How to Use WhatsApp for Affiliate Marketing in 2025?

In the competitive market of today, you need to make sure you get all the advantages that you can find to stay ahead of your competition. Having a personalized marketing strategy and tailored offers can be a huge help in getting more sales. 

One of the ways that works and has shown actual results is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a tried and tested initiative that allows you to generate additional revenue or hit your objectives. Now imagine if you can use WhatsApp for that. 

WhatsApp is a great platform due to its massive user base of around 3 billion and a global reach in over 180 countries, allowing you to get conversions more effectively. Just think how well you can elevate your outreach and bottom line by using WhatsApp as a channel for your affiliate marketing?

That being said, let’s take a look at how to use WhatsApp for running affiliate marketing campaigns and how to set them up for an additional stream of revenue for your business, 

What is WhatsApp affiliate marketing?

As implied by the name, WhatsApp affiliate marketing involves using WhatsApp as a channel to reach out to potential customers and offering tailored marketing suggestions having a higher chance of getting conversions than a cold outreach. 

By taking advantage of the customizability offered by WhatsApp Business API, you can run affiliate marketing campaigns to provide product recommendations and a discount if a prospect buys a product using your link or message. 

On top of that, using the real-time conversational functionality of WhatsApp, you can grab attention and compel leads to think to complete a purchase immediately after reaching out to them. This way, your business can differentiate itself from the other affiliate marketing avenues, as they are mostly more passive in their approach.

Why should you consider WhatsApp for your affiliate marketing campaigns?

Having a robust and dynamic communication channel like WhatsApp allows you to manage all the touchpoints of your affiliate marketing efforts from a single place. That being said, after learning about what WhatsApp affiliate marketing is, let’s explore some of the advantages of utilizing WhatsApp for your affiliate marketing efforts. 

Better customer engagement

Running affiliate marketing initiatives across WhatsApp allows you to leverage its ease-of-use capabilities to enhance customer engagement. Customizing your marketing messages and offering exciting incentives to hit your sales goals while also providing value to your customers. 

Furthermore, since WhatsApp is a communication app at heart, you can interact with potential customers in a one-on-one setting, enabling you to convince them or address any sales objections for seamless conversion. This kind of engagement helps you establish credibility and improve the chances of customers interacting with your messages, thereby resulting in more sales.

Unified marketing channel

Unlike other channels that need integrations with external apps for handling operations or using multiple platforms to manage all the touchpoints, WhatsApp is a unified platform that lets you keep track of everything from a single location. 

For example, you can acquire leads with WhatsApp outreach, nurture them with automated messages, and complete transactions with WhatsApp Payments. Using these features, you can improve the efficiency of your efforts and save money on deploying multiple tools to achieve the same results. 

Tailored suggestions

No one wants to receive random marketing messages that have nothing to do with their past purchases or interests. Also, sending irrelevant marketing messages continuously is a sure-shot way of getting banned on WhatsApp. 

So, making sure you personalize your messages is a great way to not only ensure relevance but also increase engagement. By utilizing past customer data and creating a WhatsApp CRM for a smooth transition, you can easily craft tailored affiliate marketing messages based on customer preferences and requirements. 

Streamlined customer assistance

Affiliate marketing involves more than just sending messages with your links and hoping that customers will click on them for you to generate revenue. 

In most cases, you will have to talk with a potential customer and help them move across the stages of the pipeline. What better way to do that than using WhatsApp? With WhatsApp’s automation functionality, you can set up chatbots to automate customer support and resolve common inquiries without requiring human intervention. 

And for some reason, if the chatbot can’t handle a query, it can escalate the issue to the next tier by redirecting it to a support rep. 

Performance tracking and monitoring

The traditional way of promoting affiliate marketing can only let you track the click and conversion rates. However, with WhatsApp, you can track numerous metrics like engagement, click-through, conversion, and drop-off.

Having a complete idea about how well your affiliate marketing campaigns are going and where you need to put in more effort will allow you to optimize your initiatives to drive maximum ROI. 

How to run affiliate marketing campaigns on WhatsApp?

