The next big shopping season is always just around the corner. For merchants and businesses of all kinds, seasonal sales peaks around holidays and Mega Sales Days like Black Friday can be a crucial time for generating revenue. But the real opportunity is even bigger than that.

Seasonal peaks, especially during the holidays, are a time when shoppers are open to discovering new brands, new products, and new relationships with businesses online. Business messaging on WhatsApp is a proven and powerful way to shape and elevate those experiences, with strategies you can implement throughout the customer lifecycle.

Business messaging frequently outperforms other channels during holiday periods, in part because more consumers are online. In December 2023, 61% of holiday shoppers surveyed reported that they increase their online time during the holidays, and 85% said they’re also more likely to make spontaneous shopping discoveries.¹

Consumers find messaging to be a convenient way to communicate with businesses, and 39% of holiday shoppers say it makes them feel more personally connected with brands.¹ That makes sense, because messaging is how many consumers stay connected with friends and family every day.

Most important, businesses report big benefits from messaging. More than 90% say Meta business messaging solutions in particular outperform legacy channels for customer acquisition and retention, topline revenue, customer experience, and more.²

So what are some of the best ways to put business messaging to work for your brand during peak sales seasons? There are lots of options, from reminding shoppers about abandoned carts to cross-selling relevant products. But one of the most versatile use cases is to leverage business messaging to deliver personalized seasonal promotions.

Read on for ideas and examples.

From driving awareness and discovery to sparking purchases and re-engagement, there are many ways that sending personalized promotions to customers on WhatsApp can help increase sales during the holidays.

For example, you might start with an enticing offer or message within a targeted ad that clicks to WhatsApp from Instagram or Facebook.

From there, you can capture opt-ins for marketing messages, explore customer preferences, share a customized promotion, and close the sale all within a seamless WhatsApp thread.

WhatsApp Flows offer a way to streamline the promo experience even more. It’s a feature that enables you to create rich custom experiences directly within the WhatsApp message thread. For example, you might use Flows to create in-thread forms to gather information about purchase intent, capture interest for a personalized offer, or collect sign-ups for holiday deals.

Here’s an example of how you can customize promotions using information you gather with WhatsApp Flows custom forms.

Tata CLiQ, the flagship digital commerce initiative for Tata Group, offers luxury products ranging from electronics and home furnishings to fashion and beauty.

Their goal was to reach every customer who opted in on their website to receive follow-up communications and offers and move them toward conversion, but they observed that email delivered only a 10 percent open rate, and SMS messages restricted their ability to craft personalized content.

So, working with Gupshup, a Meta Business Messaging Partner, they developed a strategy to deliver personalized promotions for opted-in customers using the WhatsApp Business Platform. That turned out to be a smart move.

Customers who visited the Tata CLiQ website from a WhatsApp promotional message were 1.7 times more likely to make a purchase. WhatsApp delivered 10X the ROI of email or SMS and was a significant contributor to the brand’s Diwali and Black Friday campaign revenue.

By delivering personalized, relevant messages on the platform shoppers prefer, merchants can stand out during busy sales periods, drive deeper relationships, and boost seasonal sales performance. And promotions are just the beginning.

Check out our WhatsApp for Business playbook for more use cases and best practices during sales peaks. And find a full array of helpful holiday and Mega Sales Day resources here.

Not yet taking advantage of WhatsApp for Business? Take the first step here, and be on your way to stronger results and customer relationships during peak periods and every day of the year.