May 12, 2023
With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is one of the best messaging channels for marketers to reach their target audience.
There are tons of WhatsApp marketing tools that can help you leverage the messaging app to send simple promo messages, cart recovery prompts, event reminders, and more. However, WhatsApp recently made a big leap forward in this regard by introducing conversational commerce.
This new capability lets companies transform the shopping experience in WhatsApp and gives customers a new way to discover, browse, and buy products, as shown in the video below.
In this guide, we’ll dive deep into WhatsApp conversational commerce, including what it is, its benefits, and how to take advantage of it. We’ll also show two examples of companies that use WhatsApp to boost customer engagement, conversions, and revenue.
Insider—a Meta-verified Business Solution Provider—can help you take full advantage of WhatsApp’s marketing capabilities. Our platform also brings together the most extensive personalization capabilities for other channels like email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, web push, on-site, and more.
To learn more, visit our website or schedule a demo with our team.
WhatsApp conversational commerce: Definition and benefits
2 Examples of companies using WhatsApp to drive engagement, conversions, and revenue
How to set up and use conversational commerce in WhatsApp
Unlock the power of WhatsApp marketing with Insider
WhatsApp conversational commerce is the process of designing end-to-end buying experiences that let customers discover, browse, and buy products without leaving WhatsApp.
To fully understand this new capability, we have to start by discussing how WhatsApp’s regular marketing features work.
Since the release of the WhatsApp Business API, brands have been using WhatsApp to send different types of promo messages, like:
Despite their usefulness, these initial WhatsApp capabilities were somewhat limited, because customers always had to be redirected to a site or app to finish their purchase, book a demo, or complete another transactional activity.
Conversational commerce changes that by allowing customers to discover products, add them to their carts, and check out—all inside WhatsApp.For example, say you send customers a promo message about new arrivals or discounted products in your eCommerce store. With a conversational commerce platform (like our WhatsApp Commerce), you can have customers browse and buy your store’s products directly from WhatsApp.
Or, let’s say you use WhatsApp to send cart recovery prompts. Instead of trying to get users back to your site to finish their purchase, WhatsApp Commerce lets them do so directly in the app.
These end-to-end buying experiences have four key benefits over traditional WhatsApp marketing:
In this section, we’ll look at two real-life examples of WhatsApp’s marketing capabilities.
Note that the two brands below used Insider’s full WhatsApp marketing suite, including personalized promo messages, price drop alerts, reminders, and conversational commerce.
One of our customers—a global beauty brand headquartered in Paris—realized they were losing revenue by missing key engagement opportunities in the customer journey.
When analyzing their customer data, they found that WhatsApp would be a great channel to get in front of current and potential buyers. And after an initial call with our team, they decided to give WhatsApp a shot.
First, they used Insider’s pre-built opt-in templates and grew their WhatsApp subscriber base by 7x almost immediately.
With that, they were ready to design their new WhatsApp-based buying journeys and conversational campaigns.
Here are some of the prompts they leveraged to start conversations with their target audience:
Overall, this combination of promo messages, reminders, and conversational commerce tactics helped the brand achieve a 2.3x increase in revenue per customer.
For more details about this company’s WhatsApp marketing strategy, check out the full case study.
Another one of our clients—a massive retail brand in Europe—noticed that customer engagement, conversions, and revenue from their traditional channels were stagnating.
SMS, email, and web push were no longer doing enough to help the brand reach its customer lifetime value (CLTV) and profitability goals. That’s why they decided to test WhatsApp as a new marketing touchpoint.
First, they used our opt-in templates to grow their subscriber base in a quick and compliant way.
They collected thousands of opt-ins in days using a cross-channel strategy that involved their website, push notifications, and even scannable QR codes on physical receipts.
Then, they used our WhatsApp templates to start sending all kinds of personalized messages as part of their new conversational campaigns, including:
Their new conversational WhatsApp campaigns achieved:
Here’s what the brand’s Customer Loyalty Director had to say about this experience:
“We weren’t sure where to start when it came to using WhatsApp as a complementary channel. Insider was able to demystify the entire process. The roll-out was fantastic. I was hesitant about claims of short timescales and a lack of internal resources, but we were live within 6 days rather than 6 months. The go-live was largely thanks to Insider’s pre-approved templates—which were submitted on our behalf to reduce efforts from my own team. The initial results were phenomenal. WhatsApp has already provided a significant bump to our conversion rate, customer lifetime value and—crucially—revenue. We’re excited to now leverage Insider’s WhatsApp capabilities in a more sophisticated way as part of our zero-party data collection strategy. We’re already exploring conversational commerce via two-step conversational messages which adapt based on a user’s responses.”
For a deeper dive into the brand’s WhatsApp marketing approach, check out the full case study.
While powerful, WhatsApp’s conversational commerce can take you a while to set up. There are a bunch of actions you need to take, which can be broadly organized into three steps:
Insider can help you take advantage of WhatsApp’s full marketing potential to boost customer satisfaction, conversions, and revenue. As Meta-verified BSP, we can:
However, Insider is not just a WhatsApp marketing solution. It’s an enterprise marketing platform for creating individualized, cross-channel experiences on every touchpoint customers have with your brand—from your website and mobile app to channels like WhatsApp, SMS, email, web push, and more.
Here’s a quick overview of our platform’s key capabilities.
Insider’s Actionable Customer Data Platform (CDP) can aggregate your customer data—from websites, mobile apps, analytics tools, CRMs, and any other online or offline source—into a central database.
This helps you overcome data silos and get a clear view of the entire customer journey with detailed 360-degree customer profiles, like the one shown below.
This unified data is the foundation for creating personalized experiences based on each customer’s behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.
Learn more: 7 best customer data platforms (CDPs) in 2023.
Insider’s powerful segmentation lets you find the right target audiences for your marketing efforts.
Our AI-powered algorithms create various predictive audiences based on users’:
You can combine these predictive audiences with the standard ones based on on-site or in-app behaviors, channel engagement, purchase history, and other audiences shown below.
Finally, Insider also creates lots of useful predefined audiences that are a great starting for building your segments. For example, these predefined audiences include users who:
These versatile segmentation capabilities make it super easy to narrow down and target the right audiences in your marketing campaigns.
We built Insider to help brands use their data to create personalized experiences and automate marketing campaigns across all touchpoints—including their websites, mobile apps, WhatsApp, push notifications, email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger.
Thanks to this broad channel support and extensive personalization capabilities, Insider can help you:
For example, our journey orchestration tool (called Architect) lets you create and automate cross-channel marketing campaigns via a simple drag-and-drop editor. It also uses AI to help you find the right channels, send messages at the right times, and much more.
Our powerful personalization software also lets you deliver tailored content, messaging, and product recommendations at each touchpoint.
For example, say you have a segment of leads who have a high discount affinity and an interest in a specific product category on your site. You can use Insider to:
In short, Insider ensures you’re making the most out of your marketing efforts and budget by delivering the right messages to the right audiences at the right times.
To see Insider in action and learn how it can help you reach your business goals, book a demo with our team.
WhatsApp conversational commerce is a business strategy that leverages the WhatsApp messaging platform to engage with customers, answer queries, provide support, and facilitate transactions through natural, text-based conversations.
It enables businesses to offer personalized, real-time interactions, streamline customer service, and drive sales within a widely used messaging app.
WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption for messages, ensuring the security and privacy of customer interactions.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).