WhatsApp is a fantastic channel for online stores looking to deliver timely and engaging messages to their customers. It’s also growing in popularity as more eCommerce marketers are realizing its potential.
However, most eCommerce brands are still only scratching the surface of WhatsApp’s capabilities. At the same time, Meta’s recent developments have dramatically expanded the app’s potential for use cases like:
- Collecting first-party data from leads and customers.
- Sending highly personalized messages and product recommendations based on customers’ needs, interests, and preferences.
- Delivering interactive, end-to-end shopping experiences and having two-way conversations with customers at scale.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to take full advantage of WhatsApp eCommerce to generate new customers, drive sales, and create long-term, profitable customer relationships. We’ll also use Insider — our enterprise WhatsApp and omnichannel engagement platform — to show examples of the app’s massive potential for online stores.
What is WhatsApp eCommerce? (Definition & benefits)
The term WhatsApp eCommerce refers to different ways online stores can use WhatsApp to drive engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. This includes sending personalized promotional messages, keeping customers updated with timely transactional alerts, and designing conversational shopping experiences.
There are five key benefits of using WhatsApp as a marketing channel for your eCommerce business:
- Unmatched reach: WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world with 2.5 billion users. This makes it an extremely powerful channel, especially if you’re aiming to grow brand awareness among audiences located in big developing economies like Brazil, India, and Indonesia.
- Novelty: Many eCommerce brands still don’t leverage WhatsApp, especially compared to traditional channels like email and SMS. This gives you a chance to offer something new and exciting to mobile-first customers looking to engage with brands on their preferred channels.
- High open, conversion, and clickthrough rates (CTR): WhatsApp open rates are between 90 and 99%, while clickthrough and conversion rates are anywhere from 20% to 60%. For example, one of our customers saw a 97% open rate and nearly 30% CTR on WhatsApp.
- Streamlined product discovery. When used to its full potential, WhatsApp lets you add your entire product catalog to the app. This means users can browse your store, add items to their carts, and complete their purchases without going to an external site or app.
- Opportunity for real-time sales assistance. WhatsApp lets you answer customer questions in real-time — either via live agents or WhatsApp chatbots. This gives you the chance to create a guided and personalized shopping experience that customers usually can’t get online.
How WhatsApp eCommerce works
eCommerce teams can use WhatsApp through one of the WhatsApp business products — the WhatsApp Business App or the WhatsApp Business Platform (also known as the WhatsApp Business API).
- The WhatsApp Business App is designed for solopreneurs and small businesses who want to manage one-to-one customer communications. It’s free to download and easy to create a business profile. However, the app is not a good choice for bigger stores with large customer bases as it can’t manage communications at scale.
TheWhatsApp Business Platform is built for leveraging all of WhatsApp’s marketing and customer service capabilities. It offers three APIs for managing conversations at scale — Cloud API (hosted by Meta), On-Premises API, and Business Manager. The platform’s pricing varies based on the country and conversation type, i.e., marketing, utility, service, or authentication.
In short, if you have a small store or are just starting out, the WhatsApp Business App should be enough. However, if you have a large audience and are looking to tap into WhatsApp’s full potential — by building campaigns, triggering contextual messages, and having two-way conversations at scale — you’ll need the business platform.
Larger eCommerce businesses usually partner with a Business Solution Provider (BSP) for their WhatsApp marketing needs.
BSPs are companies that Meta has certified as WhatsApp experts. They’re listed in this Partner Directory, sometimes under a subsidiary or parent company.
While you can use the Business Platform and its APIs without an external service provider, working with BSPs offers some important advantages:
- BSPs can create your WhatsApp business account and guide you through the other steps in the setup.
- They let you manage WhatsApp audience lists and campaigns with a simple UI, instead of only programmatically.
- They help you get WhatsApp message templates approved and give you a convenient place to manage them.
- They help you build WhatsApp flows and automations.
Put simply, BSPs make setting up, automating, managing, and analyzing WhatsApp messages and campaigns much easier.
Additionally, BSPs that also support other channels (like Insider) can help you integrate WhatsApp into your broader marketing strategy. This results in seamless customer experiences across all touchpoints, which drive engagement, boost sales, and improve retention.
eCommerce use cases for WhatsApp
There are tons of WhatsApp marketing tactics you can employ for your eCommerce businesses. We can group them into three broad categories:
- Promotional messages for driving engagement and revenue. These include new arrival and discount announcements, price drop alerts, cart abandonment reminders, and other similar strategies.
- Transactional alerts for keeping customers informed and satisfied. These include order confirmations, shipping updates, one-time passwords (OTPs), and other non-promotional messages.
- Conversational commerce for having two-way communication and providing customer support. These more advanced functionalities enable customers to browse products, add them to their carts, ask questions, and complete their purchases within WhatsApp.
Service businesses can also use WhatsApp to send timely reminders about upcoming appointments, hotel reservations, flights, and other events. Since this guide only focuses on WhatsApp for eCommerce brands, we won’t be covering those use cases here.
If you want a comprehensive look at WhatsApp’s potential, check out:
- Our complete guide to WhatsApp marketing, which covers various strategies, tactics, and examples.
- Our case study with Picniq, which explores how a travel brand uses WhatsApp to nurture long-term customer relationships, remind users about upcoming events, and recover lost revenue.
- Our WhatsApp template explorer, which has WhatsApp templates for seven industries and dozens of use cases like driving conversions, engaging customers post-purchase, and improving customer satisfaction.
