2024 is the perfect time to take full advantage of key calendar moments to maximize your WhatsApp engagement, conversions, and ROI.
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When you’re communicating with customers, timing is the difference between increasing engagement and revenue and leaving money on the table.
Whether it’s a back-to-school special, a holiday season promo, or a targeted birthday discount, businesses must take advantage of moments when consumers are more likely to buy—or when customers are more likely to buy again.
By setting up a promotional calendar that pinpoints when those opportunities arise, you can significantly increase your year-round sales and ensure your reps hit their targets.
The tool that arguably opens the most doors for time-sensitive engagement is WhatsApp. With over two billion active users, the platform’s business arm generated an estimated $330 million in revenue for its users in 2022—and that value only went up in 2023.
Why WhatsApp?
To create raving fans of your brand, boost sales, and improve your brand recognition worldwide, you must deliver the right messaging to your target audience. According to McKinsey, 76% of consumers say personalized communications are “a key factor” in choosing which companies to buy from.
With stakes this high, your messaging needs to do more than transmit information; it should captivate, motivate, and inspire.
As of 2022, the average open rate for WhatsApp Business messages was an astounding 98%. Multiply that effectiveness across a global active user base of two billion consumers, and you have a formula for massive ROI from both a marketing and sales perspective.
When you set up a twelve-month promotional calendar specifically for WhatsApp, you ensure your brand stands out in a saturated market. Beyond the massive sales boost, you’ll strengthen customer loyalty during peak traffic periods and more efficiently manage inbound inquiries on a relatively new but highly effective channel.
This guide walks through key 2024 dates to help plan your WhatsApp campaigns. We’ll also highlight a few evergreen platform tactics you should always keep in mind if you want happy, loyal customers.
Critical WhatsApp tactics to adopt year-round
Regardless of when you plan on deploying WhatsApp messaging or marketing campaigns, you must understand how to use the platform effectively.
The fundamental tactics below are ones every marketing manager, e-commerce retailer, and business leader should always keep top of mind. All five help deepen customer loyalty, manage inbound consumer inquiries, and give your brand a boost during peak sales season.
Note that these are general guidelines. Seasonality and other time-sensitive considerations are covered later in this guide.
1. Know where to promote your WhatsApp channel
To maximize your WhatsApp strategy’s reach, start by identifying the various entry points for the channel across your brand’s current presence. Popular promotional in-points for WhatsApp include websites, other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, email marketing calls-to-action, and checkout points in physical retail stores.
Additionally, consider other creative digital touchpoints, like employee email signatures or out-of-office messages These are more passive ways to capture your target audience's attention and encourage them to engage with your brand via WhatsApp.
2. Set up automated cart abandonment reminders
Another effective year-round tactic is using WhatsApp as a vehicle for sending automated messages to customers who fail to complete a purchase. These messages should invoke a sense of urgency by emphasizing the limited time the individual has to place their order to lock in a discounted price, guarantee delivery by a specific date, and so on.
These automatic messages can also target other browsers by serving them personalized product recommendations and specialized promotions. As a sum of its parts, these tactical elements significantly increase e-commerce conversions.
3. Keep customers informed with inventory alerts
Inventory alerts are a great way to keep your customer base up-to-date about stock levels for high-demand items, restocks of your bestsellers, or items they’ve previously shown interest in based on their buying or browsing history. Delivering these notifications in a high-engagement environment like WhatsApp often drives immediate action and increases checkouts.
Because of the instantaneous nature of WhatsApp communications, you can also position these updates as real-time inventory alerts. This framing assures customers who opt-in that they’ll be the first to know about important updates.
4. Provide transparency with order tracking updates
Giving customers a detailed, transparent rundown of order activity is crucial—customers want to be able to track their orders, and you can get proactive with it. WhatsApp is a terrific tool for this task, helping you deepen consumer trust in your brand with accurate delivery time estimations and tracking updates.
