Nearly every consumer brand operating in India has a WhatsApp Business number by now. Almost all of them use it the same way: collect a number at checkout, then broadcast a discount code to that number every few days until the customer blocks it. The channel with the highest open rate in Indian marketing - north of 90% by most estimates, against single digits for email - gets treated like the least valuable one.
The channel earns trust differently than every other one
A WhatsApp number lives in the same inbox as a customer’s family, their doctor, their landlord. Getting added there is not neutral the way an email address is - it’s closer to being let into someone’s actual life. Brands that treat that access as a coupon-delivery pipe are spending a genuinely rare kind of trust on the least interesting thing they could say. The open rate stays high because the channel itself is intimate. It won’t stay that way if every message sent through it is a discount.
What the brands using it well are actually sending
Order updates that read like a person wrote them, not a shipping API. A founder or a real support person answering a question in the same thread a customer used to complain, visibly, without routing it into a ticket system. A restock notice for the one item a specific customer asked about, sent to them and not broadcast to the full list. None of that is a growth hack. It’s customer service and relationship-building happening in the channel where Indian consumers already spend their attention, instead of being ported over to email or app notifications nobody opens.
The discount habit is a self-inflicted wound
Every broadcast that’s purely promotional trains the recipient to open the message expecting a sale, and to stop opening it the moment the sales stop being interesting enough. That’s the same dynamic that killed email marketing’s credibility a decade ago, arriving faster this time because WhatsApp had further to fall from. A brand that saves the broadcast list for messages actually worth a notification - a real restock, a real answer, a real update - keeps the open rate that made the channel valuable in the first place.
The founders getting this right are treating a phone number like a relationship
Not a funnel stage. The upside isn’t a single campaign’s conversion rate - it’s a channel that keeps working for years because it was never burned down chasing this quarter’s number. Most founders will burn it down anyway, because the discount code is easier to ship than the judgment call about what’s actually worth a message.