10% WhatsApp engagement at half the cost of a traditional CRM
At CONNVE we build headless CRM programs — next best action, any channel, straight from the data warehouse. We recently hit a magic number — 10% engagement rate on a WhatsApp campaign promoting new medical courses to a highly profiled database of orthodontic specialists.
Which is pretty huge taking into account that typical, generic email campaigns drive <1% engagement and open rate is inflated by Gmail & Apple inbox services. SMS has zero visibility, so the only remaining channels with deep insights are Push (assuming you have your own mobile app) and RCS which is still in infancy usage wise.
Key success factors
- Messages were ultra personal — we used name & scientific titles, last purchase date, overall course participation history
- Plain text, no graphics — written like a human, not a marketing blast
- Personal sales rep footer — recipients perceived it as 1:1 communication with their rep
- Results: 10% replied, 75% opened — we received overwhelmingly positive responses; clients genuinely enjoy this channel
- A/B tested send times — morning (10:00) vs afternoon (14:00). Morning wins. Peak response between 10:00–11:00. We’re now building profile-level send time optimization — every recipient has their own interaction schedule
- Every reply saved to CRM — assigned as a task to the sales rep. We set up a procedure with Sales Leadership: every message gets a response, even with no immediate purchase intent. This reinforces the personal touch
Tech stack
The entire program was built outside the client’s traditional execution CRM — their sending system couldn’t handle this dynamic setup. We used:
- Google BigQuery as data source — Salesforce & MSSQL (ERP) data synced on 5-min incremental level via Storage Write API
- Flowgen as activation layer — send to data warehouse audience
- NATS as 12h contact lock to prevent repetitive messaging + overall distributed engine / queue / processing
- Twilio as messaging sender
- Flowgen again as webhook listener for Twilio delivery events
Why a headless CRM is 2x cheaper than any execution CRM
From our experience running CRM programs, 40–50% of any traditional CRM platform spend goes to template management, list management, ETL and attribute syncing — none of which is needed with a headless CRM approach. Use Flowgen + a data warehouse as your source of truth and skip the entire middleware layer.