https://wa.me/28202555000?text=Hi!%20I%20got%20here%20from%20your%20email%20signature.

You can now add the WhatsApp link to images or text in your emails, websites, blogs and more. Read on to learn how to add it to your email signatures.

How to move conversation from email to a mobile chat

Now, let’s be honest. Not many people use WhatsApp in their browser. So, that’s exactly the point where you might think that using those links might be pointless if someone opens your email anywhere but on a mobile device. Well, do I have a great solution for you.

Imagine that you’re in a hurry, you should have left half an hour ago and you’ve just received an urgent email that requires your reaction. Sounds familiar? If you have an email account set up on your mobile, then you can take it from there. But even then, it might be quicker to handle things using instant messaging. Imagine you see something like this in the email:

Let’s take this conversation to WhatsApp:

You scan this with your mobile and BOOM. A new chat opens, with a prefilled message, ready to click send.

So, how to get such a QR code?

You can use any free QR code generator for that. Here’s a good one: CodeTwo QR Code Reader & Generator. It doesn’t cost anything and doesn’t even bother you with ads. You just paste your WhatsApp link into its Generate mode and you’ll have a QR code you can paste, for example, into your email signature, or your contact page.

Add a WhatsApp link to your email signature template

Once you have your WhatsApp link ready, it’s time to use it in your email signature template. The process of adding links is identical for the WhatsApp icon and for the hyperlinked text.

1. Open the email signature template in your email signature editor. Then, add a WhatsApp logo or text and link it using the created link, as shown below. In this example I’m using the editor that comes with CodeTwo Email Signatures 365.

2. Highlight the WhatsApp logo or text and click the link icon in your template editor. In my example, it looks like this (it should look similar in any editor you might be using).

3. Enter your WhatsApp link in the new window that opens.

4. Save changes and test your new email signature template to make sure the link works as expected.

When recipients click the link in your signature, they should be able to contact you directly via WhatsApp on their mobiles, either via a text message or a phone call.

Note: If the recipient doesn’t have the WhatsApp app installed on their mobile, they will be asked to download one before continuing.

If the recipient opens the link on a desktop, they should see something like this:

To send a message simply follow the instructions on the screen.

Note: To use WhatsApp on a computer, you need WhatsApp on your mobile to access WhatsApp Web from it. Then, you will be asked to scan a QR code on the computer screen to synchronize contacts and conversations from your mobile to desktop. You can also download WhatsApp for Mac or Windows PC.  

That’s it. From now on, you and your contacts can enjoy fast and direct communication provided by the WhatsApp messaging app.

Automate email signatures in Microsoft 365

Adding a WhatsApp link to a single email signature is pretty straightforward. You can do it yourself without breaking a sweat. But imagine adding such a link to every email signature in an organization that has thousands of mailboxes. And remember to customize those links, so that every signature has the right one. And remember to skip everyone, who doesn’t have a mobile number.

Manually, it would be a mind-numbing exercise. But with some email marketing automation, you can do it in no time, for everyone.

CodeTwo Email Signatures 365 makes your email branding management easy and tamper-proof. You can use it to add personalized email signatures to every email, ensuring contact details are always up to date and signatures are always up to standard.

How to add WhatsApp links to CodeTwo Email Signatures

See also:

• Microsoft Teams deep links in email signatures
• Free email signature generator