Katie Morley
Aug 15, 2023
Katie Morley
Aug 15, 2023
With massive reach, amazing open rates, and breakthrough promotional features, WhatsApp is quickly becoming one of the most exciting marketing channels.
The messaging platform offers an ideal opportunity for customers to interact with their favorite brands and for companies to get in front of their target audience in a new and engaging way.
However, getting started with WhatsApp marketing isn’t as straightforward as with more established channels like email or SMS. For example, midsize and enterprise brands need to consider:
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about WhatsApp marketing — from its basic premise and benefits to practical strategies for engaging your customers on WhatsApp.
Here’s everything we cover below:
WhatsApp marketing 101: Definition, benefits, and how to get started
Basic and advanced WhatsApp marketing strategies for generating more engagement and revenue
3 Examples of enterprise organizations leveraging WhatsApp’s marketing potential
Take your WhatsApp marketing to the next level with Insider
We’ll also be using Insider — our cross-channel personalization platform — to show how you can put the WhatsApp marketing tactics and strategies we discuss below into action.
Insider is a Meta-verified BSP that helps brands 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.
Any promotional activity that takes place on WhatsApp falls under the umbrella of WhatsApp marketing. This includes simple promotional messages, real-time price drop alerts, discount announcements, cart recovery prompts, and other types of marketing messages.
The term WhatsApp marketing can also include activities that don’t aim to sell a product or service but rather enhance the customer experience, like:
WhatsApp marketing often goes hand in hand with WhatsApp customer service: the process of answering questions or helping customers find what they’re looking for. This can be done via live customer service agents, WhatsApp chatbots with quick replies for frequently asked questions (FAQs), or a mix of both.
WhatsApp offers a unique blend of benefits that most traditional channels can’t match:
WhatsApp offers two different products for companies that want to use it for marketing:
WhatsApp offers two different products for companies that want to use it for marketing:
Because the WhatsApp Business Platform is complex to set up and manage, most mid-sized and large businesses work with a dedicated Business Solution Provider (BSP) for their WhatsApp marketing needs.
BSPs are companies whose expertise in the WhatsApp Business Platform has been verified by Meta. They can be found in the Partner Directory (sometimes under a subsidiary or parent company), so you can easily check if the company behind the WhatsApp marketing tool you’re considering is a BSP.
The benefit of working with a BSP is that they can help you take full advantage of WhatsApp’s marketing potential while giving you a nice UI to manage your contact lists and campaigns (as opposed to using the WhatsApp Business Platform programmatically).
For example, a BSP can go through the laborious process of creating your WhatsApp business account. They can also get your templates approved and help you store and manage them in a convenient way.
On that note, templates are prebuilt messages that you can use to start conversations with customers. They’re the only type of message that brands can use to start conversations with customers who:
WhatsApp message templates have to be approved by Meta’s team before you can start sending them. This means there will be a small delay between when you create a template and when you can use it.
Most BSPs offer a variety of templates that you can use after customizing your brand’s name, colors, and other identifying characteristics. At Insider, we have a free WhatsApp template explorer that you can use to browse our templates. You can even send them to your phone to see how they’d look in a real scenario. And if you prefer sending voice messages, you can try a tool like Play.ht, It uses AI voice, which can help you to send customized messages without speaking yourself.
Before we dive in, note that Insider offers pre-built templates for putting each one of the strategies below into action. As a result, brands that use our platform can start sending personalized WhatsApp messages within minutes after the setup, as they don’t have to start the process from scratch.
With that out of the way, here are eight ideas for using WhatsApp in your marketing:
2. Promote newly arrived products. WhatsApp’s high open rates make it an ideal tool for driving product discovery. Whenever you get a new product or collection, you can promote it via a WhatsApp bulk message. Or, if you want to make your most loyal customers feel special, you can send them the promo a few days before broadcasting it to everyone else.
Note: Insider’s advanced segmentation makes it easy to target VIP customers, as well as customers who’ve spent over a certain amount with your brand.
3. Recover abandoned carts. Cart abandonments have always been a big problem for eCommerce businesses. Due to its high open and conversion rates, WhatsApp is a fantastic channel for tackling the issue. You can even throw in a discount for users with a high discount affinity (Insider can help you segment them) in order to sweeten the deal.
4. Promote items with fresh discounts. This is a great tactic whenever you’re trying to clear inventory by discounting certain items in your catalog. Just make sure to mention the original price, the discount price, and how fast the items are selling out to induce a sense of urgency.
5. Confirm successful purchases or bookings. Keeping users informed about their order status is essential for meeting their expectations and avoiding unnecessary customer service tickets. You can use WhatsApp to confirm that their order was successful or take things further by broadcasting messages when the ordered item is picked up from your warehouse.
6. Remind customers about upcoming events or reservations. A simple WhatsApp reminder about an upcoming flight, restaurant booking, meeting, or any other scheduled event can save your customers lots of headaches. This is another great way to improve customer satisfaction without trying to sell anything.
