With a jaw-dropping open rate of 98% and 2 billion monthly active users in over 180 countries, it’s clear that WhatsApp represents a big opportunity for marketers. Although WhatsApp initially only allowed customer support use cases, Meta recently opened the door to marketing messaging, giving brands the ability to connect with people on a channel that’s already ingrained in their daily lives. With a penetration rate of over 85% in Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America, WhatsApp is an ideal platform to reach your customers with personally relevant messaging experiences.

So, what kinds of creativity can WhatApp unlock for marketers? This channel is an ideal one for brands looking to build 1:1 connections and potentially strengthen engagement with their customer base. Plus, the channel’s two-way messaging flow is perfect for delivering the kinds of personalized and dynamic campaigns that today’s customers crave. WhatsApp has features and functionality to facilitate these two-way conversations, including quick replies buttons that your customers can easily select instead of typing out responses and call-to-action buttons to easily direct them to your app or website.

From seamless onboarding flows to monetization efforts like back-in-stock notifications to loyalty and win-back campaigns, WhatsApp can serve up compelling experiences no matter which stage of the lifecycle your customer is in. WhatsApp’s reach and versatility make it a powerful new channel to add to your customer engagement toolkit. Let’s explore how you can use it effectively to reach your goals.

Making the Most of Your WhatsApp Marketing Efforts

Adding a new channel in your marketing mix is just the beginning. Next, you’ve got to learn how to use it for maximum impact. WhatsApp is a premium channel, meaning you may gain enormous business value out of it, but you also need to be thoughtful about how you use it; that means thinking through who it makes sense to connect with on this channel and what you say to them when you do. While WhatsApp offers the flexibility to engage your customers at every stage of their lifecycle, in order to see a stronger ROI, you will need to use this channel to deliver specific, high-value actions.

Context is everything when it comes to customer engagement. WhatsApp is an intimate channel that people use every day to send messages to friends and family. When customers hear from a brand over WhatsApp, they expect those communications to be equally valuable and deeply personalized to their interests and needs. This is not the place to direct a high volume of messages in one day or send broader announcements that don’t speak to the customer individually. Put simply, WhatsApp is not a channel for batch and blast communications. Reserve your lower priority, less targeted communications for other channels.

3 WhatsApp Marketing Use Cases Designed to Drive High-Value Actions

So what are some examples of campaigns that will likely drive high-value actions while taking advantage of the platform’s rich, two-way functionality? Below, we dive into three use cases that showcase how WhatsApp can potentially supercharge your customer engagement efforts. We’ve mapped these to the most critical pillars of customer engagement: Activation, Monetization, and Retention.

1. Customer Activation: Abandoned Onboarding Campaign

You’ve acquired a new customer and successfully encouraged them to download your app or create an account with your brand. However, getting them to finish their onboarding is another story. As a marketer, you know that an incomplete onboarding can lead to missing information on a customer profile and missed opportunities for engagement. With WhatsApp, you can re-engage these customers on an out-of-product channel to gather information you might otherwise collect in your app or on your website. WhatsApp’s rich functionality and interactive qualities make it a perfect fit for driving high-value actions early on in the customer lifecycle to help convince newer customers to stick around and convert later on.

In this example, fictional travel startup Upon Voyage creates an abandoned onboarding campaign to re-engage new users. To close the gap and capture information essential to delivering the best possible customer experience, they send a WhatsApp message deep linking the customer to where they left off in their onboarding flow. Alternatively, marketers can use WhatsApp’s two-way capabilities (like quick reply buttons) to collect information directly in the WhatsApp thread. Not only do campaigns like this help brands engage customers more effectively in the short term, but collecting this information may help you build better experiences later on by leveraging their responses to surface relevant content and feed your recommendation engines.

Pro Tip: Motivating customers to complete registration and onboarding may reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and facilitate a more personalized customer experience.

Additional Use Cases:

• Account Creation Campaign

• Welcome Campaign

• Onboarding Campaign

• App Download Campaign

• Referral Campaign

2. Monetization: Abandoned Cart Campaign

Once you’ve onboarded your users and brought them into your brand experience, it can still take a little time to encourage them to make a purchase. WhatsApp may help drive the purchasing behaviors that could lead to higher-value customers. For instance, WhatsApp makes it easy for you to help simplify the checkout process for a user, which may seamlessly drive upsells and cross-sells, or promote sales or restocks for products relevant to a particular user.

As an example, let’s look at Calorie Rocket, a fictional food delivery service. When they noticed their customers were adding menu items to their cart without completing their transactions, Calorie Rocket sent a triggered abandoned cart campaign to users on WhatsApp to bring them back to the checkout flow. To sweeten the deal even further (and pique user’ interest), Calorie Rocket threw in a promo for free delivery if users ordered within the hour. WhatsApp’s clear call-to-action was used to further simplify the checkout process and for the user to redeem a promotion with the mere tap of a button. Calorie Rocket could also A/B test to pinpoint with precision the ideal timing window for these messages to ensure optimized conversions.

Pro Tip: Leverage out-of-product channels like WhatsApp to reach customers after they’ve left your app or website for “just in time” messages like abandoned cart and limited time only campaigns.

Additional Use Cases:

• Discounts & Sales Campaign

• Upsell Campaign

• Seasonal Promotion Campaign

• Subscription Renewal Campaign

• Low Stock / Back-in-Stock Campaigns

• Cross-Sell Campaign

• Buy It Again Campaign

3. Retention: Loyalty Enrollment Campaign

Whether you’re a FinTech or an eCommerce brand, the competition out there today is stiff. Every day, hundreds of brands in your category compete to capture your existing customers’ attention—so it’s worth putting in the extra effort to retain them.

Take fictional clothing retailer Flash & Thread. Consumers have more clothing options than ever before, leaving Flash & Thread struggling to keep their customers’ attention past first purchase. With WhatsApp, they were able to send conversational messages about the value of joining their loyalty program. Consumers saw the benefit of the joining—such as discounts and exclusive access to new collections—and were able to join the loyalty program with a tap of a button. By driving more customers to their loyalty program, Flash & Thread can likely improve customer retention and customer lifetime value.

Pro Tip: Because many users stay in touch with one another on WhatsApp, it’s perfect for building deeper relationships with high-value customers through loyalty programming. To potentially grow your list and reward your high-value customers, consider exclusive deals and offers that are only offered to your WhatsApp subscribers.

Additional Use Cases:

• Order Confirmation and Update Campaigns

• Loyalty Enrollment and Promotion Campaigns

• Urgent Communication Campaign

• Customer Surveys / Product Feedback Campaigns

• New Product Announcement Campaign

• Content Recommendation Campaign

• Milestone / Anniversary Campaigns

• Win-Back Campaigns

Unlock Your Highest Marketing Potential With WhatsApp

Figuring out how to fit a new channel into your customer engagement strategy can initially feel overwhelming, but you’re not alone. Braze offers native support for the WhatsApp channel and our platform is built to help you tap into its massive global audience and deliver 1:1 customer conversations at scale. In a rapidly changing landscape, we can help you get your WhatsApp program running quickly. If you’re looking to add WhatsApp to your marketing mix or have done so already and want to find ways to drive the most value out of this powerful channel, we’ve got you covered.

Curious to dive into more WhatsApp use cases that may drive business value? Explore our best practices and strategies in the Braze WhatsApp Inspiration Guide to discover the full scope of this emerging channel's impact.