Quick guide to WhatsApp marketing for businesses

Quick guide to WhatsApp marketing for businesses

Are your marketing messages collecting dust in customers’ inboxes? You’re not alone. With consumers spending over 4.5 hours daily on their phones—excluding talk time—customers are distracted, and showing up in their notifications no longer guarantees you'll stand out from the competition. If you want consumers to take the desired action from your campaign, you’ll need to get their attention first. 

Enter WhatsApp marketing for businesses. 

Of the 10 key channels businesses use to connect with customers, WhatsApp has emerged as a popular choice across demographics, offering a high engagement rate and a personal touch that resonates with consumers of all ages. In today’s guide, we’ll share our best practices for developing, personalizing, and launching an attention-grabbing marketing campaign with Twilio’s WhatsApp Business API.

Why use WhatsApp for marketing 

Put simply, WhatsApp is where your customers are. WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging app, with 100 million active users in the United States and more than 3 billion monthly active users worldwide. In January 2024, it was the most downloaded chat and messaging app, amassing upwards of 51 million downloads globally across the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

WhatsApp is the messaging platform of choice in many parts of the world, including Latin America, India, and parts of Europe. Because consumers frequently use WhatsApp for personal communications, they engage with it often and open messages at higher rates (98% compared to 20% for emails). If your business operates in these markets or is a multinational company looking to expand to these regions, WhatsApp is a strategic marketing channel. 

Bear in mind, WhatsApp marketing wasn’t always an option. When the WhatsApp Business App was first introduced in 2018, it was traditionally used for transactional notifications and customer service. Once the company began permitting marketing and promotional messaging use cases via the WhatsApp Business Platform in 2021, marketing campaigns took off. 

WhatsApp’s global popularity and high levels of engagement offer a promising avenue for marketers to engage with consumers over their preferred channel with targeted messages. Focusing campaign dollars on WhatsApp marketing can spark conversations, build loyal relationships, and deliver measurable ROI. 

For example, use WhatsApp marketing messages as a starting point to engage your customers by sending a personalized product recommendation or back-in-stock notification. Encourage follow-up questions and assist with transactions so they never have to leave the platform. In this way, you can drive greater conversion and revenue with WhatsApp for marketing.

Types of WhatsApp marketing messages 

Whether you're connecting within a city, a country, or across continents, you can use WhatsApp throughout the customer journey to reach or re-engage customers with personalized and relevant marketing messages. There are many different types of marketing and promotional messages your business can send over WhatsApp, including new product updates, abandoned cart reminders, personalized discounts, and seasonal campaigns.

Acquisition and initial outreach

Bring customers into the purchase funnel with messages offering a discount on their first purchase, sharing new product updates, or promoting seasonal or holiday campaigns.

Conversion

For customers who may have engaged with previous marketing messages or added items to their cart on your website, reach out to them with abandoned cart reminders, back-in-stock alerts, or other reengagement messages to bring them back to the purchase process.

Reengagement

Connect with customers who've already made purchases by sending them suggested additional products or personalized discounts and offers for future purchases. Reengaging with customers after they've made a purchase can help drive repeat purchases and loyalty, especially when using their previous purchases and online behavior to guide content customization. 

Personalizing the above types of WhatsApp marketing messages helps drive greater engagement and an average 54% increase in customer spending. With the Twilio WhatsApp Business API, you can use your first-party data to curate relevant and personalized marketing messages for your customers, such as abandoned cart reminders, purchase suggestions, or customized discounts.

How to use WhatsApp for marketing: a step-by-step guide

Today’s businesses have unprecedented opportunities to access vast amounts of customer data, obtain actionable insights, and deliver memorable, personalized marketing messages on preferred channels. With WhatsApp leading the pack for preferred messaging apps, consider this four-step guide for crafting WhatsApp marketing campaigns that meet your customers where they’re at. 

1. Getting started 

Begin by choosing the best solution for your marketing team: the WhatsApp Business app or the WhatsApp Business Platform. 

• The WhatsApp Business app is similar to the traditional consumer messaging app but supports up to four users per account to respond to customer service issues, deliver appointment reminders, and chat with consumers from a single branded profile.

• The WhatsApp Business Platform is an API that integrates directly with your existing back-end systems, like CRM and marketing automation platforms, to deliver WhatsApp messaging broadcasts and personalized promotions from a single verified profile. 