After learning about what WhatsApp affiliate marketing is and the advantages of using WhatsApp as a communication channel, now it’s time to take a look at how to kick-start your affiliate marketing with the help of WhatsApp Business API. 

The WhatsApp API lets you make the most of WhatsApp’s capabilities, ensuring you connect with prospects at the right time and provide the required product details to let them make an informed decision. Having said that, below are the steps to let you get started. 

Setting up the WhatsApp Business API

To start with the affiliate marketing campaign initiatives over WhatsApp, you first need to sign up for the WhatsApp Business API. Although you can also make do with the WhatsApp Business app, if you want to utilize all the marketing features of WhatsApp, it would be better to get the API instead. 

To learn more about the in-depth process of getting your WhatsApp Business API up and running, here is a step-by-step guide to help you with that.

Moreover, you also need a WhatsApp API provider that can serve as a front end since the API doesn’t have one. So, for that purpose, I suggest you check out Zixflow. 

Zixflow is a multichannel platform with support across WhatsApp, RCS, email, and SMS, allowing you to adopt other channels into your affiliate marketing. With our solution, you can manage all the stages of your WhatsApp affiliate marketing from a unified application. 

For example, you can leverage Zixflow to save customer data in its native CRM, run affiliate marketing campaigns with a code-free campaign editor, automate your outreach to ensure proper lead nurturing and send tailored product catalogs to boost the likelihood of converting more prospects. 

Take a look at this video to see Zixflow in action and it can be a great platform to run your affiliate marketing campaigns on WhatsApp.

Designing tailored marketing messages to grab attention

As I mentioned before, it is crucial to personalize your affiliate marketing to meet the needs of your customers. Since affiliate marketing messages should first and foremost focus on offering benefits rather than selling a product, it is all the more reason to customize them based on customer preferences. 

If you use WhatsApp API, you can predesign eye-catching templates that contain product images, descriptions, and an action-driving CTA to encourage prospective customers to make a purchasing decision. 

So, how to create these messaging templates? With Zixflow! 

Zixflow’s WhatsApp template editor allows you to create marketing, utility, and authentication WhatsApp templates to engage customers. The editor is user-friendly in nature and doesn't require technical expertise from your end to craft messages. 

By filling in the information and content of your template, you can effectively build messages that resonate with your target audience and add value to their purchases. 

Make use of WhatsApp Broadcasts

WhatsApp enables you to send bulk messages via its WhatsApp Broadcast feature to engage with hundreds of prospects at once. Another great advantage of WhatsApp Broadcast is that you can segment your audience into smaller groups based on their behavior or the type of products you want to promote. Having smaller, more targeted groups allows you to better engage them with highly personalized offers. 

If you are using the WhatsApp Business app, you can create Broadcast lists directly within the app. On the other hand, for WhatsApp API, Zixflow already comes with a native CRM where you can create custom marketing lists that revolve around specific situations that go beyond affiliate marketing. 

Taking advantage of the automation to optimize nurturing and support

The aspect that particularly differentiates WhatsApp from the other is its automation capability. Although affiliate marketing is kind of a passive income source, if you want to actively use it to drive sales, then WhatsApp automation is one of the best ways to do that. 

WhatsApp messages can be automated in two ways:

• Sending messages at a predetermined time
• Setting up a chatbot to handle incoming queries

The first way allows you to stay in touch with prospects by sending timely reminders or follow-ups, ensuring prospects keep on moving through the stages of the pipeline and finally, finish the task. 

The second option is more of a support choice to let you manage issues or provide relevant information about your offerings to prospects. This chatbot can send useful details using your knowledge base and help articles to resolve problems. 

That being said, you can take care of both of these options with our visual automation builder, Flows. With Flows, you can set up a chatbot by selecting the trigger conditions and deciding the next course of action it should take. 

For example, when a prospect opts in to receive marketing messages or signs up to your platform, you can send a welcome WhatsApp message to them, thanking them for signing up and explaining the next steps they have to take. 

In addition to that, if you want to follow up with leads that are currently in the pipeline, you can make use of sales cadences to automatically reach out, moving them to the next stage effortlessly.

