Even brands that have put in the work to optimize their current marketing mix may find themselves looking for new ways to engage their customers in order to deliver deeper engagement, higher conversions, and—ultimately—more ROI. Luckily, there’s a new marketing channel that can help you boost engagement, extend the scale of your reach, and increase revenue. Say hello to WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is trusted worldwide, wildly popular, and completely frictionless for the end-user. Every marketer’s dream, right? If it all sounds too good to be true, think again. WhatsApp’s popularity with consumers comes as no surprise, as it's a channel they’re likely to be using already. With 2 billion monthly active users and a penetration rate of over 85% in parts of Asia Pacific, Europe, and Latin America, your friends and family are likely already familiar with this channel, even if it feels a bit new to marketers. That’s because it’s an emerging channel for marketing use cases.

For brands looking to engage customers at any lifecycle stage, from activation to retention and everything in between, WhatsApp’s rich functionality is as unparalleled as its reach. With its two-way messaging capabilities, each interaction feels more like a conversation than a transaction. From purchasing to finding product information or checking order status, WhatsApp enables cohesive, sticky experiences that can activate, monetize, and retain consumers.

Whether you’re considering adding WhatsApp to your marketing mix or are searching for ways to drive more value from this powerful channel, we’ll explore key considerations and benefits to help inform your decision-making process or level up your existing WhatsApp strategy.

3 Benefits of Adding WhatsApp to Your Channel Mix

1. WhatsApp can help you build 1:1 relationships with your customers at a massive scale.

Leading businesses know the best way to reach their audience is to engage with them directly on the channels that their customers use most. As WhatsApp is the most popular messaging channel in the word, it’s likely that many of your customers are already on there. And because it’s supported in many countries around the world (with an 85% penetration rate in some areas), opening up this channel instantly unlocks your ability to reach its 2 billion monthly active users.

Best of all, putting your marketing focus on the channel with a broad reach and high daily usage means your team can place its focus on building a winning customer engagement strategy and spend less time focused on channel activation.

2. Drive deeper engagement that leads to higher conversions.

WhatsApp is built for two-way messaging, which unlocks marketers’ ability to create richer conversational experiences with consumers. Customer support first leveraged the channel to cut down on wait times and increase customer satisfaction and use cases have since expanded to include everything from shipping updates to promotional messages.

From redeeming a promotion to tracking a return or completing a purchase, leveraging WhatsApp can streamline customers’ interactions with your brand and allow them to carry out a range of different activities in one place. Imagine a customer sees an in-store promotion where they can message the word “YUM” to receive a promo code for a free sandwich. Perhaps a week or two later, that customer could be sent a reminder of the code that also includes items from their browsing history.

Brands can also easily leverage WhatsApp to surface abandoned cart messages, share a referral code, or solicit user feedback via surveys—all within their WhatsApp interface. It’s also a great way to nudge customers along the onboarding journey, making them more likely to complete the process by bringing them back to your app or website.

Additionally, WhatsApp’s popularity and bidirectionality make it uniquely suited to retention campaigns like loyalty programs. Businesses can embed personalized, dynamic creative content into each message without writing a line of code. Rich creative content is ideal for celebrating customers’ important milestones, like unlocking a new loyalty tier, accessing exclusive offers, or being notified when points are added to their accounts.

3. Create a cohesive brand experience and optimize marketing spend.

While your brand works diligently behind the scenes to deliver cross-channel customer engagement, your customers will always experience your brand as a monolith. The brand they interact with over email is no different to them than the brand they encounter over WhatsApp. The last thing you want is an onboarding message that sounds like it came from an entirely different company to complicate the relationship with a customer you’ve worked so hard to acquire. That’s why it’s mission-critical to break down internal silos that can lead to disconnected interactions. Making sure that your teams routinely talk to one another can help identify where campaigns have messaging overlap. Understanding the desired lifecycle journey for your customers is also essential. With WhatsApp, you can easily engage customers at any lifecycle stage with minimal friction.

And while we’re on the subject of streamlining things, one of the best ways to optimize marketing spend is to consolidate your tech stack and integrate WhatsApp alongside your other marketing channels. To do this, you need a fit-for-purpose customer engagement platform that natively supports email, WhatsApp, and any other marketing channels (e.g. mobile, SMS, and web) in your mix. Ideally, this platform should enable intuitive end-to-end campaign creation, segmentation, and message delivery. Look for tools with a single, holistic interface that can enable real-time performance monitoring and analysis, so you can track the performance of each campaign to inform future experimentation.

Determining if WhatsApp Marketing Is Right for You

WhatsApp is a powerful channel, made even more impactful when paired with a cross-channel customer engagement strategy. Want to learn more about how your business could benefit from adding WhatsApp to your marketing mix? Check out the Braze WhatsApp Inspiration Guide for real-world use cases and exclusive best practices for getting the most value out of this emerging channel.