The Business app is best for small businesses that personally manage one-on-one conversations with customers. It can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The Business Platform, on the other hand, is designed to deliver the types of marketing messages demonstrated above. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll continue with a Business Platform account. 

To set up a WhatsApp Business Platform account, you'll need:

• A Meta Business account

• A WhatsApp Business account linked to your Meta Business account

• A WhatsApp Business app associated with your Meta Business account

• A WhatsApp Business integration system user access token, a system user access token, or a user access token

• The whatsapp_business_management permission

Likewise, if your app accesses endpoints that target your Meta Business Account, you'll need the business_management permission. If your app accesses Cloud API endpoints, you'll need the whatsapp_business_messaging permission.

To create your WhatsApp Business account and link it to your Meta Business account, you’ll need to add a valid WhatsApp number. In the left-hand menu of the Meta App dashboard, toggle to WhatsApp and hover over "API Setup" to get started. 

Wagtail callout panel → Info: To simplify the process—and streamline integrations with your existing tech stack—opt for a solution like the Twilio WhatsApp Business API. Twilio helps developers access quick-start guides, code snippets, software development kits, and more, all in a comprehensive resource library that accelerates the WhatsApp integration with your CRM, marketing platforms, and other tools. 

2. Building and managing your contact list 

Once WhatsApp is integrated with your back-end systems, it’s time to build and manage your contact list. One of the key advantages of integrating WhatsApp into platforms like your CRM is the ability to consolidate your contact list into one centralized location and streamline communication channels. 

Before crafting WhatsApp marketing campaigns, be sure to segment your contact list so you can deliver highly personalized messages. Solutions like Twilio Segment harness the power of AI to move beyond basic demographics and uncover deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors to help in this endeavor.

With Twilio Segment, your business can identify nuanced patterns and trends that allow you to categorize your contact list by sales funnel stage, targeting specific customer segments with increasingly relevant messaging and offers. As a result, you can move prospects and customers further down the funnel with higher efficiency. 

3. Creating effective WhatsApp marketing campaigns 

Now it’s time to generate WhatsApp marketing campaigns. It’s wise to allow your segmented contact list to guide your marketing messages, creating campaigns for various stages of the customer journey. 

For example, you can send contacts who are still contemplating a purchase an abandoned cart notification with a customized discount code to prompt a conversion. For customers who've recently purchased, you can send surveys to measure their experience and build your online ratings. Alternatively, you can send customers who've already converted a personalized product recommendation to encourage a repeat purchase. 

But use caution: when implementing WhatsApp for marketing, you're legally required to gain explicit consent from your contacts before sending them promotional messages. As part of messaging compliance, you must also provide customers with the choice to opt out at any time. Be sure to consult with your legal counsel to understand and comply with all applicable regulations.

4. Measuring and optimizing your WhatsApp marketing 

Using WhatsApp for marketing relies on effective data—not only customer data but also campaign performance data. It’s vital to track campaign performance over time to gauge elements like:

• Deliverability rate 

• Message open rate

• Click-through rate (CTR)

• Engagement rate 

• Conversion rate

• Opt-out rate

You may notice that certain user segments gravitate toward specific promotions. For example, potential leads may redeem new customer discounts more often than existing customers redeem personalized promotions. In these instances, you’ll want to A/B test a variety of marketing messages to enhance redemption among lesser-performing audiences.

Options to optimize your WhatsApp marketing campaigns include shortening link URLs for more efficient clicks, swapping out static graphics for more eye-catching GIFs, and getting more granular with your personalization efforts to connect with consumers on a one-on-one level. 

Best practices for marketing on WhatsApp 

When using WhatsApp for marketing, there are several factors to consider as you develop and launch a marketing campaign. From the initial planning and creative development to testing and iterating after launch, here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you try out WhatsApp marketing campaigns. 

Getting ready to send on WhatsApp

If your brand is not already using WhatsApp to communicate with your customers, you'll need to onboard your brand onto the Twilio platform before you begin sending messages. You also need to ensure that you have secured the proper opt-in from users to send them marketing messages. Following opt-in best practices will enhance the end-user experience and ensure your business can deliver messages as expected while also helping you avoid the penalties associated with noncompliance. 

Verifying user accounts

The WhatsApp Business Platform allows businesses to enable multi-factor authentication or one-time passwords (OTPs) to verify accounts and users. While this feature is helpful in fighting fraud and building customer trust, it often requires users to leave the WhatsApp interface to verify their identity. 