When you combine order tracking with some of the other tactics listed above, you can increase engagement significantly in a single conversation. Feeding consumers recommendations and answers to their questions post-order can increase the likelihood of return business.
5. Simplify the return and exchange process
No one wants a return or exchange to be a hassle. Simplifying and de-stressing this process is easier with WhatsApp, which allows you to set up automated conversation triggers that guide customers through the necessary steps and FAQs. By prioritizing efficiency, you’re reducing frustration, improving customer satisfaction, and delivering an exceptional experience.
Leaning on WhatsApp for returns and exchanges also improves internal support velocity; agents aren’t spending so much time processing returns and exchanges. Speeding up this part of the buyer’s journey allows you to operate more effectively at scale.
Crucial 2024 WhatsApp calendar dates to remember
To hit sales targets and grow in the coming year, it’s vital to leverage platforms like WhatsApp at the right time to capitalize on peak consumer spending periods.
2023 data from Deloitte shows that 56% of people use social media to research products or services before the holiday shopping season. This trend is only increasing with time: 87% of Gen Z shoppers get shopping inspiration from social platforms.
Setting up a strategy that caters to these habits doesn’t have to take hours or days.
Keep reading to see the only promotional calendar you’ll need for your WhatsApp marketing campaigns in 2024, month by month.
January 2024
New Year's Day (Jan. 1): Start your customers’ year off right by sending personalized messages offering exclusive deals following the holidays.
Chinese New Year (Jan. 22): Leading up to the street parades and lion and dragon dances are days when people are eager to get their hands on everything red — clothing, tapestries, lanterns, and candles. Get inspired and theme engagement on these items via WhatsApp within countries like China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Winter Clearance Sale (Jan. 1-15): Move out your overstocked winter inventory and make room for new stock by highlighting discounted prices and limited-time offers.
National Hobby Month (Jan. 1-31): Encourage your customers to pursue their hobbies by offering special discounts on related products and sharing hobby-specific content.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Many consumers have extra discretionary income on hand in January due to holiday gifting—create and send exclusive discounts to a broadcast subscriber list to take advantage of this.
February 2024
Valentine's Day (Feb. 14): Ensure your target audience feels the love by sending special gift ideas, recommendations, or limited-edition product line promotions via WhatsApp.
Super Bowl LVIII (Feb. 11): Amp up your brand exposure on game day by targeting sports and entertainment enthusiasts with real-time updates and interactive, event-based content.
Presidents’ Day (Feb. 19): American businesses often honor their country's leaders and history by offering patriotic-themed promotions and exclusive content that bakes in historical trivia.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Implement a chatbot that provides personalized gift recommendations based on the recipient's preferences and budget, perfect for occasions like Valentine's Day.
March 2024
International Women's Day (Mar. 8): Use WhatsApp to celebrate women by highlighting female-led businesses or partners, offering discounts on women's products, and sharing inspiring stories.
St. Patrick's Day (Mar. 17): Embrace the luck of the Irish by running a campaign that includes themed messages, fun contests, and maybe an exclusive green product or two.
Spring Break (Mar. 1-15): Wash the winter blues away by sending customers discounts and promotions on the hottest fashion, gadgets, and accessories that will take their vacation to the next level.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Position your brand as one that knows what’s trendy and isn’t afraid to share those recommendations with customers—it’s an excellent way to promote new products and fresh restocks.
April 2024
Good Friday (Mar. 29)/Easter Monday (Apr. 1): Hop into the long Easter weekend by serving up themed promotions on products and running contests like a virtual Easter egg hunt.
Earth Day (Apr. 22): Emphasize your commitment to sustainability by promoting eco-friendly products or initiatives and sharing tips for reducing consumer carbon footprint.
Koningsdag or King’s Day (Apr. 27): This day is filled with concerts, flea markets, community gatherings, and of course, orange outfits every April in the Netherlands. Share your commitment to this specific subset of your audience by acknowledging this important holiday and maybe even running promotions on your goods to celebrate.
