7 Ways to Grow Your Business with WhatsApp During Diwali, Black Friday, and Festive Sales All Year Long

Seasonal sales present an exciting opportunity for ecommerce and retail businesses to do more with conversations by driving growth with business messaging across the customer lifecycle.

Whether you’re planning for Diwali or end-of-season sales in India, or strategizing for Black Friday or Singles’ Day in markets around the world, WhatsApp can help you grow in more ways than you might expect.

As consumers ramp up their shopping around Diwali, Black Friday, and other seasonal sales moments, 66% of shoppers in APAC report spending more time online compared to other times of the year.¹ This means they are more engaged with Meta platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—which 58% of shoppers globally say are likely to influence their purchase decisions.¹

In 2024, 72% of APAC shoppers waited for discount sales events to purchase items they need, and they’re increasingly likely to message with businesses when they do.¹ 57% of festive season shoppers in APAC reported that they communicated with a business via messaging around festive season sales.¹

To meet your customers where they’re spending time online around key sales moments throughout the year, let’s dive into how WhatsApp can help you maximize growth every step of the way.

Finding new customers to grow sales starts by making a connection. Using targeted ads that click to WhatsApp, you can reach the right leads on Facebook or Instagram and start a WhatsApp conversation thread.

After reaching your target audience through ads, the possibilities for nurturing and converting leads via conversations are virtually endless. A Business Messaging Partner can help you build engaging in-thread lead generation experiences like:

• Delivering personalized coupons
• Creating Q&A experiences to capture relevant contact information and qualify leads
• Building custom lead generation forms with WhatsApp Flows
• Securing opt-in to send marketing messages with promotions or utility messages with order updates

No matter what your in-thread experience looks like, WhatsApp can help you build messaging journeys that bring in new potential customers for peak season sales and beyond.

Here’s what a messaging journey could look like for lead generation and qualification using a WhatsApp Flows custom form.

When shoppers are actively looking for deals on purchases for themselves and others, promotions can help you capitalize on increased consumer spending to boost sales and revenue.

Once someone has opted in to receive communications from your business on WhatsApp, you can send marketing messages to deliver personalized coupons or special offers. Business Messaging Partners can help you take your promotions strategy to the next level with in-thread experiences featuring product catalogs or chatbots to guide shoppers to conversion.

Here’s just one example of what’s possible.

Particularly during popular festive season sales like Diwali, customers expect to receive personal attention and to have all their questions answered. This is especially true for high-value or high-consideration products and services.

High-touch, consultative selling requires building trust, understanding customer needs, and providing guidance to help turn browsers into buyers. Creating service-centric messaging journeys on WhatsApp can help.

For high-consideration sales, it all comes down to a personalized customer experience. Through a human agent or a chatbot, businesses can gather customer preferences, provide tailored product recommendations, and facilitate checkout in-thread² or on another channel.

Let’s look at a potential consultative selling messaging journey to guide your customer from discovery to purchase.

For businesses with physical locations—whether it’s a retail storefront or a salon that sees a bump around big celebratory ocassions—bringing customers through the door can be essential to growing revenue.

To help spark foot traffic in stores and offline sales, start with making new connections online via ads that click to WhatsApp, or re-engaging existing contacts on WhatsApp with relevant marketing messages.

Then, tailor the in-thread experience to drive in-person conversions. For example, a retailer could book in-store shopping consultations using WhatsApp Flows, or deliver automated order status notifications using utility messages to remind customers about their in-store pickup orders.

Here’s an example brought to life.

When key moments like Black Friday and Diwali come around, seasonal shoppers are often in spending mode, actively looking for ideas and deals. Every purchase offers you clues about their preferences and insight into which other products or services they might also like.

Acting on those clues can help you turn small shopping carts into bigger ones, and deliver a positive customer experience in the process.

You can kick off a conversation by using marketing messages to deliver personalized cross-sell promotions based on a customer’s past behavior. Or simply suggest an appropriate upsell or cross-sell as part of an existing chat where you’re offering a consultative shopping experience.

Here’s one approach to helping increase sales with value-added product recommendations.

Frustratingly common, abandoned shopping carts can quickly take the joy (and profitability) out of seasonal sales. That’s why re-engagement campaigns are an essential part of any marketing strategy, especially around high-value sales periods like Diwali.

Marketing messages can help by delivering automated messages on WhatsApp when abandoned cart web events are detected. The messages can be personalized with a link directly to the customer’s cart.

By integrating your ecommerce platform with WhatsApp through a Business Messaging Partner, you can create a purchase experience that better serves your customers and your business.

Check out how a simple messaging journey can help recover abandoned carts and boost sales.

During Black Friday and other busy festive sales peaks, you want every customer to have a positive experience with your business from start to finish. Proactive fulfillment communications—with time-sensitive messaging on order status or delivery updates—are a smart way to keep customers informed and reduce inbound contact volume. With utility messages on WhatsApp, you’re covered.

Utility messages are for important notifications to help keep customers informed, facilitate seamless fulfillment of every order, and lower the likelihood that seasonal shoppers overwhelm your customer service team with questions. They’re both timely and highly visible, grabbing attention and helping to increase open rates compared to other channels like email.

See how you can keep customers informed with order status updates on WhatsApp.

All of the strategies above can help your business seize the opportunity that comes with heightened consumer activity around important festive season sales. And by bringing multiple strategies together, you can create end-to-end messaging journeys for your customers and achieve a wide range of business goals with WhatsApp.

What’s important is that you start now. Having a strategic plan and an end-to-end strategy in place can make all the difference when your customers’ urge to shop ramps up.

For more ways to capture the momentum of the moment, check out our seasonal sales resources, or get started today.