Twilio’s Verify API is a fully managed turnkey API that verifies users over multiple channels at scale. Twilio Verify offers features like Silent Network Authentication (SNA), which allows for frictionless verification of end users, accounts, and transactions without requiring users to wait or leave the app.

Plus, you can validate users in real time, so you can confidently protect your customers against fraud while handling service complaints, delivery tracking, and account retrievals via WhatsApp. Even better, OTP delivery via SMS, WhatsApp, voice, and email are all managed through a single API.

Developing creative assets

When developing creative assets to use in WhatsApp marketing campaigns, consider the various rich messaging features WhatsApp offers. Features like buttons enable consumers to take action based on your marketing messages. For example, include a few buttons with conversation starters (e.g., “check if my size is available” or “chat with an associate”). 

You can also create media message templates to make WhatsApp marketing messages more visually engaging or include links within WhatsApp messages, such as a link to the product page to allow customers to learn more or complete a transaction. This approach enables you to gather data about which types of messages drive engagement and turn marketing messages into conversations with your customers.

The Twilio Content API helps manage rich content and monitor template approvals on WhatsApp to make sure you're ready to send your marketing messages. You can also manage a multi-channel marketing campaign with the Content API’s ability to help you efficiently reuse content between WhatsApp and other channels like SMS marketing.

As you develop your WhatsApp marketing strategy, consider how consumers may want to respond to your messages. Using buttons or links provides them with a suggested next step, but they may also want to reply to your messages with questions about your product or campaign. 

Twilio’s Conversational Messaging Trend Report showed that 77% of consumers want to use conversational messaging to get help with selecting a product or service, so ensuring you're equipped to handle and respond to inbound messages will enable you to continue to move your customers through the purchase funnel.

Engaging with customers

Try out various WhatsApp entry points to include WhatsApp as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign. Ads that click to WhatsApp enable consumers to take immediate action when they see a business’s ad and allow marketers to increase the ROI of their digital ads. Other entry points that businesses can use for WhatsApp range from deep links on websites, emails, and social media profiles to QR codes on billboards or physical product packaging. 

Building WhatsApp entry points into your various marketing materials helps customers start conversations with a brand and enables businesses to learn which types of marketing tactics or assets are most engaging. Additionally, as you're A/B testing various marketing templates over WhatsApp, you'll discover that sending personalized messages helps drive greater engagement with consumers. 

Beyond just including the consumer’s name in the message, personalized WhatsApp marketing messages can look like custom product recommendations based on previous purchases or tailored discounts for a product a consumer has in their cart. With Twilio Segment, you can capture real-time data from any source in your tech stack to develop a unified profile and create personalized marketing messages for WhatsApp.

You may want to include links in your messages, such as to a product page or to the customer’s abandoned cart so they can complete a transaction. With Twilio’s Link Shortening and Click Tracking feature, you can shorten long URLs into company-branded shortened links to increase clicks, reduce carrier filtering, and enable granular analytics like A/B testing with our click-tracking functionality.

Iterating and optimizing

As you run marketing campaigns at various stages of the funnel over WhatsApp, consider reengaging customers who previously interacted with your marketing messages but did not convert. Sending personalized follow-up messages can help remind consumers where they dropped off in their purchase journey. For example, Twilio customer Magalu saw their onboarding conversion rate more than double when using WhatsApp instead of traditional channels.

You can also track the performance of your WhatsApp marketing strategy to optimize your messages and maximize the ROI from your campaigns going forward. With Twilio’s Messaging Insights dashboard and Engagement Suite, you can track important metrics like deliverability rates, opt-outs, and response types. This helps you understand how different marketing messages are performing across various audiences, ensuring that your content achieves high engagement.

Unlock the power of Twilio’s WhatsApp Business API

The launch of the WhatsApp Business Platform opened a world of new marketing opportunities for companies big and small. Just one WhatsApp marketing campaign can reach customers located around the globe, from North America and Latin America to India, Europe, and just about everywhere in between. 

If you’re ready to explore the worldwide potential of WhatsApp marketing, you can access unrivaled scale and connectivity through Twilio's trusted APIs, software, and first-party customer data. With Twilio’s WhatsApp Business API, it’s never been easier to craft engaging, conversion-focused marketing campaigns.

Build data-driven, personalized marketing campaigns that include transactional messages like notifications and alerts, plus conversational messages that range from customer care to conversational commerce. Unlock the true power of WhatsApp marketing by getting started with Twilio's WhatsApp Business Platform today.