[00:00.0] How are you, Guillaume? I’m very well, and you? Really happy to have you on the podcast – we’ve known each other for a little while and we’d planned to do this for some time, so I’m glad it’s finally happening. Thanks for the invite, I’m very happy to be here too. Today we’re going to talk about lots of things, obviously – in particular conversational e-commerce and the role of WhatsApp in all of that. [00:20.2] Just before we dive in, could you quickly introduce yourself for those who don’t know you yet? Yes, of course. My name is Guillaume Escolier, I’m the CEO of Wax. Wax stands for WhatsApp Experience, a company we launched three years ago with my co-founders Paul and Lucas, with the aim of helping brands activate WhatsApp as a new channel for communication, sales and loyalty. [00:40.1] Before that, I worked for three years in a venture capital fund where I was in charge of investments in direct-to-consumer brands and pure-player e-commerce companies, broadly speaking. That’s what allowed me to see the pain point around retention: the fact that traditional or classic communication channels – email and SMS – didn’t necessarily bring customers back, qualify them or convert them properly. So we launched WAX with that in mind. [01:04.6] Brilliant. So before we get into all the details, I’d like to start with a quick true/false – quick question, short answer. Relational commerce is mainly a question of technology. That’s partly true: you do need native technology, you need a conversational experience – knowing which use cases to deploy and in what order – and above all you need really strong support. [01:27.3] If we’re really talking about WhatsApp, it’s extremely specific, and what makes the quality of our service at WAX is the operational excellence of our CSMs. So there’s this sort of triptych: tech, conversational expertise, and then the hands-on support that actually gets everything deployed. [01:42.8] Love that. Most CRM programmes in e-commerce are still centred on email. That’s relatively true. In France, WhatsApp is still emerging – it’s fairly new. In other geographies, conversational has become totally mainstream. [02:00.9] If you look at China, for example, with WeChat of course, or even WhatsApp in lots of regions around the world – Latin America, India – most messages sent by brands are sent on conversational platforms. So in France we’re still in a bit of an adoption phase. [02:18.7] There are about 800 brands that have adopted WhatsApp, but adoption is still fairly fast. Emails still have a better ROI than WhatsApp. Email is definitely very competitive; for me it’s still the foundation of CRM. But the idea is to orchestrate WhatsApp around email and unlock incremental sales thanks to WhatsApp. [02:40.3] There are some use cases where WhatsApp can be more ROI-positive – I’m thinking about abandoned baskets, where we really capitalise on the conversational power of WhatsApp, or conversational in general, to identify purchase barriers – something email doesn’t really let you do – and then resolve them in the conversation. [02:58.4] On abandoned baskets, for example, we recover an extra 15% by adding WhatsApp, and we see ROIs that can reach 150 or even 200x. It’s a use case where WhatsApp is incredibly ROI-driven. So good – 200x is pretty hard to beat. [03:15.8] WhatsApp currently has an average open rate of more than 90%. True – that’s the average we see. Among 30–35-year-olds, it’s more like 95%. For those over 50, it’s more like 80–85%. Consumers are more likely to read a WhatsApp than an SMS. [03:34.1] Yes, I really believe that. An SMS isn’t conversational – it’s 140 characters. So as a CRM channel it’s actually quite poor. RCS is coming, but we’re not quite there yet. With WhatsApp, what’s interesting is that you have a 24-hour messaging window during which you can share photos, videos, text, voice notes – all unlimited. [03:55.2] So it’s extremely rich. And above all, it’s now more ingrained in our habits to send WhatsApps rather than SMS – with family, friends, and even at work. Definitely – when you look at the type of SMS we usually get, it’s a bit less sexy than a WhatsApp. [04:11.4] It’s not exactly dreamy. Exactly. Inactive customers are often more receptive to a WhatsApp message than a reactivation email. That’s rather false. WhatsApp is a very powerful tool for the middle and bottom of the funnel, so you’re more likely to use it to address warm audiences, loyal customers or warm prospects. [04:30.2] So for reactivation on cold bases, I wouldn’t recommend using WhatsApp, because there’s a quality score on WhatsApp that’s very sensitive – like your email deliverability score, but much more sensitive. If you push WhatsApp campaigns to cold bases at high volumes, you risk getting blocked by Meta. [04:46.3] So for pure reactivation, I’d still recommend prioritising email. OK. WhatsApp is more effective for activation and loyalty than for acquisition. Yes, absolutely true. For the same reasons: mid- and low-funnel, on warm audiences. WhatsApp is a very powerful tool to qualify and convert audiences that have been warned they’ll be contacted on WhatsApp. [05:07.3] Right at the top of the funnel that’s not necessarily always the case. That said, we’ll talk about use cases later, but there are interesting activation use cases on WhatsApp, especially what we call click-to-WhatsApp Ads – I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. They’re Facebook and Instagram ads that