Ecommerce WhatsApp Marketing Guide: Klaviyo & Shopify Integration Inc
WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messenger app, with around two billion monthly active users, and counting. Especially in mobile-first countries such as in LATAM and ASEAN you will see WhatsApp all over the place. With businesses of all kinds, such as boutiques, shops, hairdressers, public toilets.. being on WhatsApp, to offer you to make your purchases or book your appointments, the WhatsApp-trend amongst businesses knows no stopping, and is slowly conquering EMEA as well.
As of Q4 2024, many verticals such as “hiring”, “hotels & restaurants” or “b2b sales & hospitality” are still seeking WhatsApp use cases at scale, it is just a question of time until those will be clearly defined and vertically served by SaaS companies. The early-adopting ecommerce space has already found its use cases, and those are the ones we will fully equip you with today.
In this article, you, as an ecommerce business owner, will learn:
- how WhatsApp Marketing works and what it looks like in ecommerce
- comparison and differences between WhatsApp marketing and Email marketing
- how to pair WhatsApp marketing with email marketing
- some KPI’s that guide guide you, and how to tweak your approach as a reaction
- how to achieve RPR’s of €2,50+ through WhatsApp Marketing
- how to achieve a 50%-100% improvement in your your mobile traffic leadgen
- how to setup a passive lead generation and lead enrichment setup via Shopify & Klaviyo WhatsApp integration
- iterate your WhatsApp marketing campaigns and run A/B-tests
- best practices, do’s and dont’s of WhatsApp marketing
I am Johannes Mansbart, founder of a WhatsApp Marketing Tool for Shopify & Klaviyo D2C-Brands. We do nothing but work directly with marketing- and CRM-teams of 7-, 8- and 9-figure D2C ecommerce businesses on a daily basis. Helping them scale their WhatsApp Marketing in ecommerce. By reading this article, we try to enable you to do the same. Thanks for reading!
Introduction to WhatsApp Marketing in ecommerce: How it works!
WhatsApp marketing is very similar to email marketing, providing you the chance to generate, enrich and serve your (WhatsApp) leads. Leads will enter your private one-to-one WhatsApp chat, usually entering a pre-built welcome-automation that welcomes them and serves them with the offer or lead magnet you initially granted to channel leads into your WhatsApp chat in the first place.
Later on, you will use those leads to retarget them via custom journeys based on their email- or shop-activity, and/or simply send WhatsApp Marketing campaigns to market your current crucial event such as a product drop, early access, discount campaign, or critical promotional days such as valentine’s day, birthdays, single’s day, black week or holiday seasons.
Differences between Email Marketing and WhatsApp Marketing for ecommerce
Email Marketing is and will remain your number one retention marketing channel. It does have some parallels and some differences to WhatsApp Marketing. Let’s check those out:
Email Marketing | WhatsApp Marketing | |
Double Optin | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Leadgen | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Lead Enrichment | ❌ | ✔️ |
Push Campaigns | ❌ | ✔️ |
Automations | ✔️ | ✔️ |
(Hyper-)personalization | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Integrations | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Revenue Tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Interactive 2-way pushes | ❌ | ✔️ |
1-way pushes | ✔️ | ✔️ |
costs per conversation | ❌ | ✔️ |
Generally, WhatsApp Marketing and Email Marketing will have you face the same challenges operatively:
- grow and sustain a high-quality-subscriber list
- find the right balance between targeting and spamming
- stay relevant through personalization and segmentation
- integrate your channel with your shop system to keep track of your results
- be in a private and GDPR-compliant one-to-one channel with your client
- goal of direct marketing for CLTV and retention revenue maximization
The biggest difference between Email Marketing for ecommerce and WhatsApp Marketing for ecommerce is surely, that Email is more generic. Your clients are used to getting marketing messages and newsletters via Email. With WhatsApp, usually that’s not the case (just yet). WhatsApp is a private environment where your users will engage with friends and family on a daily basis. This brings a higher relevance and sensitivity to the channel, making it very important for your to segment, and personalize according to your clients’ individual needs. As a result, email marketing frequency will be way higher, whilst WhatsApp marketing relevance will go up.
Last but not least, there is a final important difference: In email marketing, you will only have to pay your tools’ costs, and that’s it. The WhatsApp Business Platform is META’s WhatsApp API, which you will have to build your WhatsApp marketing on using a WhatsApp marketing tool. Costs for using it are defined via a “conversational pricing” that globally regulates costs, and through that, also use cases of WhatsApp Marketing. Here you can find an overview of all WhatsApp Marketing Costs
Thus, your retention-marketing-mixes’ order of frequency of engaging with your customers will look like this:
- email marketing
- WhatsApp marketing
- direct mailings
in order to prioritize through costs and also sensibility of channel.
