10 best WhatsApp marketing campaign examples

Need inspiration for your next WhatsApp marketing campaign? Get fresh ideas with our top 10 WhatsApp marketing campaigns, from seasonal sales to creative concepts.

Getting started with WhatsApp marketing can be challenging in the beginning. 

Whether you are working with a professional WhatsApp tool from an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP) or on your own using the free WhatsApp Business app - more than the technical side, the creative side of building a WhatsApp marketing campaign can be difficult.

Fortunately, we from charles have collected a deep bag of tricks over the years - also thanks to our clients success stories 😉 - and are very happy to share it with the world.

Think of this article as your own personal album of WhatsApp campaign examples, that you can use to get inspired and come back to whenever you need new ideas. 

So without further ado, here are:

10 of the best WhatsApp marketing campaign examples

1. L'Occitane en Provence: Mothers Day campaign x PURELEI (Seasonal)
2. Dermalogica: Consultation via WhatsApp
3. Katjes: Candy counting competition powered by charles' inhouse agency
4. Leevje: Winter sale, sunglasses sale (Seasonal)
5. ABOUT YOU: Clever use of segmentation and influencers

6. Braineffect: Black Friday turns into Black Month on WhatsApp (Seasonal)

7. Oatsome: Let customers be your promoters with WhatsApp pre-access and early reviews

8. Every.: Using Veganuary to build a healthy vegan lifestyle community (Seasonal)

9. WhatsApp collaborations - win-win campaigns for brand and customer

10. WWF: First WhatsApp game worldwide to raise awareness on endangered wildlife

1. L'Occitane en Provence: Mother's Day WhatsApp campaign x PURELEI

For Mother's Day, the famous French cosmetics brand launched a campaign in collaboration with the Hawaii-inspired jewellery & lifestyle company PURELEI. 

For everyone with difficulties making decisions or the clueless ones that want to bring a smile to mom's face, L'Occitane gave away a PURELEI necklace for every order above 45 Euros.

The code to get the present was sent via WhatsApp.

The cute little gesture comes from Léa, a Persona that was created by the brand to manage WhatsApp chats. 

To get visitors of the website to enter the WhatsApp channel and chat with Léa, L'Occitane, as many other companies, uses chat bubbles that link to WhatsApp.

L'Occitane created the persona of Léa to give the brand's WhatsApp channel a face, making the interactions more heartfelt for the users.

2. Dermalogica: Skin consultation via WhatsApp

Dermalogica is a personal care brand based in the US. Skin care is a very sensitive topic and requires a lot of information for customers. 

Of course, in-store consultation is a must for a lot of men and women before buying a product to get the best results and prevent unwanted side-effects. 

To provide the vital information and consultation online - or rather via chat - the brand decided to launch a WhatsApp consultation service, where customers can ask questions about products and their skin to a certified cosmetician with deep knowledge about the product portfolio of Dermalogica.

Customers from Germany can make use of the WhatsApp consultation service on working days from 9 am to 4:30 pm.

Having a consultation chat on WhatsApp has the advantage of keeping the interaction on a highly personal level. 

Customers can chat with the brand the same way they would with a friend: Using emojis, sending pictures, videos or links and even voice messages. 

Best thing about WhatsApp consultation: just send a voice note when your tired of writing a novel to describe your problem.

As a result, subscribers to the WhatsApp channel are very close to the brand, engage visibly more with their content and are ready to buy. 

With their monthly WhatsApp offers, Dermalogica reaches an average revenue per recipient of around 3.2 €, which is an extremely solid figure for regular offers. A figure that is possible thanks to elite customer retention on WhatsApp.

3. Katjes: Candy counting competition powered by charles' inhouse agency

Katjes candy counting competition looks like their candies taste: sweet, colourful and wild.

The contestants had to estimate the amount of Katjes candies inside a digital rotatable 3D jar, follow a click-to-WhatsApp button into a chat with the brand and enter there estimated number. 