redirect paid traffic into WhatsApp. [05:25.6] There, in WhatsApp, you get a 48-hour messaging window to convert those audiences. And if you don’t convert them right away, you can actually store their details, bring that back into your WAX CRM, and also into your email and SMS CRM, so you’re massively enriching your base. [05:43.9] So that’s the highest-funnel use case we have. It’s not massively deployed yet in France, but in geographies that are more advanced on WhatsApp marketing and customer relationships via WhatsApp, it’s huge. We’ll get there. Customers are willing to share their data if it improves their experience. [06:01.7] Yes, I’m very convinced of that. We have a great use case with Maison 123, which I’m sure you know – a women’s fashion brand that’s doing very well. We launched them five months ago. We did €420k in revenue in five months with an average ROI of 46x. [06:18.7] And why are users willing to share information? Because first, the approach is to collect an opt-in – a second-level opt-in in WhatsApp – so to find out whether the person is actually interested in that channel or not. [06:34.7] Then we ask questions about how often they’d like to be contacted: do they want to receive one newsletter a month, two, or three? That’s the basics, let’s say. And when the approach is good, it tends to work really well. [06:50.9] We get brilliant opt-in rates. And then again, we really lean into conversational in WhatsApp. What we did with Maison 123 on the first campaign we launched was to qualify a base by asking them which collection they preferred. [07:06.1] I think there were three collections: Beach, City or Nature. And then we redirected them to the products that were more likely to convert them. When the approach is right and the brand has an engaged, well-targeted audience, it works very well. [07:23.8] Dynamic personalisation based on purchase history systematically increases AOV. “Systematically” is hard to claim, but in the vast majority of cases, yes – the more you know about a customer, the better you can speak to them and address their needs. [07:42.6] And I think the real strength of WhatsApp is the ability to better understand and get to know your base of prospects and customers. So yes, broadly speaking, it’s true. The post-purchase experience is the biggest opportunity to build loyalty. Yes, I think so too. [08:00.9] And on WhatsApp we have a really interesting use case: sending order confirmations and tracking links on WhatsApp post-purchase. We have a legitimate interest in doing that, so we don’t even need a specific opt-in at that point. In WhatsApp we then collect a second opt-in. [08:16.4] We first provide a useful, satisfying WhatsApp experience. We leverage that positive first experience to collect an opt-in and then roll out, for example, repeat purchase flows, referral, whatever. Post-purchase is a really good door-opener for activating WhatsApp, because that’s when the customer is super hyped – they’ve just bought a product. [08:41.7] French brands are still behind on WhatsApp adoption compared with international markets. In reality, compared with India and Latin America generally, we started adopting WhatsApp later. And even at European level: [09:03.0] Germany, Spain and Italy were the three pioneers in adopting WhatsApp marketing. France followed afterwards. But adoption has been much faster in France because there are several players pushing WhatsApp. We started later, but now we’re moving faster. [09:21.5] So it’s kind of levelling out. And we’re still ahead of the UK – for once, which is nice – and especially ahead of the US, where iMessage is really standard. There are “only” about 100 million WhatsApp users there, so they’re still behind the UK, which itself is behind France. [09:38.5] Interesting – it is quite satisfying, for once, to see it going that way round. By 2026, every brand will have WhatsApp in its CRM strategy. No, not every brand. Obviously that’s the direction we’d like things to go. But in reality, there are about 800 brands in France today that have adopted WhatsApp. [09:56.7] Five hundred of those are WAX clients. So 800 brands out of maybe thousands, even tens of thousands of brands in France overall – that’s still just a minority of early adopters. And that’s really interesting because it means there’s still a first-mover advantage in getting started on WhatsApp. It’s still highly differentiating – it hasn’t been adopted by the majority yet. [10:15.5] So yes, WhatsApp marketing has a very bright future in France. You reply faster to your WhatsApp messages than to your emails. Yes – I don’t think you need to know WAX to answer that one. The stats are that on average a message is read on WhatsApp within seven minutes, whereas an email will take several hours. [10:38.1] That’s obviously a big advantage. Open rates at 90%, the speed at which messages are opened, engagement rates on WhatsApp – around 60% of people interact with brands by clicking buttons or replying with text. [10:53.2] And all that means we get click-through rates of about 30% at the end of the chain. So you’re ten times higher than a good email campaign typically generates. That plus the conversational side makes it a pretty incredible channel for pushing content. [11:12.3] And last little question: do you think AI will replace part of customer service within the next three years? Yes, absolutely. We’re pushing very hard in that direction at WAX. We’re lucky to have, in the team, our