Costs for WhatsApp marketing are billed through “24 hours conversation windows upon chatstart”, which range between €0,01 / conversation (USA) and €0,12 / conversation (Netherlands) and thus heavily depend on the origin (pre-dial-code) of your customer base. Since WhatsApp KPI’s should outperform those costs with a ROWAS (“Return on WhatsApp Spent”) of at least 1.000%, there is nothing to worry about. We will cover WhatsApp Marketing KPI’s for ecommerce later in this blog post, however, be aware that those three crucial factors will define the success of your WhatsApp marketing efforts:
- size of your business, so you have the capacity to build a WhatsApp revenue engine and the urgency to improve your CLTV and retention revenue metrics
- your product/market-fit, so, if you clearly solve a pain and have lovebrand-status so people are well-receptive to your WhatsApp marketing efforts
- product-category-type, whilst supplements will work better since they’re frequently and repetitively bought, a high-priced fashion- or lifestyle-brand will have a tougher time scaling its WhatsApp marketing efforts, since clients’ purchase cycles might be very slow and irregular
All those aspects generally play a crucial role not only for your retention marketing strategy, but overall business unit economics for your ecommerce d2c brand.
Pair your Email Marketing with your WhatsApp Marketing
We have already discussed the differences and strategical high-level-approach towards your ecommerce Email marketing and WhatsApp marketing strategy. Let’s dive into the details. In order to understand, we will dive this section into three content buckets to detect differences, parallels, and synergies, between your ecommerce businesses’ Email marketing and WhatsApp marketing strategy:
- Email and WhatsApp marketing for new customer acquisition
- Email and WhatsApp for retention marketing
- Technical Setup enabling Email & WhatsApp transparency
- Go-To-Market with your WhatsApp eCommerce strategy
New client acquisition via WhatsApp in ecommerce
WhatsApp marketing is not only a retention channel, but also serves for acquiring new customers cheaply and efficiently. “Costs pear Leads” (CPL) in new customer acquisition, for example through WhatsApp Chatstart Ads, WhatsApp Influencer campaigns or WhatsApp Brand Collaborations, can go down as much as 50-80% as opposed to Email leadgen funnels. At the same time, you can in principle A/B test all your sales channels, funnels and CTAs with WhatsApp Chatstarts to compare the results. To build a test case here, it’s best to contact the Growganic guys directly. How does that work?
Let’s have another look at the leadgen funnel via WhatsApp. Looking at the waterdrop® example above, you will miss any type of form that is to be filled out. How come? You can simply enter a WhatsApp automation by one-click-chatstart. This is how it looks like with waterdrop®:
This way, leadgen improvements of up to 100% as our clients’ results prove:
The reasons for an increase in WhatsApp leads as opposed to email are:
- no inbox/delivery issues for DOI (Double Optins): Double Optins via WhatsApp have almost 100% retention and no dropoffs or inbox issues
- no form fillin: chatstart link instead a form that needs to be entered
- native mobile journey: WhatsApp is a 100% mobile user environment, which is the most natural way to engage with your mobile traffic
As you can see, there is some logical hypothesis as to why D2C ecommerce businesses can harvest 50-100% more leads from their mobile traffic than through classical email forms. More ways to leverage this effect are:
- hosting influencer campaigns via WhatsApp
- running “click-to-WhatsApp-ads” on social media
- creating giveaway experiences through WhatsApp
- offline lead gen on promotional campaigns, events and fares
Through the above leverages, brands like “Kloster Kitchen” generate up to 800 leads per influencer campaign, or brands such as “Spacies” can get up to 1.000 leads through their promotional efforts on rock and pop concerts they place their “wheel of fortune” at, which you’re invited to spin upon entering the dedicated WhatsApp welcome automation through simple chatstart click or QR code scan.
Ideally, you won’t just want to generate your lead, but also enrich them with additional information such as their email address, home address, birthday, or similar.
By integrating WhatsApp with Klaviyo & Shopify, you can make sure that even “cold” leads, that had never had a single touchpoint with your email CRM or shop before, can be synchronized through WhatsApp. Here is what it looks from a backend perspective:
So you can integrate WhatsApp with Shopify and Klaviyo, and have virtually 100% synchronization between Chatarmin, Shopify and Klaviyo. This avoids cannibalisation between email and WhatsApp, and enables you to analyze and target your customers in a transparent way. It’s the perfect retention marketing setup.
This is how this setup looks like at a german 8-figure-beverage-brand running on Shopify and Klaviyo:
The magic of adding your WhatsApp leads to your CRM – which usually serves as your CDP as well – is, that you will be able to analyze cohorts such as
- Email only
- WhatsApp only
- Email & WhatsApp
and thus identify the incremental value that WhatsApp marketing adds to your retention longtail revenue through additional touchpoints with your cold or warm audiences. Conversion rates go up, engagement increases, revenue reaches new heights.