Spring Cleaning Season (Apr. 15-31): Out with the old, in with the new—help your customers refresh their homes or style by offering discounts on wardrobe and decor essentials.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Make spring cleaning less about clutter and more about organization with WhatsApp conversation centered around life hacks and user-generated content, like sharing before-and-after photos of home makeovers.
May 2024
Mother's Day (May 12): Show appreciation for mothers everywhere by offering special discounts on gifts, organizing exclusive giveaways, and sharing heartwarming user-submitted stories.
Cinco de Mayo (May 5): Use WhatsApp to target segments of your audience with Mexican-themed products, traditional recipes, virtual event invites, and other cultural celebrations.
Memorial Day (May 27): Honor fallen heroes and show support for veterans and their families with special discounts, supporting charity groups, and sharing stories of courage.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Use your broadcast lists to send subscribers reminders to place orders by a specified date and time so their products or services will arrive before Mom’s big day.
June 2024
Father's Day (Jun. 16): Give dads a shout-out with unique gift recommendations, fun content like quizzes and polls, and limited-time giveaways guaranteed to make their day.
Graduation Season (Jun. 1-15): Celebrate recent graduates by sending people gift suggestions, personalized product recommendations, and discounts on post-graduation essentials—new apartment decor anyone?
World Music Day (Jun. 21): Embrace the universal language of music by promoting any music-related products, organizing virtual jam sessions, and sharing curated playlists.
St. John’s Day or Midsommar (Jun. 23 or 24): This European holiday marks the longest day of the year and always involves gatherings of friends and family, great food, and wildflowers. Make sure your WhatsApp audience is prepared to celebrate with all of the right garb, grub, and garden goods.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Ensure your chatbot is equipped to answer all your customers’ holiday-related product questions, making it easy for them to find the perfect gift for a father, recent grad, and more.
July 2024
Summer Sale (Jul. 1-15): Help your customers have fun in the sun by offering promotions on any summer-themed products, such as swimwear, outdoor gear, and vacation essentials.
Independence Day (Jul. 4): Celebrate the Fourth of July by sending recommendations for red, white, and blue products or contest sweepstakes information.
Bastille Day (Jul. 14): This French fan-favorite holiday features parades and parties. Honor your French audience by offering special promotions and discounts in connection with this historical, important day.
World Emoji Day (Jul. 17): Incorporate lots of (or, if you’re bold, exclusively) emojis into your messaging and ask your audience to share their favorite emoji or related online memes. They can even vote via an interactive quiz and see how thousands of other recipients respond.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Leverage multimedia assets in your WhatsApp messages to further entice engagement from your target audience and dazzle them with your brand’s digital style.
August 2024
Summer Clearance (Aug. 1-15): Clear out your summer inventory and get ready for fall by offering major discounts on seasonal products by sending notifications about limited quantities and limited time offers.
Back-to-School (Aug 15-31): Help families prepare for the upcoming school year by sharing discounts or promotions or relevant items, like school supplies, backpacks, electronics, and clothing.
National Dog Day (Aug. 26): Drive WhatsApp engagement with the pet lovers in your brand’s community by organizing pet photo contests and awarding giveaways based on user-generated content.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Get granular with your audience or buyer data to personalize your WhatsApp content. During a back-to-school promotion, certain items may entice individuals who have kids in a specific grade level or region.
September 2024
Fall Fashion Launch (Sept. 1-15): Once summer comes to a close, fashion retailers provide subscribers or VIPs with early access to and discounts on their new fall collection.
Labor Day (Sept. 2): Many businesses use the last long weekend of summer to finish their stock cleanout, using channels like WhatsApp to send eye-opening discounts or BOGO offers to customers.
