WhatsApp marketing: How to build the perfect strategy

With the rise of conversational marketing, WhatsApp Business Platform has become increasingly popular for businesses to send promotional messages and nurture leads to purchase.

In this blog we explain why you should join the bandwagon and include WhatsApp in your marketing efforts and how to stand out with a WhatsApp marketing strategy that delivers real results.

WhatsApp Marketing conversations are business-initiated conversations that customers have opted into and may include promotions and offers.  

With WhatsApp’s rich message types including media, buttons, carousels, and CTAs, proactive marketing messages can be used for highly personalized communication about new products or services, cart abandonment notifications, specialized offers, and many more use cases. 

Brands should keep in mind that WhatsApp is a conversational platform used by customers to chat with friends and family, so having a strong (and non-spammy) strategy is key. Otherwise, you run the risk of building a poor reputation and losing opt-ins.

Until recently, WhatsApp’s high regulations regarding messages that can be sent to customers didn’t limit the number of messages a customer could receive. 

However, as of February 2024, Meta implemented a new set of advanced measurement mechanisms, limiting the number of marketing conversations a customer receives from any business in a specific time frame, and all other marketing messages beyond that limit will be blocked. 

So, what do businesses need to do to ensure they respect these new limits and still run successful marketing campaigns on WhatsApp? 

So, let’s walk through how your brand can achieve this along with high ROIs on marketing campaigns, and boost engagement with customers over WhatsApp – even with messaging limits.  

Check out what our partners at Hagens, a leading martech company in Brazil, has to say about WhatsApp for conversational marketing and how to make an impact with customers: 

So, what features and capabilities should businesses use for marketing over WhatsApp? Let’s break down the most important ones and how to use them to your advantage. 

Your first step to chatting with customers is collecting opt-ins. Without them you can’t start a conversation or send any promotional messages. There are multiple ways to collect opt-ins but Click to chat ads are among the more popular and effective methods. 

As part of your strategy, launch targeted and relevant ads on Instagram or Facebook, with a “send message on WhatsApp” button that gives customers easy access to start the conversation.  

Once the ad is launched on Facebook Ad Manager and connected to WhatsApp, your business can access specific data on how many conversations were initiated and behavioral data such as conversion tracking on websites or mobile apps, post-purchase experiences, abandoned cart recovery, and the end-to-end marketing funnel from the number of impressions in the Facebook feed to the number of conversions and ROAS for each campaign. 

It can be used for any stage of the journey, from initial discovery of your brand, to targeted re-engagement, making conversational marketing a breeze. 

But this is just scratching the surface of the many benefits from using Click to WhatsApp ads, learn more here: 

A major benefit of using a conversational channel like WhatsApp is keeping the user experience seamless, easy, and of course, within the channel. WhatsApp Flows is designed to help improve customer experience over WhatsApp by simplifying use cases that would otherwise require switching to a third-party website or app. It enables businesses to build and offer an end-to-end journey all within WhatsApp.  

Check out how you can generate leads and collect subscriptions within WhatsApp with Flows:

WhatsApp Flows is ideal for lead generation forms, appointment booking, satisfaction surveys, and more. Learn more about Flows here: 

A chatbot is great for conversational support, but did you know it is just as useful for marketing messages?  

It’s an ideal way to carry out your marketing campaigns and continue the conversation with customers. Your chatbot should reflect your brand persona through its messaging style and image. Connecting your chatbot to a customer data platform will allow you to collect valuable first party data which you can use to better target existing customers in the future.

Luckily, building a WhatsApp chatbot isn’t as hard as you might think. There are free templates available that can help you quickly launch a reliable chatbot in a matter of minutes.

This feature enables you to add up to 30 products with photos and detailed descriptions that customers can browse from within the WhatsApp chat. This feature is also available to integrate via API. When a person wants to purchase an item, they can either make a payment within WhatsApp, or click through to your website’s checkout page complete the transaction. This allows customers to transition from each stage of the journey seamlessly by remaining within the WhatsApp conversation. 

Get the most out of one message with carousels. Carousels allow you to include up to 10 cards to promote products, discounted offers, items left in carts, highlighting travel destinations, and anything else your brand wants to advertise.  

Carousels are easy to use with their scrolling feature and make shopping and exploring your offers more engaging to your customers. You can add any call-to-action to your carousel, from click to call buttons, URLs, or quick replies.