lead developer who contributed to writing the MCP protocol adapted to the Ruby language, and who was one of the early pioneers of open-source AI in France. [11:38.1] We’re testing some genuinely “banger” use cases. Around 70 brands have beta-tested product recommendations, FAQs – we’ll come back to that – and, in terms of customer service and support, this lets you automate a large majority – around 75% – of tickets, so the team can focus on the tickets that actually have value, where you can generate repeat purchases or do product recommendations. [12:05.2] So yes, totally. Big shout-out to Yurik. Cool. I suggest we now get into the heart of the topic, especially relational commerce. You mentioned it quite a lot during the little Q&A session. It’s a big topic at the moment, but how would you personally define this concept? [12:28.3] Yes – relational or conversational commerce, I play with the terms a bit, occupational hazard. For me, it’s simply the fact of integrating conversational channels into your CRM strategy and starting to shift your mindset towards pushing content in both directions, not just broadcasting messages. [12:44.3] It’s also about gathering feedback and understanding that the conversational data you collect is a goldmine for better qualifying, better converting and better bringing customers back. That’s how I see it. And what’s funny is that when we launched WAX three and a half years ago – let’s say three years – we had a strong intuition that the future of commerce could only be conversational. [13:08.9] That coincided with the rise of ChatGPT and LLMs at the time, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. And today that’s being confirmed quite a lot: when you look at the digital checkout features pushed by Stripe, Etsy, Shopify inside ChatGPT, you realise we now have access to a unified shopping experience inside a conversational model. [13:34.5] And what we said to ourselves was: rather than having that inside ChatGPT, we wanted to inject exactly the same experience into the most-read messaging app on the planet, which is WhatsApp. Very interesting. Do you have an example of a brand that moved from a fairly transactional, top-down logic to a much more conversational approach? [13:54.3] And what were the results? I mention them a lot because they really are excellent – we love working with them – but I’m thinking of the 900.care team, who had a great instinct for conversational long before we met them: they were already using an Indian WhatsApp marketing platform. [14:12.9] Before that, they were 100% transactional. When we started working with them, we tried to switch as many use cases as possible to conversational. I’ll take one use case: post-purchase upsell. They sell hygiene products on subscription – shampoos, deodorants, toothpaste, etc. [14:33.0] The use case we built was: when someone places an order on their Shopify store for the first time, we send them a WhatsApp message to confirm the order and offer them the chance to add a second product to their original order – an upsell or cross-sell. [14:51.9] And what’s interesting is that we can only do that in a 30-minute window before the order is sent to the fulfilment partner. Those 30 minutes are the window where only WhatsApp can really “play”, because messages are read in an average of seven minutes, with open rates at 90% and engagement at 60%. [15:11.5] The results on this upsell use case: 30% of people go from one subscription to two subscriptions after that flow is sent. It’s genuinely transformational for 900.care. And particularly on deodorant, which is their main product, we reached 55%. [15:29.4] So more than one person in two doubled their LTV thanks to that flow. That’s the first flow we deployed with 900.care on upsell, and it was stellar. The second flow is across the whole subscriber base, and it’s more about “care”: every month, before they’re charged, we send a little WhatsApp message reminding them they’re about to be debited – that it’s not coming out of nowhere – so they have visibility over the charge. [15:52.3] That can seem counter-intuitive in subscription models, where you’d think “I’d rather not touch that”. But we did the opposite. [16:09.8] And we offer them the chance to view their subscription, see what’s in it, add a product, remove a product, reduce the frequency, increase it, etc. Naturally, we assumed that might generate a bit of churn. Because sometimes, with subscriptions, the fact you’ve forgotten you’ve got one is what keeps you in the pipe. But in reality it increased LTV by 20–25% on that use case. [16:27.3] So 900.care is a great example of very strong adoption of conversational. Super interesting. And today, why would you say the conversational side has become truly strategic for brands? [16:46.8] Why is it strategic? For me, it’s the conversational data you’ll collect. That’s really a goldmine, and you can use it to convert in real time inside WhatsApp, to enrich your whole conversational base around WhatsApp, and then also push it back up into your CDP and CRM to enrich your email and SMS segments. [17:07.6] So conversational and WhatsApp become the spearhead of your CRM. They’re what help you really understand your customers, their needs, their purchase barriers, their problems after delivery, etc. And how would you advise brands to avoid over-soliciting consumers? There’s definitely a question of dosage too. [17:28.9] You don’t necessarily want to be contacted by a