Start-of-Fall Sale (Sept. 21): The transition from summer to fall isn’t just for the fashion industry—capitalize on returns to work and school by serving your target audience with promotions they don’t want to miss.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Fine-tune your messaging timing and frequency to ensure you’re able to send your customer base multiple content snippets before and during a marketing campaign without it feeling spammy.
October 2024
Halloween (Thursday, Oct. 31): Embrace the spooky season by offering Halloween-themed promotions and giveaways for the best costume pictures through your WhatsApp feed.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Show support for breast cancer awareness and highlight your brand’s socially conscious side by participating in charity initiatives or donating a portion of sales to breast cancer research.
National Pizza Month: Universally loved days like this one practically cry out for themed content and messaging to engage customers; pizza topping polls, quiz-based contests, and lots of those pizza emojis should be on the menu.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Personalize your WhatsApp chatbot’s welcome message to match the occasion, whether it’s to highlight a charitable endeavor or invite engagement with a Halloween or pizza-themed piece of content.
November 2024
Diwali (Nov. 1): For Hindu families and others around the world, Diwali is a celebration of “the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.” People often gather together and celebrate with large meals, great food, lanterns, fireworks, and candles. Help your audience celebrate by pointing them to links that’ll make hosting people for the festivities feel simple.
Thanksgiving (Nov. 28): Thanksgiving isn’t only about turkey and stuffing anymore. The immediate calm before the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) storm is when many consumers start their holiday shopping, and when retailers begin rolling out promotions.
Black Friday (Nov. 29): It’s the biggest shopping event of any calendar year—one that raked in an estimated $9.8 billion in 2023, up 7.5% year-over-year. Regardless of what you sell, leverage deep discounts, flash sales, and other time-bound tactics to maximize sales.
Small Business Saturday (Nov. 30): Champion independent businesses in your area by spotlighting local merchants as part of your BFCM campaigns. Doing so can also improve your brand’s global reputation with consumers.
Key WhatsApp tactic: Make sure your target audience knows all about your exciting Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals well in advance of the big weekend blitz. Start sending messages to relevant lists several weeks early.
December 2024
Cyber Monday (Dec. 2): Interestingly, the latter half of BFCM tends to do even better than the start of the long weekend, generating nearly $12.5 billion in sales in 2023. Take advantage of the increased online traffic loads with fresh deals and discounts as everyone rushes to get their purchases processed and holiday shopping underway.
Giving Tuesday (Dec. 3): After BFCM, Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to extend promotions while also giving back—consider participating in this global event by donating sales proceeds to worthy causes.
Saint Nicholas Day or Sinterklass (Dec. 5): On this day, children in European countries are often given gifts, baked goods, or candy. For brands that sell children’s clothing or toys, the days leading up to this holiday can be bigger than Christmas for these countries.
Holiday Gift Guide: Help your customers find the perfect gifts for their loved ones by creating the perfect holiday gift guide, preferably in an interactive format, and let WhatsApp be the delivery vehicle.
12 Days of Christmas (Dec. 13-25): Create a series of promotions, discounts, or giveaways that serve as a countdown to Christmas Day, with daily messages highlighting exclusive deals or contests.
Boxing Day (Dec. 26): Traditionally, this was a day of giving back for Commonwealth nations like Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. People would donate a gift they received during the Christmas season, but often companies offer large discounts on this day — and yours should be one of them that promotes those deals via WhatsApp.
New Year's Eve (Tuesday, Dec. 31): Say goodbye to the year that was with one last blow-out promotion. Use audience data to personalize your messaging and help consumers celebrate in style.
Key WhatsApp tactic: With an abundance of brands sending promotions to consumers during the holiday shopping season, keep your messaging clear and concise. Create a sense of urgency but don’t be intrusive—only some folks will want a branded message sent to their phone on Christmas morning.
Remember, these are just a handful of examples of the many promotional opportunities available throughout 2024. Tailor your WhatsApp marketing approach to the themes that align with your business’ persona and market, all with a focus on enhancing customer loyalty and building connections at scale.
