Bringing WhatsApp and Klaviyo together (via charles) for more powerful marketing

For companies that are slowly growing out of the startup phase, scaling their business becomes an important challenge to face. Duschbrocken is no exception. As a brand that wants to be close to their fans using WhatsApp, handling a channel this personal became a pain point without a professional tool and tailored support. 

At Duschbrocken the advantages of WhatsApp Business were already known for the CRM department. They used the free WhatsApp Business app using a company smartphone and carried out their sendouts manually. Edwin Merk, CRM Manager at Duschbrocken and responsible for email and retention marketing describes the process before they decided to look for a professional solution:

"We did it all by hand. We created multiple broadcast lists with targeted subscribers and combined them for every sendout using a workaround. It was a huge pain for our agents working with WhatsApp."

Eventually, the effort that went into their campaigns was too much and Duschbrocken decided to look for a tool that would help smooth out the process and save time and capacities. Luckily, the two founders of the brand, Christoph and Johannes met with charles' team at the OMR and after calculating their potential benefits, decided to give a chance of working with a Business Solution Provider.

The first campaign they tested was an all-time classic for Germany: the 2023 Advent Calendar campaign. (Launched during Christmas time when the Advent days kicked off). 

To ensure that the advent calendar campaign would be successful, Duschbrocken followed a combined strategy that leveraged email sendouts as well as WhatsApp follow-ups. The strategy: only users that either did not receive an email, did not open it or did not buy would get contacted via WhatsApp.

The advent calendar itself was a product with an exceptionally high average order value (AOV) with over 100€. Keep in mind that the average AOV for Duschbrocken is around 30€, even lower for first-time customers. Also, the targeted customers were those, that were already familiar with the brand. Therefore, using email and WhatsApp as communication channels made sense.

Duschbrocken followed the perfect strategy of being "not too pushy or salesy", according to Edwin. "We didn't want to make the sales aspect our focus but rather community-building. We have very high retention rate and we want to avoid at all cost nagging our customers. We try to be restrained."

Their approach for the advent calendar campaign "wasn't rocket science", Edwin says. It started on Klayivo where they segmented the relevant customer groups. After the first sendout, the insights were used to determine, which of the recipients were WhatsApp subscribers and did not receive or open the email. Also - thanks to the Shopify integration - Edwin and his team were able to retrieve the information of all the WhatsApp subscribers recipients who opened the email but did not end up buying the calendar.

These subscribers and the ones that had not opted in to receive emails (around 60% of all WhatsApp subscribers) were being targeted two days later with a WhatsApp sendout via Campaigns.

With this approach the brand wanted to make sure not to contact any of the customers redundantly. "Why would someone that just bought the calendar want to be contacted again via WhatsApp? These kinds of things lead to negative customer experience."

A very nice, creative gimmick of the advent calendar showed the versatility of WhatsApp as a communication channel: on every Sunday, exit games were announced! With a book full of puzzles and riddles, that was delivered inside the calendar, Edwin and his team created a gamified customer experience that was not only a lot of fun but also integrated with WhatsApp as part of the experience.

With 15 detailled flows, Edwin managed to put together a "scavenger hunt" that "starts offline and ends online, in our WhatsApp channel". "This way we could also gain some subscribers for WhatsApp through the advent calendar."

As it turned out, Edwin and his team weren't too far off with their personal, retention-focused approach for the advent calendar campaign, as we can see from the numbers.

The total costs of the WhatsApp campaign was around 1.100 Euros. With 11.000 targeted customers and 35.000 Euros in revenue, the revenue per recipient was outstanding at €3.40. 

The reasons for the financial success of the campaign lie in the nature of the product. High AOV which focused interestingly for loyal customers rather than first time buyers. WhatsApp is the perfect channel to connect with fans of the brand who are interested in the product, as it's the closest option available for any marketer who want to get closer to their customers and drive retention.

The results of the campaign on Duschbrocken's charles Dashboard

Beyond the financial results, a big part of the success hides behind less measurable benefits such as reduced workload to set up the campaign and freed time of the team to focus on other tasks. Edwin mentioned a curiosity that emerged amongst the co-workers not directly involved with charles after noticing the WhatsApp activity and the success. 

In addition, on the customer side, he could observe that the features and the improved user experience did not go unnoticed and as the replies and the communication with the brand got faster and smoother, the customer satisfaction profits followed right after.