brand on WhatsApp every five minutes. How would you advise them to get the balance right? Yes, 100%. WhatsApp is very powerful, so you mustn’t over-use it. [17:45.4] What we say is: high relevance, low frequency. We’ll increase the relevance of the messages we send on WhatsApp and reduce send frequency. There are also best practices our CSM teams help deploy for clients and sometimes for agencies that manage their own clients on WhatsApp. [18:06.5] Roughly speaking: put in place a good opt-in collection strategy, so that users are warm and aware that they’ll receive messages on WhatsApp. Favour inbound if possible. Then, as I said, measure the marketing pressure you’re putting on your audiences and reduce send frequency. [18:25.5] On WhatsApp, we’d generally send one to two messages per month – very far from typical email newsletter frequency, where some brands send almost two newsletters a week, even a day. And above all, we always add exits in WhatsApp. [18:44.8] So in almost every interaction, we offer the user the chance to unsubscribe via a button. That lets you get a sort of natural selection, avoid spam, and make sure that your WhatsApp audiences are really refined to prospects and customers who actually want to hear from the brand on WhatsApp. [19:04.1] It also creates a kind of natural targeting inside WhatsApp. It really sets a new standard in terms of information availability. You mentioned earlier that when you place an order, the brand will communicate with you on WhatsApp about tracking. [19:21.6] People will start to expect more reactivity and availability, because similarly, they can ask questions directly on WhatsApp as a support channel. In your view, what does a brand that doesn’t follow this new standard risk compared with others? [19:45.6] A brand that doesn’t go into conversational, you mean. For me, there are two risks. The first is a risk of lost revenue – an opportunity cost. When I’m talking to a brand on a call, in a sort of sales negotiation phase, and they object on timing – “I can’t start now, I don’t have time” – [20:05.4] I like to introduce the concept of RONI – trying to calculate with them their Return On Non-Investment: what it costs them not to go onto WhatsApp now. I obviously use the abandoned basket use case because it’s the most ROI-driven; it’s where I can show the biggest gap. In general, 70% of visitors abandon their baskets. [20:26.3] In WhatsApp we recover an extra 15% of abandoned baskets. So you do 70 times 15, times your average basket, times your number of visitors. If your average basket is €70 and you have 10,000 visitors a month, that’s roughly €73k in revenue you’re not recovering via WhatsApp because you didn’t bother to do a 20-minute call with us. [20:51.4] Which is a bit of a shame – that’s a 150x ROI. So there’s that element of lost revenue by not going now. The second risk is that you’ll also accumulate an “opt-in debt”, because a good WhatsApp strategy always starts with an opt-in collection strategy – and that takes time. There are levers to accelerate it; that’s our job too. [21:16.1] But the longer you delay that moment, the further behind you’ll fall compared with a brand that started long ago. So we often encourage brands, even if they don’t want to fully launch on WhatsApp right away, at least to put in place opt-in collection levers to gather phone numbers and mobile SMS and WhatsApp opt-ins. [21:36.1] OK, very clear. So there’s both an opportunity cost and, in the longer term, the loss of the first-mover advantage you mentioned earlier. If we look at WhatsApp as a channel in its own right, as a new lever, how would you advise integrating it into the overall CRM strategy? [21:59.9] You said it comes as a complement to other channels – so how does it all fit together? Yes. First of all, we built WAX so that the tool is as well integrated as possible with all CRM, CDP and CMS platforms: Klaviyo, Shopify, Splio, Adobe, Salesforce of course, and all the helpdesk tools as well. [22:21.5] Our job is first and foremost to support brands in designing a WhatsApp launch strategy. We’ll prioritise two or three opt-in collection levers. That might be a welcome pop-up, or “mail-to-WhatsApp” – [22:37.8] sending an email to your entire base in the form of a newsletter to announce the opening of the WhatsApp club. We collect around 3% of opt-ins from your email base into WhatsApp. That’s pretty good – if you do it three or four times, you start to have decent audience pools. We can also leverage your e-commerce platform. [22:56.7] So as mentioned: the pop-in, collecting opt-ins at checkout. There are lots of ways – even in retail, which we might cover in more detail later. Then, we orchestrate WhatsApp around email on use cases across the whole customer journey: [23:14.7] a welcome flow to bring back people who have dropped out of browsing; abandoned basket flows, where we usually prioritise WhatsApp over email because we think you need to strike while the iron’s hot with a channel that has 90% open rates and recovers a higher proportion. [23:34.3] Then the email goes out afterwards. Post-purchase, you can absolutely send both a WhatsApp and an email – staggering sends, of course – but the two are very complementary. However, I really wouldn’t advise sending both an SMS and a WhatsApp at the same time – that’s real duplication and creates fatigue. [23:55.4] So there are trade-offs we know how to make all along the customer journey between email, WhatsApp and