#1 Personalized promotional messages for driving revenue
Promotional messages come in different shapes and sizes. Some of the most popular examples include:
- Welcoming new leads and guiding them to their first purchase. This is a simple way to verify that the opt-in was successful, create a positive first impression, and guide potential customers toward the next steps in their journey. You can also offer a first-purchase discount as a purchase incentive.
- Celebrating customer milestones and enticing additional purchases. This coulda birthday, anniversary, or simply a thoughtful gesture for customers who’ve been loyal to your brand. Regardless of the occasion, personalized celebrations are a wonderful way to surprise customers with a special offer (e.g., an exclusive discount) and express your gratitude.
- Sending contextual and personalized product promotions. These can include powerful tactics like cart reminders or price drop and back-in-stock alerts for products customers have marked as favorites or browsed on your site. Because they’re personalized to users’ interests, these messages have the potential to drive lots of conversions and revenue.
- Running replenishment campaigns. For example, say you’re selling shampoos and you know customers typically run out 60 days after their purchase. You can set up a WhatsApp automation that triggers a reminder 55 days after each purchase. This is a powerful way to increase your WhatsApp return on investment (ROI) and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
For a real-life example of these strategies in action, refer to our case study with Vogacloset. This leading eCommerce site used Insider to unify its customer data and unlock WhatsApp as a new marketing channel for driving product discovery and revenue via personalized product recommendations.
Thanks to these tactics, WhatsApp became Vogacloset’s highest-converting channel, with a massive contribution to the 30x ROI they saw from working with Insider.
#2 Transactional messages for a smooth customer experience
Transactional messages are automated communications used to deliver non-promotional information. They’re typically triggered in response to user actions or events like purchases.
The most popular transactional messages for eCommerce stores are:
- Order confirmations.
- Shipping updates.
- Account alerts.
- Invoice messages.
- Payment notifications.
- Cancellation notifications.
While not as exciting as promotional messages, transactional updates are essential for building trust as people expect to receive them. Additionally, the more useful information you can include in them — e.g., updates about expected delivery times or delays — the more reliable your brand will look.
#3 WhatsApp Commerce for conversational shopping experiences and customer support
So far, we’ve looked at WhatsApp’s ability to send one-way messages to leads and customers.
However, to unlock WhatsApp’s full potential for your online stores, teams should also use it as a channel for two-way customer conversations and immersive eCommerce experiences.
For example, our WhatsApp Commerce capability lets you design these experiences that allow customers to:
- Discover and browse your product catalog.
- Add items to their cart.
- Complete purchases.
All of this happens within your WhatsApp eCommerce store, so customers don’t have to open a website or a separate app. This can drastically reduce drop-offs and improve conversion rates, especially for mobile-first customers who want a streamlined product discovery and purchase process.
Additionally, you can design different conversational flows for different use cases, like engaging with preference-based product recommendations, speeding up product discovery of new arrivals, or encouraging repeat purchases. You can also set rules and provide options for users to connect to a live agent when necessary.
On that note, WhatsApp can also be an ideal channel for answering questions and providing timely customer support.
For example, say you’ve enabled WhatsApp Commerce, so customers can browse your product catalog in the messaging platform. It’s highly likely that some customers will have similar questions about placing orders, delivery times, and refund policies.
With Insider, you can build an AI-powered virtual assistant that can answer these questions instantly to minimize response times and maximize customer satisfaction.
As you can see below, you also have a dedicated agent dashboard for a seamless handover to human agents when necessary. This dashboard integrates customer data and bot conversation analysis to help agents handle queries as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Renault and Avis both used Insider’s AI-powered digital assistant to handle customer queries on WhatsApp. Renault achieved a 93% decrease in customer service wait times, while Avis has 70% of their inquiries handled by the digital assistant and achieved 39% cost savings in one year.
Lastly, WhatsApp Flows enables you to create these experiences with interactive flows, rich forms, and other structured ways to collect inputs from users. It takes WhatsApp’s existing conversational messaging to the next level, with structured funnels and data capture.
Unlock the full potential of WhatsApp eCommerce with Insider
Insider can give your eCommerce business everything needed to maximize your WhatsApp marketing efforts and spending. You can use our platform to send personalized communications and build various automation flows, like:
- Abandoned cart prompts.
- Price drop and back-in-stock alerts.
- Transactional messages (e.g., order updates and confirmations).
Additionally, Insider gives you the freedom to create end-to-end shopping experiences in WhatsApp. You can allow your customers to browse products, add them to their carts, and even complete their purchases without leaving WhatsApp. You can also answer their questions at scale instantly using AI-powered chatbots.
However, Insider is more than just a WhatsApp marketing solution.
It’s an omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform that lets you build personalized marketing campaigns across all touchpoints — from your website and mobile app to channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, email, push notifications, social media and search ads, and more.
You can use Insider’s tools to:
- Aggregate customer interactions and other relevant data from disconnected sources — like eCommerce platforms, CRMs, analytics tools, and more — into a single database and get detailed, 360-degree views of all customers.
- Home in on the right target audiences for your campaigns with advanced segmentation and behavioral analytics tools.
- Improve conversion rates, customer satisfaction, retention, and other key metrics by personalizing the entire customer journey based on users’ needs, interests, and preferences.
- Use the full potential of AI and machine learning to predict customer behaviors, automate send times and channel selection, streamline operations, and have two-way conversions with customers.
- And much more.
For more details on how Insider can help your business, schedule a demo with our team.
