WhatsApp marketing: Best practices and strategies for 2024

With the rise of conversational marketing, WhatsApp Business Platform has become increasingly popular for businesses to send promotional messages and nurture leads to purchase.

In our most recent analysis of messaging trends, we found that brands were sending 27% more marketing messages in 2023 over WhatsApp than the year before.

In this blog we explain why you should join the bandwagon and include WhatsApp in your marketing efforts and how to stand out with a WhatsApp marketing strategy that delivers real results. 

Put simply, WhatsApp marketing is promotion of a brands’ products and services over the WhatsApp channel.

Brands should remember that WhatsApp is a conversational platform used by customers to chat with friends and family, so having a strong (and non-spammy) strategy is key. Otherwise, you run the risk of building a poor reputation and losing opt-ins.

So, WhatsApp marketing is about brands chatting with customers while promoting their services with relevant and timely messages.

WhatsApp is the world’s most popular chat app – in fact it was declared the leading communication channel for smartphone users in 2023. It is used by more than 2 billion people in over 180 countries and supports 70 languages.

Globally, the average user spent 17 hours a month on the app and checks it 12 times a day in 2022 – meaning your marketing messages get the best visibility.

As WhatsApp has strict rules requiring brands to obtain opt-ins from customers, consumers are far more likely to open and engage with messages as they trust that they are legitimate and relevant. WhatsApp also encrypts messages, doesn’t share information with third parties, and there are no ads to distract users from your own marketing messages.

Due to this trust, WhatsApp messages have a massive 98% open rate, significantly higher than channels like email and SMS.

WhatsApp offers a programmable API which means that it can be easily integrated into any business’s existing marketing stack to enable WhatsApp messaging at scale.

With WhatsApp you can use a single channel to interact with customers all the way from the discovery phase through to purchase and beyond to keep customers engaged and loyal.

The WhatsApp Business Platform provides organizations of all sizes with features and capability designed specifically for business use cases with brand messages being delivered to the same inbox as users’ personal communication.

Thanks to the rich messaging features on WhatsApp and end-to-end journey interactions, WhatsApp is one of the best channels to enable conversational marketing strategies.

There are a wide range of features and capabilities businesses can take advantage of when using WhatsApp for marketing efforts. Let’s break down the most important ones and how to get the most out of them. 

Collecting opt-ins is essential, without them you can’t start a conversation or send any promotional messages. There are multiple ways to collect opt-ins but click to chat ads are among the more popular and effective methods.

As part of your strategy, launch targeted and relevant ads on Instagram or Facebook, with a “send message to WhatsApp” button that gives customers easy access to start the conversation. Once the ad is launched on Facebook Ad Manager and connected to a WhatsApp chatbot, your business can access specific data on how many conversations were initiated and behavioral data such as conversion tracking on websites or mobile apps, post-purchase experiences, abandoned cart recovery, and the end-to-end marketing funnel from the number of impressions in the Facebook feed to the number of conversions and ROAS for each campaign.

It can be used for any stage of the journey, from initial discovery of your brand, to targeted re-engagement, making conversational marketing a breeze.

But this is just scratching the surface of the many benefits from using click to WhatsApp ads, learn more here:

A major benefit of using a conversational channel like WhatsApp is keeping the user experience seamless, easy, and of course, within the channel. WhatsApp Flows is designed to help improve customer experience over WhatsApp by simplifying use cases that would otherwise require switching to a third-party website or app. It enables businesses to offer an end-to-end journey all within WhatsApp. 

For example, if a customer wants to book an appointment, a WhatsApp Flows message will be triggered that contains locations to choose from, then options for time and date of the appointment, then a contact form to be filled to finalize the booking. Once they complete the flow, they receive a WhatsApp message with a summary of their booking, making sure the user never has to leave the chat app.

Check out how you can generate leads and collect subscriptions within WhatsApp with Flows:

WhatsApp Flows is ideal for lead generation forms, appointment booking, satisfaction surveys, and more. Learn more about Flows here:

Use an automated chatbot over WhatsApp to connect with customers. Your chatbot should reflect your brand persona through its messaging style and image. It is an ideal way to carry out your marketing campaigns and continue the conversation with customers. Connecting your chatbot to a customer data platform will allow you to collect valuable first party data which you can use to better target existing customers in the future.

Luckily, setting up a chatbot isn’t as hard as you might think. There are free templates available that can help you quickly launch a reliable chatbot in a matter of minutes. Checkout our guide to building a chatbot on WhatsApp to get you started:

This feature enables you to add up to 30 products with photos and detailed descriptions that people can browse from within the WhatsApp chat. This feature is also available to integrate via the API. When a person wants to purchase an item, they can make a payment within WhatsApp, or click through to your website’s checkout page complete the transaction. This allows customers to transition from each stage of the journey seamlessly by remaining within the WhatsApp conversation.

If your conversational marketing flows have been successful, and your customer has reached the end of the funnel, don’t redirect them to a new channel – keep everything within WhatsApp by enabling payments on WhatsApp. For the time being, this feature is only available in India and Brazil, but WhatsApp will expand this offer to other regions in the future. Get prepared and learn more about how to use payments in this blog. 

We’ve touched on opt-ins via click to chat ads above, but there are multiple ways you can collect opt-ins.

Opt-ins must be collected before you message a customer using WhatsApp. If a customer completes a consent form, or if they initiate the conversation, you have collected their opt-in for receiving messages over WhatsApp. The business is responsible for storing opt-ins (aka customer consent to receive messages from your brand).

Look at your current marketing strategy and funnel and determine where you can best use WhatsApp to boost engagement. Perhaps you struggle with lead generation, or your conversion rate is low.

Part of this process should be to identify the types of messages that you will use, for example: list messages for booking appointments or displaying past orders, CTA buttons for easy replies, maps for location services, and other rich media to add value to your interactions. 

Building out your workflows is key to delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Using an omnichannel customer engagement solution such as Moments can help you design and launch interactions with engaging message types over WhatsApp.

Checkout a list of use cases and what rich message types from WhatsApp that would make your messages stand out:

Kibon, a beloved ice cream brand and part of Unilever, needed to find a way to streamline B2B communication with their partners as they moved to digital forms of communication. A WhatsApp chatbot allowed Kibon to cover the entire partner journey over the chat app. The WhatsApp campaign generated 30,000% ROI in three days with 74% of partners viewing the campaign on WhatsApp.