SMS. And we say we’re “conversational design” experts – meaning we actually design the conversational sequences inside the flows that are most likely to convert your customer and collect data. [24:20.1] But we’ll also tell you exactly where to place the trigger. We can do a bit of A/B testing as well. That’s what’s fascinating about conversational: every brand has its own specifics. [24:36.1] Our passion is to unpick all that and find the combination that works best. Love it. You mentioned the welcome flow, you mentioned abandoned baskets too. What would you say are the main use cases you’re seeing today – and maybe the most effective ones for brands, if we had to summarise? [24:56.9] We should first distinguish between conversational campaigns – sort of marketing blasts – and automations. On one side you have campaigns, which are more one-off sends to bring energy and novelty to your promotional calendar – for sales, Black Friday, all the big events, collection launches. [25:25.4] We send campaigns that generate between 15 and 30x on WhatsApp, on volumes that are much smaller than the email bases we’ll target. It’s really performance on top of email and SMS. [25:41.1] Then, if we look at automations, there are two main types: marketing/commercial automations, and “utility” automations – what WhatsApp calls transactional. [25:58.7] On the commercial side, abandoned basket – we’ve discussed that a lot. Welcome flow, which is very powerful on WhatsApp because, beyond sending a discount code to re-engage abandoners, you can also send them content about the brand’s DNA: the founders’ vision, ambassadors, voice notes, etc. [26:19.9] All of that is really rich. That’s what drives strong re-engagement on a welcome flow. On abandoned baskets, the goal is to identify purchase barriers and resolve them inside WhatsApp. [26:37.2] Another interesting area is all the transactional post-purchase automations, like parcel tracking. And this will probably resonate with you: in post-purchase we also love sending satisfaction surveys via WhatsApp once the customer has received and tried the product. [26:57.3] We simply ask in WhatsApp: “Are you satisfied? Yes/No.” If the answer is yes, we then suggest leaving a review on Trustpilot – and we’ve raised some brands’ Trustpilot scores by more than one full point out of five. We can suggest referring a friend, or buying again – generating repeat purchases via WhatsApp, which is super powerful. [27:29.4] You can do that off the back of a one-off purchase, or if you’ve got a subscription model: once they’ve tried the product once, you can say “Look, I’ll give you 15% off and you can subscribe via WhatsApp.” [27:48.8] That works brilliantly. And for people who say they’re not satisfied, the value is in asking two or three questions to understand and qualify their dissatisfaction and see if we can redirect them to a product that’s more likely to suit them. So you can turn a bad experience into a repeat purchase, which is pretty clever. [28:07.7] Or if the person just isn’t satisfied because there’s been a problem – an unresolved support ticket – we can either solve it with our AI or raise a ticket in Gorgias, Zendesk, Crisp etc., so it’s handled by support agents in the usual way and then the answer comes back down into WhatsApp. [28:27.3] Those are the big flows we usually deploy for clients. We have a plan we call the 30-day plan for SME-type brands on Shopify. Within 30 days, the goal is to have deployed two or three opt-in levers, two ROI-driven marketing automations to prove the value of the channel, and a few transactional automations to show it delivers value too. [28:58.3] That way we have a balance between: we’ve got enough opt-ins to drive ROI at scale with marketing campaigns; we’ve delivered value and satisfaction for the end consumer; and, from the brand’s perspective, we’ve proved the product is highly ROI-positive – so usually by then they’re convinced. [29:15.5] The ROI is genuinely multi-dimensional – you can do so much through WhatsApp. It’s great to see all those use cases. You mentioned opt-ins a lot – that’s kind of step zero for getting started on WhatsApp. [29:34.5] Do you have ideas or examples of brands that have been quite creative in collecting opt-ins? Maison 123 – I mention them often because we did a case study with them recently and I think they really nailed the WhatsApp and conversational marketing challenge. [29:54.6] Especially Sophie Lepeu, who leads the team that deployed it. We put in place three opt-in levers. First, we capitalised on their CRM – the email base – with mail-to-WhatsApp as I explained earlier, so I won’t repeat it. [30:09.8] What’s slightly more original or different is that we also did transactional mail-to-WhatsApp: emails inside the customer journey – order confirmation emails – where we then offer to switch to WhatsApp. [30:29.7] Whereas originally we were doing more outbound newsletter-style pushes. So we really tested lots of things on mail-to-WhatsApp. We quickly collected around 10,000 opt-ins that way. We leveraged their e-commerce platform with checkout opt-ins, and the pop-in is being rolled out. [30:51.4] And above all, we took advantage of their store network. I think they have around 200 shops, if I’m not mistaken. So we set up QR codes in store to collect opt-ins. Thanks to all of that, in a few weeks we had around 20,000 opt-ins, which is a very solid base to start running WhatsApp campaigns. [31:08.6] Yes, definitely. And