Time sensitive offers are sometimes difficult to promote as customers skim messages, and don’t always realize the offer expires soon. With Limited Time Offer messages on WhatsApp, you can display expiration dates and count downs making it obvious and easy to understand that the offer has a time limit, helping you improve conversion rates. When the timer expires, so does the coupon, the code becomes inactive, and customers can no longer use it.

If your conversational marketing flows have been successful, and your customer has reached the end of the funnel, don’t redirect them to a new channel – keep everything within WhatsApp by enabling payments on WhatsApp. For the time being, this feature is only available in India and Brazil, but WhatsApp will expand this offer to other regions in the future. Get prepared and learn more about how to use payments in this blog: 

So, you’re starting to understand why WhatsApp is perfect for marketing, and how to get the most out of the channel – but how do you put it all together to build a successful strategy? 

Here’s a quick checklist of all the steps you will need to build a winning WhatsApp marketing strategy:

Depending on the size of your business and the marketing use cases you want to cover, you can use the WhatsApp Business App or the WhatsApp Business Platform. 

At a very high level the app is better suited to smaller businesses while larger enterprise businesses will get more benefit from the WhatsApp Business Platform due to its scalability and automation options.  

To help you decide, you should read our useful guide on the differences between the WhatsApp Business App and WhatsApp Business Platform.  

Here’s a quick comparison to help you determine which would work best for your business: 

We’ve touched on opt-ins via Click to chat ads above, but there are multiple ways you can collect opt-ins. 

Opt-ins must be collected before you message a customer using WhatsApp. If a customer completes a consent form, or if they initiate the conversation, you have collected their opt-in for receiving messages over WhatsApp. Your business is responsible for storing opt-ins (aka customer consent to receive messages from your brand). 

When collecting opt-ins, you must: 

You can then consider how you will maximize opt-ins:

Look at your current marketing strategy and funnel and determine where you can best use WhatsApp to boost engagement. Perhaps you struggle with lead generation, or your conversion rate is low. 

Part of this process should be to identify the types of messages that you will use, for example: 

The people that you send marketing messages to on WhatsApp will be a subset of your total customer database – meaning they must be users of the app and must have opted in to receiving messages. Beyond those commonalities they will be as diverse and different in their expectations and requirements. Take time to determine who you are targeting, what their needs are and how you can use WhatsApp to help them meet those needs. 

A customer data platform will help you collect data on customers and store it in one place. Then you can create detailed customer profiles that will help you determine what personas you are targeting and how to effectively segment your audiences before communicating with them. 

Outline measurable KPIs that will help you track progress once you include WhatsApp in your strategy. This could include conversion rate, cost per conversion, or click rates on campaigns. Setting clear and measurable marketing goals will help you understand the impact that WhatsApp is having on achieving your business goals. 

People use WhatsApp to connect with friends and family to have personal conversations. When using the app to interact with a brand, they expect the same type of experience. Make sure that your brand persona and tone of voice can be properly conveyed through the chat app. 

It is a good opportunity to show your brand’s playful and human side, which makes for more engaging marketing interactions. WhatsApp is not the right channel for boring and robotic conversations.  

Building out your workflows is key to delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Using an omnichannel customer engagement solution can help you design and launch interactions with engaging message types over WhatsApp. 

Checkout a list of use cases and what rich message types from WhatsApp that would make your messages stand out: 

A leading auto tech company in India thrives on helping customers find the perfect car. They were looking for a way to advertise deals to their customers with the best visibility and to improve conversion rates. CarDekho decided to use WhatsApp to send alerts to perspective buyers that fit their criteria. The campaign saw 15,000 conversions per day, and a total of 2 million sessions throughout the campaign – a major win for the car gurus.  

One of the world’s largest consumer goods corporations was looking for a new and unique way to promote new products for their fabric softener brand, Comfort. They decided to launch a WhatsApp campaign that encouraged customers to reach out on their WhatsApp channel, where they could interact with the chatbot MadameBot who gave advice on how to take care of their clothing and receive a 50% off coupon. Unilever saw a 14x increase in sales and 145,000 messages exchanged during the campaign- far exceeding the expected number of interactions of only 600.  

Retail and eCommerce:

Banking and finance

Telecommunications

WhatsApp Business Platform messaging is a powerful and wide-reaching communication platform that can help you create meaningful connections with your customers. That’s why a WhatsApp marketing strategy is a key part of your marketing arsenal, supporting your customer experience goals and helping to add value at critical moments in the customer journey.