Businesses can now share additional information and create two-way customer conversations on the world’s most popular messaging platform

Sinch AB (publ), a global leader in cloud communications for mobile customer engagement, today announced that brands can now use the Sinch Conversation API to share additional information, such as back-in-stock updates, product recommendations, and more with opted-in WhatsApp users in applicable regions.

WhatsApp, the messaging platform used by 2 billion people worldwide, recently said how it is improving the way businesses can communicate with their customers and will support more types of messages people opt-in to receive, which will make it easier to follow up with customers outside of a 24-hour window.

But developing, integrating and orchestrating conversation interactions, can be challenging and complex for businesses. With Sinch’s longstanding WhatsApp business API expertise combined with its powerful Conversation API, brands can now confidently build and scale rich, engaging conversations with WhatsApp users and send billions of customized messages through the app.

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Sinch’s Conversation API is a single, unique API through which businesses can communicate with people over multiple mobile channels such as Instagram, Facebook Messenger, SMS, MMS, RCS and WhatsApp.

“Today, people expect to reach brands on whatever social or mobile channel they use. WhatsApp is a hugely popular channel and now businesses can directly engage in-app with users in a new way, sharing additional kinds of information and campaigns,” said Eduardo Henrique, Sinch’s Chief Business Development Officer. “Sinch had early access to these features and has led in this channel, handling high volumes of messages on behalf of customers, especially at key times like Black Friday. Brands seeking to use WhatsApp to connect with their customers can be confident that Sinch can deliver the scale, security and quality needed, while eliminating complexity.”

iFood, a Brazilian food delivery platform that hosts more than 1.4 million customer conversations per year, is one of the first companies to leverage Sinch’s WhatsApp solution. As iFood looked to improve its entire delivery chain, the company leveraged Sinch and WhatsApp to create conversations designed to sign up more restaurants, register new delivery staff and improve sales and customer service. iFood achieved 38x (38 times) more sales conversions on WhatsApp than on other channels with the same marketing campaign.

To support companies as they begin developing content and high-quality campaigns for WhatsApp, Sinch is offering tools including a “Warm Up” program which:

• Ensures messages always follow the WhatsApp Business Policy.
• Allows the sending of messages only to users who have accepted to receive messages from your company or have opted to interact with the brand on WhatsApp for less than four months.
• Creates highly personalized, useful messages for users while eliminating any vague or introductory welcome messages.
• Prevents the sending of multiple messages a day to customers, keeping all communication informative and concise.

WhatsApp is supporting more types of messages in Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and the United States.

According to WhatsApp, the company wants to ensure users have a valuable experience when messaging with businesses on WhatsApp. People are always in control and can block/report a business at any time.

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