by channel type, in terms of volume, which would you say are the most effective? Maybe mail-to-WhatsApp? Yes, mail-to-WhatsApp is good because you get a big batch in one go. You run a campaign and you get 3% of your email base to opt-in on WhatsApp. [31:24.4] The levers that need to be implemented as early as possible – especially before Black Friday – are the checkout levers. Why? Because you’ll have a huge spike in traffic and conversions. [31:49.1] We capitalise on that by sending WhatsApp notifications to everyone who has purchased, giving them their tracking link and then offering, in a second step, to opt into the WhatsApp club. So you really need to make the most of that traffic spike to implement this lever, which is a great way to collect opt-ins over time, because it grows with your traffic and sales. [32:04.9] Stores are more structural, but for retailers it’s a fantastic experience: when you’re in a shop, you scan a code and you’re taken straight into WhatsApp, added to the base, qualified, etc. It’s pretty brilliant. [32:24.1] Another interesting strategy is click-to-WhatsApp ads. We mentioned them briefly earlier, but for Clarins – whom we work with – Stéphanie Cattarino’s team set up click-to-WhatsApp ads: a Facebook ad that redirects the user into WhatsApp. [32:42.7] There, we ask them to complete a skin diagnosis. So we’re not only collecting opt-ins, but also high-quality data with huge value for the brand, because we can better segment all the visitors that go through that flow. [32:57.3] Love it. So we’ve seen there are lots of use cases. What metrics do you track on WhatsApp – or that your clients track? You’ve mentioned LTV for subscription brands, churn reduction… What are all the potential outputs of these mechanics? [33:02.1] There are metrics that are specific to the WhatsApp API: open rates, i.e. how many people read your messages. One metric we track very closely is engagement rate – the number of people who click buttons or type in text after receiving a message. [33:20.3] And on those two – you said average open rate is around 90%. Below that is where you can look at your funnel and see where there might be leaks. And the second one was… Engagement rate. Engagement rate – you said around 60% on average? [33:36.4] Yes, yes – not on average. On really good campaigns we see around 60%; it can go higher. But 60% is a very strong engagement rate. On average you’re more like 30–40%. [33:55.4] It goes up on the very best campaigns, for the most engaged brands. Then you have click-through rates – people clicking on URLs that take them to an external link. On good campaigns, again, around 30%. [34:12.3] So compared with email, you’re ten times higher. Those are the metrics inherent to the WhatsApp API. Beyond that we track conversion rates and ROI. When we’re far enough along with a brand on a specific use case, we can try to estimate the LTV uplift. [34:36.7] But that’s not always easy. 900.care is one of the clients we’ve worked with the longest, so we did the exercise there. That’s the general idea: revenue generated, beyond the more classic conversational metrics like opens, clicks, etc. [34:56.4] Have you seen any mistakes brands make when using WhatsApp? I imagine you’ve seen a few. We’ve got three years’ worth of experience and we’ve launched 500 brands, so yes, we’ve tripped up a fair few times. [35:15.5] That’s what lets us be the leaders in conversational in Europe today. The main mistakes: trying to send campaigns on cold bases too quickly, before warming up the account. That’s why we created the 30-day plan. [35:32.6] It also lets you warm up your account because, on WhatsApp, you have a quality score, like an email deliverability score but much more sensitive. You also have sending limits linked to your quality score. You start with 1,000 conversations a day, then you unlock the next threshold of 10,000, then 100,000, then unlimited. [35:51.0] So you really need to go “slow and steady” to unlock those volumes. That’s the first pitfall: pushing too hard, too fast. The other is brands that fail to prioritise WhatsApp in their roadmap and CRM strategy. [36:18.0] That’s also why there are quite a few self-serve tools – competitors of ours that don’t really support their clients – and those clients get poor results. Because WhatsApp is still an emerging channel. It won’t represent 90% of your performance for a long time – even if I’m sure we’ll get there 🙂 [36:40.1] But if you don’t have CSMs or an agency we’ve trained to say, “You need to do this, or we’ll do it for you at the start to get you going”, then the risk is that it never gets prioritised. So there’s the “too much” pitfall and the “not enough” pitfall – and we try to sit in the middle. [36:59.6] There’s something you mentioned a lot: segmentation. Do you have your own segmentation, or do you plug into existing segments via your integrations? And what kind of segments do you suggest targeting first? [37:18.6] Say you’ve just launched your account and a brand listening wants to start a WhatsApp strategy tomorrow – if we look at the roadmap, which are the first segments to target to warm up the account? What would you advise? [37:34.7] Very good question. We can import segments created in Splio, Klaviyo, any other platform via integration, and then we refine them in WAX using filters specific to conversational. [37:51.2] We focus on the 20% of your customers who generate 60% of your revenue. We’ve created audiences of