WhatsApp marketing: offers and coupons customers act on
Endelir sends offers, discounts and coupon campaigns on WhatsApp to customers who opted in, as approved marketing templates with one clear action, and brings the replies into your inbox. An offer on WhatsApp arrives next to messages from someone's family, so it has to be worth the interruption. Endelir sends your promotion as an approved Marketing template to a group of customers who have agreed to hear from you, and every reply lands in the inbox your team already works from.
The offer goes out and then nothing comes back
Most promotions are built the wrong way round. Someone decides on a discount, writes it into a poster, and pushes it at whoever is on the list. There is no record of who agreed to receive it, no way to tell a regular customer from someone who bought once two years ago, and no place for an answer to go.
The result is a message that costs money to send, annoys the people it reaches, and produces a handful of replies that nobody follows up because they arrived on a phone at the counter. The offer was not the problem. The campaign around it was.
One offer, one audience, one thing to do next
In Endelir a promotion is a campaign: an approved Marketing template, a contact group you have built, and a time to send. Before each message goes out the software checks that contact — anyone who has opted out is excluded, and a Marketing template is refused for a contact with no recorded marketing consent. That check is not advice printed on a help page; it happens on every send.
The message itself carries the offer. A template can have an image, video or document at the top, wording that fills in from each contact's own record, a button that opens a page on your site, and a button that copies a code. When someone replies, the conversation opens in the shared inbox with a name against it, so the answer reaches a person instead of a group chat.
How a promotion is built
- 1 Decide what the campaign is for A weekday table filled, a slow line cleared, a membership renewed. One commercial objective, written down before anything else.
- 2 Build the audience The audience is a contact group. You put contacts into one when you import them, or by selecting them in the contact list and assigning the group. There is no facility for pasting in a list of numbers, and that is deliberate.
- 3 Choose an approved Marketing template Templates are created in your WhatsApp Business account, reviewed by Meta, and synced into Endelir with their category and status. Only an approved one can be sent.
- 4 Fill in the offer The picture, the wording, the expiry date, the code, and the link behind the button. Fields in the template can be filled from each contact's record rather than typed once for everyone.
- 5 Schedule it Send now, or pick a date and time in your own timezone. A campaign that has not started can still be deleted.
- 6 Endelir checks each contact and sends Opted-out contacts are dropped. A contact with no recorded marketing consent is refused for that template. The rest are queued and sent.
- 7 Replies come to your team Answers arrive in the shared inbox as ordinary conversations, and the campaign report shows what was delivered, read and failed.
What this looks like in practice
A salon wants to fill its quiet Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. It has a group of clients who ticked the marketing box when they last visited, so that group becomes the audience. The template carries a photograph, the offer, the date it ends, and a button that copies a short code the front desk recognises.
The campaign goes out on Sunday evening. Replies asking for a time open in the inbox, where whoever is on reception picks one up and can assign it to a stylist. Anyone who replies stop is marked as opted out and dropped from the next campaign automatically, without anyone editing a spreadsheet.
What can happen next
Works across businesses
What to know before you send one
A discount is a Marketing message, and it stays a Marketing message when it is sent to someone who has bought from you before. "Your order has shipped" is a service update. "Your order has shipped, and here is 20% off your next one" is a promotion with a service update attached to it. Keep the two apart, use the right template category for each, and do not dress an offer up as a receipt.
Business-initiated messaging is permission-based. Endelir will not send a Marketing template to a contact without recorded marketing consent, and it drops anyone who has opted out. Your part is to collect that permission honestly and keep a record of it. Templates are reviewed by Meta before they can be used, and that decision is Meta's, not ours — write the offer clearly, state the conditions, and do not manufacture urgency that is not real.
Frequency is a judgement, not a setting. A restaurant with a weekly special and a property developer are not on the same clock. Watch the opt-outs after each campaign; they are the clearest signal you have that a list is being asked for too much. How many campaigns you can run in a month depends on your plan, and the software enforces that count exactly — the limits are on the pricing page.
What to measure
- Delivered and read counts for each campaign, which Endelir reports as it sends
- Failed sends, and the reason each one failed
- Replies per campaign, and how many reached a named person
- Enquiries, bookings or orders your team recorded off the back of the campaign
- Opt-outs in the days after each send
- Which offer, and which audience, produced the most replies
Related
Questions people ask
Can I send discount coupons to customers on WhatsApp?
Yes, to customers who have given you permission to send them marketing. The coupon is part of an approved Marketing template: the code can sit in the message wording, or behind a button that copies it to the customer's clipboard. You supply the code. Endelir does not generate codes, does not check whether one has already been used, and does not know when it is redeemed — that stays with your till, your booking system or your shop. Before each message is sent, Endelir checks that contact for recorded marketing consent and for an opt-out, and skips anyone who fails either check.
Can I send a different coupon to different customer segments?
Yes. A campaign goes to one contact group, so a different offer for a different group is a separate campaign — recent customers, higher-value customers, people at one branch, people who have not bought in a year. You build each group yourself, when you import contacts or by selecting them in the list and assigning the group. Nothing fills a group on its own, so an offer for one city reaches that city only if you put those customers in that group. Fields inside the template are filled from each contact's own record, including custom fields you have defined yourself, so the name or the branch changes per person within a single campaign. Match the offer to the reason the group exists; a loyalty offer sent to strangers reads as a mistake.
Can a WhatsApp promotion contain an image, link or coupon code?
Yes, if the template you have had approved contains those parts. Endelir supports a template with an image, video or document at the top, wording with fields that fill in per contact, a button that opens a URL on your site, and a button that copies a code. You choose the picture and the values when you build the campaign. What you cannot do is add a component the approved template does not have — the structure is fixed at approval time, and only the values inside it change.
Are WhatsApp discount messages Marketing or Utility?
Marketing. An offer does not become a service message because the person has bought from you before. "Your appointment is tomorrow at 11" is a service message. "Book another treatment this month and save" is a promotion, and it needs a Marketing template and recorded consent. Endelir treats the category on the template as the deciding fact: a template whose category is Marketing is refused for any contact without marketing consent, whatever the wording says. Mixing the two into one message so it travels as a service update is against WhatsApp's rules and is not something we will help you do.
How often should I send promotions?
There is no number that suits every business. A restaurant with a weekly special and a developer selling apartments are not sending at the same rhythm. The useful test is whether the person receiving it would think the message was worth reading. Send when you have a real reason, say what it is, and watch the opt-outs afterwards — a rise in people asking to stop is the clearest evidence you have that the list is being used too hard. Your plan also caps how many campaigns you can run in a month, which is a floor on restraint rather than a substitute for it.
Can customers unsubscribe from promotional messages?
Yes, and it is automatic. A reply of stop, unsubscribe, cancel, end or quit marks that contact as opted out, records a marketing suppression against them, and halts any follow-up already queued for them. From then on they are excluded from Marketing campaigns without anyone having to remember. They can still write to you and you can still answer them — an opt-out ends the promotions, not the relationship. Your team can also set the opt-out by hand for someone who asks over the phone or at the counter.
Can I track whether a coupon campaign resulted in sales?
Not on its own. Endelir shows you what happened on WhatsApp: how many messages were sent, delivered, read and failed, and every reply that came back. It cannot see your till or your checkout, so it cannot tell you that a particular sale came from a particular campaign. Two things close that gap. Your team can record the outcome on the contact while the conversation is open. And your own systems can write what they know onto the contact through the API, so the order sits on the record the next person opens with the chat. We would rather say this plainly than publish a revenue figure the software cannot stand behind.
Turn your next promotion into a customer conversation.
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