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In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses need to meet customers where they are - and increasingly, that place is WhatsApp. With over 3 billion active users worldwide (Statista, March 2025) and high engagement rates, WhatsApp has become one of the most powerful platforms for business communication and marketing.
The importance and versatility of WhatsApp as a channel is indisputable – and WhatsApp Business Platform has a lot to offer businesses looking to create engaging, personalised, and impactful content for their audiences. Rich media and interactive features help drive customer engagement and conversion across the customer journey, from product awareness to loyalty programs and re-purchases.
Running successful marketing campaigns across the customer journey requires a clear understanding of performance. Tracking data and insights are crucial for optimising your approach and maximising overall effectiveness of your campaigns - and making sure you get the most within your existing marketing budget!
Optimised WhatsApp Business marketing messages
Measuring performance effectively for optimised operations and ROI is crucial, but also a struggle for most businesses. How do you make sure you track and analyse the right data for improvement?
In Forrester’s 2024 Business Messaging survey, 86% of respondents also said their organisation struggles to optimise messaging efforts with their current metric tracking and measurement capabilities. Aside from the sheer amount of data, they are challenged by the inconsistency of metrics across platforms.
WhatsApp Business Platform offers important insights into performance data based on user behaviour, like read rates and message blocks. This data can influence the quality scores of your messages, which represents how well (or how poorly) they are being received. Based on this feedback, you can optimise and adapt your marketing strategies. But there's more!
WhatsApp Business Platform is now introducing a new set of features for marketers looking to further optimise their messaging: the Marketing Message Lite API (MM Lite API). This API builds on the strength of AI systems and data to help optimise your messaging strategy, enhance the customer experience, and to drive better results by offering automatic optimisations, additional measurement capabilities and dynamic message limits. It is available as a marketing upgrade for WhatsApp Business Platform via your provider (like CM.com).
Get equal or better direct marketing results through marketing messages with optimisations. Run more campaigns within your original budget and increase your performance and ROI.
Do more with your budget throughout the customer journey
WhatsApp Business offers marketers the opportunity for customer engagement, conversion and retention throughout the entire customer journey, with both brands and customer returning to the same conversation over time during different phases of the relationship.
Awareness: The first impression
At this stage, your goal is to get your brand on the radar. While WhatsApp isn’t a traditional advertising channel - you have to guide customers to it, for them to see it - it can complement your awareness efforts when used strategically.
Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram: These ads allow users to message your business directly. This creates an instant bridge between your online presence and real-time conversations.
QR codes in physical locations or packaging: Encourage curious passersby or buyers to scan and start a chat with your business.
WhatsApp widgets on websites: Adding a "Chat with us on WhatsApp" button helps warm leads instantly reach out when they’re just getting familiar with your brand.
Optimise the awareness phase with app deep link support
Normal marketing messages via WhatsApp only allow ‘http’ and ‘https’ URLs in the call-to-action buttons. With the marketing upgrade, you can also add non-https links like deep links into your own apps (with a fallback URL if the app is not installed).
Discovery: Let customers browse and explore
Once someone connects with your brand, they’re likely to want more information. Discovery is about answering questions, showcasing offerings, and making it easy for your (potential) customers to explore your products and services.
Automated welcome messages and quick replies guide users through product categories or FAQs.
Share product catalogs directly in chat, complete with images, prices, and descriptions. Do your customers like what they see? Then they can even buy the products within the same chat!
Use chatbots to segment interests and offer relevant options (e.g., "Are you interested in men's or women's clothing?").
Optimise the discovery phase with automatic creative optimisations
Automatic creative optimisations, like enhancing image brightness, image cropping, adding animations or switching between video thumbnail images can help optimise your marketing engagement. Please note: This feature is still in development.
Consideration: Seal the deal
In this phase, potential customers are weighing their options. Personalised interactions can tilt the scale in your favour.
Offer one-on-one consultations via chat or even voice calls to assist the sales process.
Use rich media - videos, PDFs, or images - to showcase features, benefits, or comparisons.
Bonus: You can also integrate abandoned cart reminders or tailored follow-ups to nudge decisions forward. This can also be used as re-engagement later in the journey.
Optimise the consideration phase with new marketing features
The optimised marketing messages upgrade will unlock new message formats to help enhance the visual appeal and engagement of your messages – formats like multi-image messages, image animations and list views.
Purchase: Make it seamless
Your customer is ready to buy, so don’t let friction stop them. Make sure your buying process is easy and seamless, for the ultimate customer experience.
Provide secure payment links or integrate with payment platforms directly through the chat.
Offer order confirmations, shipping updates, and digital invoices via WhatsApp to streamline communication.
Post-purchase: Strengthening the relationship
After a purchase, the journey isn’t over - it’s just the beginning of loyalty. You want customers to have a positive experience with your brand, building a community around it and making sure they want to do business with you again in the future.
Send thank-you messages, care tips, or how-to guides for product usage, and proactively ask for feedback. Show that you care - and care to improve.
Provide real-time customer support, reducing the friction of email or call center queues.
This builds trust and shows customers that your service continues after they’ve paid.
Re-engagement: Turning one-time buyers into lifelong fans
To drive repeat purchases, businesses need to stay top of mind. WhatsApp lets you do that in a respectful, highly effective way. Because messages are conversational and not intrusive, WhatsApp makes re-engagement feel like a personal touch - not a sales push.
Share personalised offers and more during important peak sales periods (like Christmas or Black Friday)
Ask your customers if they want to receive your WhatsApp newsletter with personalised news, announcements and offers.
Use chat history and behaviour abandoned cart reminders to send relevant follow-ups after a period of inactivity, like abandoned cart reminders or wish list updates.
Optimise the re-engagement phase with:
Dynamic message limits
High engagement marketing messages refers to messages that are expected by users, relevant, and timely, and therefore more likely to be read and clicked. This evaluation is based on information that other businesses have shared (e.g., marketing message template data, customer information, message template read rates). Dynamic messaging limits allow high engagement messages to reach more customers, without the ‘hard’ messaging limits on regular marketing messages.
Customisable TTL
You can ensure that your marketing messages are timely and relevant by telling WhatsApp when to stop attempting to deliver a message. If a message is not delivered within the specified time-to-live (TTL), because for example their phone is off, the message is dropped, and your business will not be charged for it. This keeps your offers relevant and valid, and it can avoid extra charges if you use fallback channels.
Additional benchmarks, metrics and recommendations
Benchmarks will help you understand how your message templates are performing compared to similar businesses (based on geography or vertical). Recommendations will give you actionable guidance to improve when your performance is below benchmark, and error message reporting will provide some insights into the messages that are failing.
CM.com as your WhatsApp marketing partner
WhatsApp Business Platform is a formidable marketing tool in the omnichannel landscape of customer communication. By being present at every customer journey phase - from awareness to re-engagement - you can offer seamless, personal, and real-time experiences that boost conversions and foster long-term loyalty.
Looking to get the most value out of your marketing budget? Consider the marketing upgrade that WhatsApp Business Platform offers through its WhatsApp Business Partners to optimize your campaigns!
As a WhatsApp Business Partner, CM.com will help guide you through the setup and implementation process and help you understand how to unlock the potential of the WhatsApp business platform. Get in touch with one of our experts to discuss how we can help you unlock the full potential of the WhatsApp business platform.
+27 (21) 180 2560