loyal customers and warm prospects. That’s often, if you can identify them, the 20% who generate 60% of your revenue. [38:08.4] In WhatsApp, we work that audience to bring the figure up to 65, 70, 75%. That’s roughly the logic. Then it varies a lot depending on the use case. But for campaigns, you really start with the core and then you can widen and start doing volume. [38:29.8] OK, super interesting. Any other deliverability tips? I don’t know how many people send cold emails to their customers, but there are lots of tools like Lemlist with Lemwarm to warm up your email address. [38:47.5] Is it a similar logic on WhatsApp? Are there tricks, beyond what you’ve mentioned, to avoid ending up in spam? Honestly, the room for manoeuvre is very small on WhatsApp. There’s no Mailreach-style solution to artificially warm up your account. [39:12.0] Unfortunately, you can’t cheat – I could sense the hacker instinct there! But no, we can’t. The best way is to target audiences that will click on your buttons. And you might as well do that on bases that will generate ROI. [39:30.3] Definitely. So if we had to summarise everything into three best practices – between the advice you’ve given on flows and campaigns, and the errors to avoid – what would your three key best practices be? [39:46.7] First one, very linked to what we’ve just said: WhatsApp is not a mass-marketing channel. The idea is to target well – as we said, segment carefully – but above all to create a sense of belonging and exclusivity. If you can create a WhatsApp club and give access to early-bird offers, exclusive sales, store openings, etc., [40:10.3] that’s exactly the confidential space people are looking for, and it’s a rich conversational space if you exploit it properly. So I’d say first piece of advice: create a sense of belonging for your base on WhatsApp. [40:27.3] Second piece of advice: wherever possible, personify your brand. WhatsApp is an opportunity to give it a voice, to infuse it with extra soul – to embody it through the founders, ambassadors, partners for more established brands. [40:46.0] The goal is to share privileged content, because you have photos, video, voice notes, text – all unlimited. If you don’t really take advantage of this whole conversational space, you’re missing out – and that’s a bit of a shame. [41:05.8] And users on WhatsApp expect something extra, something stronger. Third piece of advice: really embrace conversational data. We’ve talked about it a lot, but WhatsApp is an opportunity to unlock huge amounts of conversational data that help you better qualify, better convert, better retain and unblock support situations. [41:32.8] You really have to go all-in on that to get the most out of the platform. That makes me want to ask you about personalisation. It’s kind of the name of the game now. There are more and more channels, more and more noise. [41:48.5] Brands really need to cut through that noise and stand out with new channels like WhatsApp. And it’s true that conversational data plus today’s technology makes it possible to build truly bespoke journeys. [42:06.0] How do you see the impact of AI combined with all the conversational data you can collect via WhatsApp on personalisation? What we’re already doing is using all this data unlocked by AI to power product recommendations. [42:26.4] That’s hugely powerful. We now have an AI running mainly for brands using Shopify, which can qualify a user’s buying preferences by asking a few questions. Then we push a product catalogue in WhatsApp that matches all those criteria. [42:46.0] It’s a structured catalogue, in carousel form – it’s brilliant. The uplift in conversion is almost 50% versus conversations that used to be handled either by automated flows (trees) or by humans – where you quickly see you’re overwhelmed by the number of conversations to manage. [43:09.5] So that’s the first part: product recommendation – hyper-personalisation to keep increasing the relevance of what we offer. The other way we use AI today is on FAQ-type issues. [43:32.6] Because when we open up a conversational space, we inevitably see an increase in support tickets as well – since we’re integrated with Zendesk, Crisp, Gorgias, etc. There, what we’ve done with AI is cut by around 75% the number of conversations that need manual handling. [43:52.5] Which allows your support agents to focus on conversations where there’s real value at stake – because there’s a sale behind it, or a genuinely technical problem to solve for a particular client. OK, brilliant. [44:08.0] And can you then feed this personalisation data back into segments in Klaviyo, Gorgias, Splio or others? We write it back as attributes. For now, they’re stored and mostly used within our own system, but with V2 of our integrations with those platforms, they’ll be synced upstream too. We’re already doing it for conversational, automations and AI. It’ll be fully bi-directional very soon. [44:41.6] OK. So, in a month’s time – actually in a few days, it’s the end of October – it’ll be BFCM, the period everyone in the ecosystem waits for. First, is it too late to get started now? If not, what steps should a brand take today to launch on WhatsApp? [45:02.3] It’s absolutely not too late. A little anecdote: two years ago, on the eve of Black Friday, Musc Intime – who had started working with one of our competitors – had their Meta Business Manager blocked. [45:19.9] We took it over, unblocked it the day before Black Friday, and they