A short summary of the candy campaign by Katjes x charles.

If the contestants estimated the wrong amount of candies, they were able to get a new chance by sharing the competition with their friends. 

Fun fact: The whole design of the campaign was created in charles' inhouse agency Studios. 

4. Leevje's recipe: Shut your shop down for Black Friday, send customers to WhatsApp, make $$

One of the more straight forward ways to grow you WhatsApp audience and generate revenue while doing it: German children's clothing brand Leevje took a risk and closed their online shop for Black Friday to lead customers into their WhatsApp channel. 

This is how it looked like: 

A password to access the website for pre-access shopping was sent out via WhatsApp only for subscribers, one day before the public November deals.

Besides their website, Leevje also advertised the pre-access campaign on their socials to create awareness for the opportunity.

The ticket for 24h pre-access shopping before everyone else. Thanks to WhatsApp 😊

The results were phenomenal for their subscriber growth, their revenue per conversation and the total amount of revenues generated. 

👉 For the exact numbers and the detailed strategy of Leevje's Black Friday campaign, read more in their success story.

5. ABOUT YOU: Clever use of influencers and segmentation

Challenged by a decrease in growth for their eCommerce and their retail, ABOUT YOU began to search for new channels to expand their revenue.

Of course, WhatsApp has become an important sales and revenue generator for many companies, especially in eCommerce and the fashion industry in particular. 

In the early phase of ABOUT YOU's WhatsApp journey, their focus was validating the success of the channel for Germany first, to later roll the channel out in other countries. 

To build their subscriber base, the brand decided to use an influencer marketing strategy to convert and transfer their social media audience to WhatsApp.

German influencer Guido Maria Kretschmer teases his new collection on Instragram.

In the second phase, the idea was to make use of audience segmentation based on the influencer that brought each customer to WhatsApp, e. g. "Guido", as seen above. 

Every Guido fan that subscribed to WhatsApp gets a 'Guido' tag.

In the third and final phase, ABOUT YOU sent targeted campaigns to their newly acquired subscribers containing a link to the influencer's own exclusive collection.

This is what the influence message looked like.

Great results with this initial strategy lead ABOUT YOU to expand their WhatsApp operation into 4 additional European countries. 

☝️ Black Friday was another use case for ABOUT YOU, and they did it pretty well. Read here in this article, what and how ABOUT YOU did in their Black Friday WhatsApp campaign.

6. BRAINEFFECT: Black Friday turns into Black Month on WhatsApp

The supplement brand BRAINEFFECT decided to extend the excitement of Black Friday to a whole month for several reasons:

• Flooded inboxes for Black Friday, hence less visibility for their own campaign
• A stretched high revenue period
• Be earlier than their competition
• Testing and adjusting their offers and ideas in real-time

Clever strategy, if you ask us. 

To get customers to subscribe to their WhatsApp channel and get access to all their exclusive deals, the company teased the offers, discounts and free products that were available during Black Month as "only for VIPs".

Exit popups, Instagram Ads and influencer promotion were the channels to create awareness for BRAINEFFECT.

👉 Read their full story and have a look at the staggering results BRAINEFFECT achieved with their unique strategy.

7. Oatsome: Let customers be your promoters with WhatsApp pre-access and early reviews

For this campaign, Oatsome, a health food brand, used WhatsApp as it should be used: Fast-moving, creative and out-of-the-box. 

Before the launch of 'Choco Crush', a new flavour of their product, the brand used WhatsApp to grant early access to their subscribers. They promoted the pre-sale campaign on social media and their website.

A look at the Instagram ad and a popup on their website promoting 'Choco Crush'

After the pre-sale, Oatsome waited 3 days to invite all customers that had already tasted the new smoothie bowl to give them their opinion on it. Of course they did not have to do that manually, but instead created an automated message flow.

The response was great: More than 50 reviews before the official launch.

The brand used the positive feedback to further promote the new flavour in the days leading up to the launch. 