How to prepare the right 2024 messaging for your audience
Setting up your 2024 WhatsApp calendar is a good place to start, but not a good place to end.
Here are a few core tactics we recommend using as you prepare compelling messaging for your 2024 WhatsApp campaigns:
1. Map everything to quarterly marketing goals
The best marketing messaging on WhatsApp always aligns with quarterly campaign objectives.
By understanding your overarching goals and how each marketing initiative influences sales opportunities, you can more effectively tailor messaging to suit different campaigns or promotions.
Questions to ask yourself:
What messaging will stay the same across all campaigns?
What will differ?
When should messaging compensate for quieter periods?
What frequency of messaging content will ensure you attain your goals?
2. Use analytics to fuel your decision-making
Forget diamonds — data is always a marketer’s best friend. To craft compelling messaging, you must understand how well previous campaigns performed, what content resonated most with your audience, and how you can optimize your marketing campaigns moving forward. Use analytics tools to paint a clear picture of audience preferences and WhatsApp performance.
Questions to ask yourself:
Which past messages had the highest open rates? Click-through rates?
Which past messages had the lowest open rates? Click-through rates?
Based on those data points, which offers resonate most with consumers?
3. Centralize and streamline asset preparation
A hallmark of efficient marketing strategies and management is having your campaign assets prepared well in advance. A platform like Bird helps marketing teams ensure consistent branding across all communication channels and personalize messaging to different regions and demographics, making each audience segment feel valued.
Questions to ask yourself:
Does each WhatsApp campaign have a dedicated content magnet?
Are voice, tone, and value propositions consistent across every campaign?
Is messaging fine-tuned for different audience segments and regions?
4. Schedule your WhatsApp message sends in advance
When you pre-schedule your marketing messages, you free up valuable time to focus on other important aspects of your marketing strategy. By automating WhatsApp message delivery, you maintain a consistent platform presence and avoid sudden content gaps.
Questions to ask yourself:
Do you have WhatsApp messaging scheduled to go out regularly?
Are your WhatsApp messages scheduled for optimal delivery times?
Is your content inventory built up enough to handle busy periods?
Capitalize on the biggest WhatsApp messaging moments in 2024
To truly harness WhatsApp’s potential as a customer engagement tool, you must set yourself up for success with a detailed, actionable campaign calendar for 2024.
To avoid disorganization and oversights during its creation process, take these steps:
Identify the correct stakeholders for each task and triage project timelines and bandwidth accordingly
Start with the most important promotional opportunities, such as BFCM and end-of-year holiday shopping, and work backward from there
Prioritize offers and timing that make sense for your audience instead of relying on a “spray and pray” execution style
With those tactics in mind, your WhatsApp marketing strategy will differ from your competitors or other brands in your space globally. To set your company up for continued WhatsApp success, make sure you:
Maintain brand consistency across all marketing campaigns and promotions
Automate message scheduling to ensure content hits consumer inboxes at the right time
Personalize message content to cater to different regional, demographic, and buying preferences
Optimize your messaging with Bird
High-performing marketing teams and their strategies have one thing in common: they understand that the process of hitting their targets is a marathon, not a sprint. Precise, continuous optimization over time is the key to winning the WhatsApp messaging game.
For brands leveraging WhatsApp in their promotional campaigns, there’s no better partner than Bird. Customers like Uber, Google, and Facebook choose MessageBird because we deliver:
Unparalleled audience reach with millions of WhatsApp messages sent daily
Incredible audience engagement with message open rates of 75%+
Stronger customer relationships built on true two-way communication tools
Stress-free setup and approvals for WhatsApp numbers and templates worldwide
Unrivaled data-driven insights that optimize your marketing and sales conversions
If you’re looking for a WhatsApp messaging platform that will support your brand’s growth every month of the year, Bird is an easy choice.
Book a personalized demo and see the difference Bird can make for your WhatsApp ROI.