With over a billion users, WhatsApp is more than just a chat app; it’s a powerful marketing tool. From promotions and surveys to seamless customer interactions, it helps businesses reach customers where they already are.
This Telerivet article breaks down how to use WhatsApp effectively, without spamming your audience.
The answer is simple—and it’s very similar to why businesses use SMS and other popular communication channels.
There are a huge number of people worldwide who prefer WhatsApp as their primary means of communication.
If there are over a billion WhatsApp users globally, and a significant proportion of them prefer to be contacted through the platform, then it’s worth assessing whether your company needs a WhatsApp strategy.
WhatsApp’s popularity varies by geography. While it doesn’t have deep market penetration in the United States compared to other regions, it is still widely used—particularly among international communities.
Outside of the U.S., the picture is very different. WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform across much of the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
For example:
On a recent visit to Japan, I made friends with a local, and when we parted ways, he said, “Let me add you on WhatsApp.”
When engaging with colleagues in Spain, WhatsApp is the primary method of communication.
Across much of the world, WhatsApp is not just a channel for personal chats—it’s a business tool.
It’s where people communicate with service brands, particularly small businesses like:
During lockdown in England, I used WhatsApp to communicate with my grocer and organize my vegetable deliveries.
WhatsApp is not just a chat app—it is one of the world’s largest interfaces for doing business.
Depending on your product, service, and the geography in which you operate, WhatsApp could be a critical part of your business software stack.
The first way to leverage WhatsApp in your marketing is one of the simplest.
This is the same way that many vendors use email—and even other channels like SMS.
Before the digital age, this was the main use case for post, and it remains a common way brands notify customers about new products, discounts, services, or other offerings.
This is a super common way of leveraging communication technology, and it gives you the opportunity to reach people who already like your products or services and show them more things they’ll probably like as well.
In the modern age of GDPR—and just good business practice—you should only be contacting people who have opted in to receive your marketing materials.
People don’t want spam in their email—and they definitely don’t want spam notifications on their phone.
However, if they have opted in—and particularly if they’ve bought from you before—they might appreciate being notified of new products and deals.
One great advantage of WhatsApp for this is that you can include rich messages, with images and links.
From a business perspective, the person receiving the message gets a push notification, meaning open rates are likely to be significantly higher.
Very smooth shopping experiences can also be built into a WhatsApp-enabled flow, allowing a customer to quickly purchase a new product you present to them.
Be careful not to overdo this marketing channel, as it can quickly feel like spam.
You don’t want users reporting you, as that could damage your standing within the Meta business ecosystem.
One of the big advances in digital technology that has improved customers’ quality of life has been the range of channels through which they can reach customer support.
The world has gone omnichannel.
Telerivet, for example, allows companies to communicate with their customers through a whole range of different channels—SMS, MMS, voice, WhatsApp, Viber, and more.
It’s now easier than ever to contact your customers via the channels they use.
This is great for customers because it means they can leave a customer support request and carry on with their day, rather than the antiquated nightmare of having to sit on hold for an hour, hoping to reach an agent.
This experience was so common that we, as a society, have largely memory-holed the fact that most popular sitcoms had at least one episode built around this trope.
In the sitcom Friends, one such episode featured a pregnant Phoebe, unable to attend Ross’s wedding in London, stuck on hold for an extended period of time, unable to take part in the conversation.
Now, none of that would be necessary.
Phoebe could simply send a message to the company she needed to communicate with, and they would message her back when they were ready. She would have been able to carry on with her day.
Customers appreciate when you communicate with them via their preferred means.
This increases their satisfaction with your brand, and it’s particularly important because people typically go to customer support when they’re already unhappy with your product or service.
Being able to placate them and give them a good experience is a key way to maintain customers and avoid churn.
Another benefit of WhatsApp, which is also true of most simple text-based communication technologies, is the ability to run structured interactions.
A great example of this is running surveys and asking for feedback.
Running a survey, of course, is a more complex form of asking for feedback, but the simplest version of this could be sending an automated message to a customer after they have purchased your product or service via WhatsApp, asking for structured or open-ended feedback.
Using WhatsApp for surveys is very simple, and you can pre-program responses or, with a platform like Telerivet, use natural language understanding (NLU) to interpret and analyze more qualitative responses.
This can help create a natural feel without having to rely on LLMs, which are prone to hallucinations or variation from your structured responses.
Again, with WhatsApp, if this is a tool your customers prefer to use, you are more likely to get positive responses from them.
You are also more likely to get them to engage in multi-step actions, which are notoriously difficult to get users to complete.
WhatsApp offers fractional benefits that can have a surprisingly large impact on conversions—including getting customers to complete a survey.
Another big use case for marketing on WhatsApp is to offer deals, specifically deals they can take advantage of. This could be vouchers or discount codes, and it could come in the form of links or QR codes.
With WhatsApp, it's very easy to deliver links to users, and it's also easy to send images. These images could be of QR codes that someone can display on their phone when physically arriving at a venue, for example.
You could also try to take advantage of the mobile experience with other native technologies. On iPhones, for example, there is the Wallet app, where tickets can live in their own custom format. Through WhatsApp, you could send vouchers or QR codes with this file format and have the end user tap to add to Wallet.
This can add further benefits, such as being tied to a date and time, creating a degree of persistence on the home screen, opening up the opportunity for further exposure and awareness, and increasing the likelihood of the voucher being used.
This ties in further with trying to use WhatsApp in ways that aren't perceived as spam. The best way to avoid being perceived as spam is to offer value. The more you offer value, the more the user will appreciate your contact rather than resent your push notification.
Another strong aspect of WhatsApp for marketing is the ability to unlock the social graph. WhatsApp is a messaging platform, but it's also a social messaging platform, and you can unlock the benefits of that by leveraging share features and functionalities.
If you contact someone via email, there is a good chance they do not have the email address of all their friends or family within their email contacts. If you notify them about a new product, for example, they are more likely to click the link in the email and then try to copy the link to go to WhatsApp or a similar chat app to send the product to a friend or relative.
If you compare this process with a WhatsApp-native flow, you can see that the higher likelihood of active push notifications will dramatically increase the open rates, along with the lower level of competition from other marketing efforts.
And then, the ability to share that product with a friend requires essentially a single click.
The friction has been dramatically reduced, and at scale, the advantages of the low-friction flow over the high-friction flow will be dramatic and will impact top-line revenue.
Further to this, leveraging functionality like the ticket file type mentioned above can be an easy way to get someone to share discounts with friends in ways that are super easy to leverage and gain value from.
The easier you make it for your customers and potential customers, the more likely they are to take that action, gain that value, and come back to you in the future.
As well as being a social chat messaging app, WhatsApp is kind of a budget version of a full communications platform.
You can send rich messages with lots of different types of media. You can send voice notes, photos, videos, and you can perform various types of calling, including voice calls and video calls.
The first thing to note about calling is that it's probably best not to try video calling your customers. Not everyone appreciates being video called by surprise.
That said, voice calling is potentially a very convenient way to leverage your WhatsApp connection with a customer.
If a customer has called for support, and you've exchanged messages, but you need to discuss something in more depth, you can very easily upgrade that interaction from simple chat to a voice call and go into more detail.
This means that instead of deploying different products to communicate across different mediums, you can use the same product and gain that value.
You can do this as a solo operator, using WhatsApp as an app on your phone, or you can do this as a giant multinational corporation, using WhatsApp on a transactional basis.
The realm of possibilities provided by WhatsApp in some markets is vast—and worth participating in.
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