Sending exciting offers/ incentives for your campaign

Affiliate marketing, by nature, works because the customers get some benefits for using your link or message to make a purchase. So, to further enhance this benefit, you can offer enticing rewards to encourage prospects to consider completing a purchase. 

For instance, you can provide your customers with flat-out discounts, exclusive offers like cashback, free shipping, free trials, or access to otherwise gated resources. These kinds of tailored incentives build a sense of trust between you and the affiliate, resulting in a greater chance of conversion. 

Creating a WhatsApp Channel

WhatsApp Channels are an excellent way to engage multiple users all at the same time. But how are they different from WhatsApp Groups? 

WhatsApp Channels only allow one-way communication, where you can send messages, and the channel members can only reply to your posts using emojis. On the other hand, WhatsApp Group allows all the members to communicate with each other like a WhatsApp chat. 

Since WhatsApp Channels only lets you send messages, you can use it to share affiliate marketing content like deals, offers, or discounts, enabling your channel members to check them out using the links within the message. 

Turning affiliates into lead-generation sources

In affiliate marketing, word-of-mouth or customer reviews can serve as great tools to further your outreach. By asking your existing customers to market your business and products can assist you in growing your reach. 

To do that, you can create loyalty or incentive programs where referrals would receive exclusive perks for driving customers to your business. This way, your customers also have a chance to get some rewards while also helping you drive more sales. 

You can use WhatsApp to send updates about the loyalty programs and the number of referrals a customer has brought. Additionally, you can provide real-time information about reward status (in case you offer a milestone system) to notify customers how far they are from hitting the next target. 

Some best practices for your WhatsApp affiliate marketing efforts

By now, you might have gotten a good idea of how to utilize WhatsApp to bring affiliate conversions for your business. However, to maximize your ROI and boost the efficiency of your campaigns, here are some of the best practices you can follow:

Personalized messaging: No matter how many times I repeat, it is crucial to understand that sending marketing messages that are not relevant will do you more harm than good. Make sure that you send targeted messages that focus on adding value rather than getting sales. 

Send discount offers: Load up your marketing with enticing offers and exclusive discounts to keep customer interest high. You can also offer pre-launch access to your offerings, allowing prospects to see the solutions in action and think about buying them via your links. 

Continuous engagement: Sending a message once and marking the lead as cold is not the right marketing approach. You have to send timely follow-ups to ensure prospects are aware of your business. Analyze your reports to identify when is the right time to send follow-ups to get maximum returns.

Humanize your outreach: Automating your outreach is a must in today’s fast-paced industry. However, it is critical to keep your chatbots sound and behave like humans. No one wants to be stuck in a never-ending conversation with a bot without being able to find a resolution to their problems. 

Monitor and improve: Keep on evaluating your WhatsApp affiliate marketing initiatives to discover areas of improvement. Monitor engagement and CTR metrics to further adjust your marketing strategy for achieving your goals. 

With a well-crafted affiliate marketing strategy and following these tactics, you can make the most of WhatsApp to scale your outreach, building an interpersonal connection with every affiliate.

Skyrock affiliate conversions with WhatsApp + Zixflow

WhatsApp is an amazing channel to streamline your affiliate marketing and elevate your business to the next level. Due to its popularity and global infrastructure, WhatsApp can serve as an all-around channel to acquire leads, send engaging messages, nurture with automation, and convert them using your affiliate links. 

We at Zixflow understand the importance of having a unified solution to manage operations and keep everything flowing smoothly. 

With Zixflow, you can take advantage of many of its native functionality to optimize your affiliate marketing efforts. For instance, the CRM can help you manage affiliates’ data, the campaign manager lets you run WhatsApp campaigns, the automation builder allows you to autopilot interactions with a chatbot, and a centralized inbox enables you to reply to all of your incoming messages from a single inbox. 

And these are only a few of the capabilities that Zixflow offers. If you want to experience all of the robust functionality of Zixflow, start by signing up for a free 7-day trial or scheduling a personalized demo to see the platform in action.