Promotion of 'Choco Crush' on Instagram.

👉 You can read Oatsome's whole success story here.

8. Every.: Using Veganuary to build a healthy vegan lifestyle community

Instead of directly generating revenue, the goal for Every. was to grow and educate their audience on a vegan lifestyle and engage them more with the products that the brand offers. 

This way, companies can build a foundation of not only customers but fans and promoters of their products. Oftentimes, the support of this kind of customer base materializes later on in their customer journey, as they become loyal to the brand and continue (re-)purchasing their products.

Said customer journey begins on Every.'s website, Instagram or post-purchase for their customers and ends in WhatsApp, as it offers a space for close relationships.

Entry points to WhatsApp from Every.'s online presence.

To make the interaction with their brand more comfortable for the subscribers, Every. started every conversation off with some questions to get to know customer preferences and segment them accordingly.

During the month of January, interested subscribers received WhatsApp newsletters surrounding the topic of a vegan lifestyle and its health benefits. 

This is an example of how Every. used to spark conversation or thoughts in their recipients.

Not only did the company manage to get over 850 new registrations while only losing less than 10 subscribers but also saw an increase in sales during Veganuary. 

👉 More on the case of Every. in our success story

9. WhatsApp collaborations - win-win campaigns for brand and customer

WhatsApp collaborations are a rather new approach where two brands with similar audiences work together to benefit through the reach of each other. 

One of many examples is lampenwelt.de and Wesco. Both brands are active in the furniture industry and decided to organize a raffle together. 

Losers of the raffle still get a discount code for the respective online shops.

Both brands benefitted from a high opt-in rate for this campaign paired with a low cost per lead. 

Summed up, the advantages of collaborations are:

• Subscriber base grows with people from the right target group
• New revenue streams
• Improved brand awareness
• Greater reach and key partnerships

Other namely examples are L'Occitane en Provence with PURELEI (see above) or Löwenanteil with Blackroll. A trend that might catch fire in the future and surely something to think about for your own WhatsApp campaigns.

10. WWF: First WhatsApp game worldwide to raise awareness on endangered wildlife

Maybe the most beautiful WhatsApp campaign example in our list and one that shows how much is possible on WhatsApp as a marketing channel thanks to rich features and automations. 

The WWF and charles teamed up to create the world's first WhatsApp game. In 'Tree of Hope' players can start an adventure as an Eco Ninja and help save the planet by solving puzzles.

The aim of the game is to raise awareness and educate on the pressing global issues on various sustainability topics such as decaying ecosystems or endangered species. 

In charles' inhouse agency Studios, visual aesthetics are very important which is reflected by the look and feel of the game. Sometimes mysterious, sometimes beautiful, the game successfully manages to create an atmosphere and really gets through to the player.

🕹️ Wanna try WWF's WhatsApp game Tree of Hope? Click here.

Basically, the game-like feel is achieved through WhatsApp automations via charles' automation tool Journeys. The players tap on an option as an answer to a message and the story continues.

Almost every possible storyline can be created seamlessly via these automated message flows, and visuals such as pictures or videos and even voice notes or audio files help create the virtual world. 

Just to show you how much work went into the game, here's a look behind the scenes:

Potentially, the biggest chat flow ever created 😧

👉 Read all the details on WWF's WhatsApp game 'Tree of Hope' in this article.

WhatsApp games, especially forms of exit games are gaining popularity and some of our clients started creating their own, as they are a creative and engaging way to tighten the relationships to customers and spread a bit of fun. 

This is only a sneak peek. Learn more

This is only a collection of some of our most interesting customer success stories. There's still a lot more success cases to discover with even more details, strategies and most importantly, KPIs and numbers. 

Hopefully, this was enough creative input to kickstart your upcoming WhatsApp campaigns. Feel free to come back whenever you want or even improve your WhatsApp marketing expertise in our blog. 

If you have more questions, our experts are always ready to answer your them. Just book a demo and we'll come back to you asap.