7. Celebrate occasions with a discount. This could be a birthday, anniversary, or just a small gesture for customers who’ve been with your brand for a certain amount of time. In any case, personalized celebrations are a great way to surprise customers with a special offer and show your appreciation.
8. Transform the shopping experience with conversational commerce. WhatsApp Flows (also called conversational commerce) is a new and advanced WhatsApp marketing functionality. It lets you create end-to-end buying experiences that allow customers to discover, browse, and buy products without leaving WhatsApp. This drastically lowers the friction during the shopping journey, makes for easier product discovery, and gives you a way to provide fast pre- and post-purchase customer support.
Conversational commerce can also be used for different purposes outside of selling products. For example, you can use it to qualify potential customers based on criteria that are relevant to your business — e.g., their age, country, the products or services they’re interested in, and so on.
The novelty and flexibility of this feature make it very enticing to midsized and enterprise brands looking for new ways to generate engagement and revenue.
As a Meta-verified BSP, Insider can help you set up your conversational commerce flows and ensure they guide customers through a smooth WhatsApp journey.
For more details, additional strategies, and examples, check out:
The three brands below all used Insider’s WhatsApp Commerce suite to:
MadeiraMadeira is the biggest home goods platform in Brazil, offering over 300,000 products.
According to their COO Robson Privado, the company wanted to work with a technology partner that could help them enable effective cross-channel communications with their customers and visitors. Insider was an ideal pick due to its broad channel support and its fast integration and setup process.
Since WhatsApp is the biggest communications app in Brazil, it was essential for MadeiraMadeira to make the most out of their WhatsApp marketing efforts. Thanks to Insider’s ease of use, they were able to start sending personalized WhatsApp messages minutes after the setup.
When compared with their average conversion rates (CR), their new personalized WhatsApp messages produced a 3.5x higher CR.
Overall, MadeiraMadeira’s marketing team managed to run some of their most successful WhatsApp campaigns thanks to Insider’s personalized, contextual, and timely communications. These campaigns included all kinds of WhatsApp marketing messages, including:
Here’s what Pamela Melo, Marketing Manager at MadeiraMadeira, had to say about working with Insider:
“I would definitely recommend Insider to any brand that is looking to bring better value in its customer communication. Insider has a unique way of tying together channels in one single journey where we were actually able to communicate better with each customer. On top of that, the Insider team is very open to new ideas and is always looking to innovate. The Insider team is also really supportive of all the crazy ideas that we have.”
One of the most transformative industry leaders, a multi-brand beauty company headquartered in Paris, was looking to grow:
They wanted to do that by creating highly personalized experiences and delivering them to their customers’ preferred communication channels.
Based on their data, they found that WhatsApp could help them get in front of their target audience. After a call with our team, they were also impressed by the channel’s promising conversion rates.
They started by usingInsider’s pre-built opt-in templates to start collecting phone numbers on different website landing pages, which quickly grew their subscriber base by 7x.
Then, they used our cross-channel journey builder (called Architect) to build and automate their new WhatsApp campaigns. Here are three ways they utilized Architect:
2. Replenishment reminders: Using Insider’s powerful segmentation again, the brand targeted loyal customers who had purchased over $150 of products in the last 45 days. They built a replenishment reminder that alerted this segment that their product would soon run out, resulting in a 30% increase in repurchase rates.
3. Back-in-stock messages: The company’s highest-intent customers often couldn’t buy what they wanted because of item unavailability. To tackle this serious issue, the company started sending real-time back-in-stock alerts, leading to a 45% increase in recovered revenue.
One of Europe’s fastest-growing fashion retailers, operating across 19 countries, was facing serious challenges with their traditional digital marketing channels, like email, SMS, and web push.
Their conversions, revenue, and customer engagement were stagnating. As a result, these channels weren’t enough for the brand to achieve their customer lifetime value (CLTV), revenue, and profitability goals.
That’s why they decided to explore WhatsApp as a new marketing channel. Specifically, they wanted to integrate WhatsApp into their overall marketing strategy to:
The brand decided to work with Insider, as our team had already helped brands like Adidas and Decathlon deliver personalized WhatsApp experiences. Our pre-built templates helped the brand collect tens of thousands of opt-ins in a few days from their site, mobile app, and QR codes on their physical receipts.
And within just six days, this brand was able to start broadcasting personalized WhatsApp messages. The results included:
As a Meta-verified BSP, Insider can help you:
At the same time, Insider also supports many other channels and capabilities outside of WhatsApp.
Our platform lets you create personalized experiences across every touchpoint customers have with your brand — from your website and mobile app to channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, email, push notifications, social media ads, and more.
You can use Insider’s versatile toolset to:
For more details on how Insider can help you reach your business goals, schedule a demo with our team.
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).
