Overview

Everything else in DMLY works on people who are already talking to you. Growth tools are how they start. A growth tool is a link — or a QR code holding that link — that opens a chat with your business, tells you where the person came from, and can drop them straight into a flow before you’ve read a word. The job is narrow and worth stating plainly: turn a thing out in the world into a conversation in your Inbox. A poster on the salon window. The link in your Instagram bio. A card at reception, a flyer, a sticker on a delivery box, an ad. Someone scans or taps, their chat app opens on your business, they send the first message — and you know which poster it was.

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Which channels it works on

Growth tools work on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. They do not work on SMS, TikTok or Live Chat. Growth Tools stays in the sidebar under Messaging on every channel, but selecting it while an unsupported channel is active doesn’t open it. You get a message instead:

Growth tools need a channel reachable by a chat link — not available on SMS, TikTok or Live Chat.

That message carries a Switch profile button, which moves you to a channel that does support them and lands you on the page. The reason is not a missing feature — a growth tool is a link that opens a chat app, and those three channels have no chat app to open. There is no setting that turns them on. If Growth Tools isn’t in your sidebar at all, that’s permissions, not your plan — your role doesn’t include the growth module. There is no limit on how many growth tools you can create on any plan.

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What a growth tool produces

You give a tool a name and pick its type: Ref link or QR code — and on a WhatsApp channel the first is labelled WhatsApp link. These are alternatives, not a pair. A ref link gives you a Copy link button and nothing to print. A QR code gives you a scannable image to Download QR. Pick by where it’s going: a bio, a button or an ad wants a link; a window, a menu, a receipt or a table tent wants a QR code. Either way the destination is the same. What you copy — and what the QR encodes — is a short tracking link on your DMLY address. Someone taps or scans it, DMLY records the click, then forwards them straight on to the chat: wa.me for WhatsApp, m.me for Facebook, ig.me for Instagram, t.me for Telegram. That hop is what makes the counting possible. On WhatsApp there’s a second effect worth knowing. The link prefills the message the person is about to send — they tap, and their WhatsApp opens with your keyword already typed in the box. They just press send. That prefilled text is what identifies the tool, and it’s also plain text your keyword automations can match on.

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What gets tracked

Two things, and it’s worth being clear on which is which. Clicks and scans. Each tool counts how many times its link was opened — labelled clicks on a ref link and scans on a QR code. New tools start at zero. This counts the tap, not the person: someone who opens the link and never sends a message still counts. Contacts. When someone messages you from a growth tool, DMLY can stamp that tool’s name onto the Contact as their source. That’s the signal that matters — the poster that produced a real conversation, not just a curious tap. Two things to know about the stamp: it only fills a source that’s still empty or still just the channel’s own name, so anything you or your team typed in by hand survives untouched; and on WhatsApp it applies to brand-new contacts only, so someone already in your list who taps a poster keeps the source they had. The per-tool number lives on the Growth Tools list itself: every tool carries its own running total next to it. Overview carries a Growth clicks tile, which is the total for the channel you have selected rather than a per-tool breakdown. To see which tool someone came from, open the Contact and read the source.

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Tools belong to a profile

A growth tool is created for the channel selected in the channel bar, and belongs to it permanently. There’s no channel picker when you create one, and the list only ever shows tools for the channel you currently have selected.

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Starting a flow

A growth tool can just open the chat and leave the rest to you. It can also start an automation the moment the person arrives — a greeting, a menu, a booking, a question that qualifies them while they’re still interested. Two ways to connect the two, and you only need one:

• From the tool. Point it at a flow with Starts flow (optional) when you create it. This works on every channel growth tools support.
• From the flow. The User clicks a link trigger in the flow builder starts a flow on link arrivals. This one is WhatsApp only — it isn’t offered when you’re building a Facebook, Instagram or Telegram flow, where the tool’s own Starts flow field is the only route. It can watch A specific link or Any of my links, meaning any link on that same WhatsApp profile — so one welcome flow covers every poster and QR code on that profile, without editing it each time you make a new one.

On WhatsApp, either route only fires for a brand-new contact. Someone already in your contacts who taps a poster simply opens a chat: no flow, no source stamp. Facebook, Instagram and Telegram don’t work this way — there, every arrival from the tool starts the flow. Only Active flows on the same channel can be picked. When a growth tool starts a flow, that flow takes the conversation — your normal keyword and entry triggers stand down so the person doesn’t get two greetings at once.

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