Turning shoppers into subscribers

Kapten & Son is an innovative and data-driven company that's always looking for new ways to improve the customer experience.

Special discounts are very popular amongst its customer base, but it was looking for a way to communicate these in a more personal and effective manner.

It wanted to test WhatsApp as a potential long-term revenue driver in good time for Black Friday. If successful, it would use WhatsApp for its Black Friday campaigns and use this as a chance to keep growing its audience.

Kapten & Son wanted to prove the value of WhatsApp for its business: through higher open rates and click-through-rates, and a positive ROI.

Once this was proven, it wanted to use Black Friday to grow its WhatsApp audience – with the aim of collecting 20k opt-ins using Black Friday deals.

The brand proved that WhatsApp is a powerful sales channel. In its first WhatsApp flash sale, it achieved 92x ROI and revenue per recipient (RPR) of €14.85. And it proved to be an effective way of gaining future customers, gaining 2,000 WhatsApp opt-ins in the first 48 hours.

Impressed with the performance of WhatsApp and charles, the stage was set for Black Friday. Kapten & Son sent WhatsApp deals through charles' "Campaigns" tool and advertised the deals on its website.

This event was used as an opportunity to grow its WhatsApp audience for the future. As Jana Fries, CRM Manager explains: “For us, Black Friday was about collecting opt-ins, not just making sales. This is because once we have more WhatsApp subscribers, they're there for the long-term and we're in a stronger position to grow revenue in the future."

And it successfully met its goal of 20k WhatsApp subscribers by Black Friday.

"We've been really happy with the charles platform," says Jana, "It's easy to use, offers useful tracking and analytics, and I can see WhatsApp growing to become our favorite channel – for both sales and marketing."