sent almost 350,000 conversations across November and December, generating pretty crazy performance – almost 200x on some campaigns. [45:36.0] So it’s definitely not too late. We’ll help you collect opt-ins, set up automations (marketing – abandoned basket, welcome flow – and transactional – order confirmation, etc.) to collect opt-ins too, as I mentioned. We’ll capitalise on the traffic spike to add as many people as possible to your database via that route. So up to the eve of Black Friday, we can launch accounts – no problem. [46:14.3] And if I had to give a little action plan for a brand launching on WhatsApp during the festive period, one month before Black Friday: first, check the big opt-in levers are live – pop-in, mail-to-WhatsApp, checkout opt-in. [46:55.6] Then check that automations are deployed – both marketing and utility. For the promotional calendar and marketing campaigns, what we’d recommend is starting to run teaser campaigns about one or two weeks before Black Friday. [47:10.7] That could be quizzes to guess what discounts will be applied for Black Friday, or pre-basket prep – letting people prepare their basket in advance so they only have to click a button when the offer goes live. [47:31.2] Basically, really nurture your WhatsApp audiences in the run-up, because they’ll perform incredibly well during Black Friday week. On the day, open the floodgates and send campaigns to as many people as possible who have opted into WhatsApp – it’s really time to go big. [47:57.3] We recommend sending campaigns between 8 and 10 in the morning. And of course, orchestrate all that with email. All Black Friday week, keep animating with flash quizzes, flash offers, options for people who have already ordered to add another product to their order, etc. [48:14.3] There are loads of use cases to deploy. Also capitalise on Cyber Monday and last-chance offers to create FOMO and say, “This is your last chance to buy.” [48:34.0] And it’s really important to have automations in place to drive maximum repeat purchases after Black Friday. That includes everything we discussed earlier around post-purchase: besides order confirmation, NPS-type flows – [48:50.4] “Were you satisfied with the product and experience? Yes? If yes, refer a friend, buy again, leave a review. If not, how can we help? Would you like to try this product instead?” Everything we discussed earlier. [49:15.1] That’s crucial because we see Black Friday as a kickstarter. You’re putting fuel in the machine – it’ll help you build the database, collect opt-ins and generate ROI. But what’s even more important is converting and retaining those audiences afterwards with tailored content over the longer term. [49:35.4] You used a word I have to pick up on: loyalty. For those who don’t know, Wax and Loyoly are integrated technically. One thing I thought of earlier, around opt-ins, was offering loyalty points for joining the WhatsApp club. [49:55.2] That’s another lever. Then we can reuse all that data – VIP tiers, for example: my Gold customers will get this offer, others get different ones. Have you seen other good practices among our mutual clients around using the loyalty programme afterwards? [50:20.4] Yes – loyalty programmes work really well, and we’re delighted to have built this integration with you. Our mutual clients are very happy too. I presented a case – Maison Berger – at Meta three or four weeks ago, where we reminded customers about different benefits when they moved up a tier. [50:36.2] There was also a notification about points expiry, and everything related to referral on WhatsApp. Because in WhatsApp you can copy and forward a message to a group with the little arrow. [50:57.8] And since that’s where all your family and friends groups are, it’s perfect. We send a ready-to-use text for families, and behind that, we get lots of referrals. The integration works really well and we’re delighted with it at WAX. [51:15.1] It’s fascinating to see how you can combine all these levers with the power of WhatsApp as a conversational channel. So if we zoom out a bit: if people listening had to remember just one piece of advice – not just on WhatsApp, but in general – for a brand that’s starting out, is there anything you’ve seen across your 500 clients that you think they could replicate? [51:33.7] I have the feeling that brands that manage to put emotion into their customer journey – into how they communicate, into everything, really – are the ones that stand out. [51:50.5] In the store experience – those are the brands that differentiate themselves. Maison 123 springs to mind, who have done that really well and executed a great pivot. It’s a brand that was declining until a new MD took over in 2020, [52:16.0] who bet everything on injecting emotion at every level of Maison 123’s strategy. I think that if big retail brands with 200 stores can reinvent themselves and bring in emotion, then pure-player e-commerce brands on Shopify, built around founders, should definitely be able to do the same. [52:37.8] It comes back to embodying your brand and giving it a voice – whether in WhatsApp, RCS, Messenger, whatever. Any conversational channel is the perfect opportunity to deploy that extra emotional layer that will make the difference. [52:53.5] Love it – perfect way to wrap up. Thank you so much, Guillaume, for joining us on the podcast – it was a pleasure. Thank you – really happy to have been invited.
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