Academy › Build › WhatsApp and customers
Help before the discount
You'll know what to write in the second message of the sequence: a question that addresses the real hesitation, saving the discount for the third message and only as a last resort.
By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026
In a sequence of reminders to recover a half-finished booking, the first one doesn't sell anything: it just points out that the booking is still pending, which is exactly what it should do. If hours go by and no one has come back to finish it, it's time for the second reminder, and here it's easy to fall into the same trap: open the template and write a discount code as the first line.
Not for the second reminder. A discount offered too soon doesn't settle any doubts, it changes the reason someone hasn't finished. Before, it was I'm not sure this is right for me; after, it becomes I'll wait and see if the price drops again. And that second reason is much more expensive to fix than the first, because it no longer depends on an answer from you: it depends on whether the customer can hold out long enough without buying. A very large experiment points to this: in one with more than 100 million Alibaba customers, published in Management Science, discounting the items already in the cart doubled same-day sales, and over the following month those customers browsed more products and bought more often on the platform, but they also added a larger share of what they browsed to their cart, possibly to chase more discounts, and ended up paying less for what they bought.
Before touching the price, there's a cheaper question to ask: what held them back? It's not that discounts don't work. In a field experiment by researchers from Rice and Cornell with 14,506 customers of an Asian online personal-care store who had left their cart half-finished, a text message with a $3 discount on purchases of $20 or more raised the share of customers who completed their purchase by 56%, compared with the same text with no offer, and a $6 discount raised it by 155%. There, unlike with Alibaba, they didn't see customers learn to wait for discounts over the following two weeks. It works, but you pay for it on every sale it closes. That's why it doesn't disappear: it's saved for the third reminder.
It's not always about price
Many bookings that get left half-finished don't fall through because of price. They fall through because someone isn't sure the time slot works with their job, whether they can pay in installments, whether they need to print a confirmation, or whether the service is really right for their specific situation and not just in general. For online shopping there's US data: in the Baymard Institute survey, leaving aside people who were just browsing, the most cited reason is extra costs that are too high (shipping, taxes, fees), at 40%. That's money, but not the price they'd already seen, and 6 out of 10 don't even mention it. The rest are hurdles and doubts: delivery took too long, they didn't trust entering their card info, the return policy didn't convince them, or they couldn't see the total cost from the start. They'd already seen the service's price on the page before starting to book; what holds people back, often, is what they still didn't know.
That changes what the second reminder needs to do. It doesn't compete on price: it answers the question that person never got to ask, because there was nobody on the other end of the form to ask it to. A form doesn't resolve doubts, it just piles them up. The second reminder is the first real chance to resolve them, which is why a well-placed question is worth more than a discount.
- It always goes in the second reminder, no exceptions.
- It costs the same to send whether that person buys or not, so there's no risk of giving away extra margin.
- If it hits the right doubt, the booking gets finished without touching the price once.
- It's saved for the third reminder, the last one in the sequence.
- It only goes out if the second reminder got no response within the window you already set.
What to choose: Always write the question in the second reminder, never the discount. If 24 hours pass with no answer, that's when the discount comes in on the third one, as a last resort, not the first card you play.
If the discount shows up in the second reminder, over time the customer can learn the game: start the booking, leave it half-finished on purpose, and wait for the code. They stop buying whenever it suits them and start waiting for the business to get nervous. And the business, without realizing it, has turned every booking into a two-round negotiation where it always loses margin.
This happens with repeat customers: someone who's already booked once and knows how the reminder sequence works. If they learned the second one brings a discount, they can leave a booking half-finished on purpose, even without any real doubts. That's why the discount never gets handed out in the second reminder, not even once: it's saved for the third, and only for people who truly didn't answer the question.
Which doubt to ask about, depending on the business
The doubt you need to clear up changes depending on what you sell. At a hair salon or spa, it's usually the time slot: if five o'clock is the only slot that works for them and they're not sure it'll still be open by the time they decide. At a store with shipping, it's the shipping cost: they got to checkout, found out shipping added $7, and wanted to think it over before paying. At a school with drop-in classes, it's whether you have to sign up for the whole course or can try a single session first. At a studio with a multi-session package, it's whether the package expires in three months or can be used at their own pace. And at a restaurant with table reservations, it's almost always whether there's room for the exact number of people they want to bring.
The reminder doesn't have to guess each person's exact doubt. It has to open the door so they can write it themselves. That's why an open question works better than a closed statement: did you run into any questions about scheduling or payment? invites them to talk; remember shipping is free on orders over $40 only works if you guessed the reason right on the first try, and in the Baymard study, not even the most cited reason, extra costs, tops 4 out of 10.
What to do when the answer to this reminder is no, or when no answer comes at all, is covered in the next lesson. One thing is worth knowing now: a reminder with a discount counts as a commercial communication, and sending one without consent can run into trouble under marketing laws like the US CAN-SPAM Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which require that recipients requested or expressly authorized them, unless they've already done business with you and the offer is for something similar. Spain's Article 21 of Law 34/2002 on information society services works the same way, and INCIBE notes that WhatsApp counts as one of those channels there too. If you want to be able to send that third reminder, ask for permission right on the booking form itself.
- The second reminder asks what's holding up the booking; it doesn't offer a discount.
- The discount, if it comes at all, goes in the third reminder, and only if the second one got no response.
- You have the exact wording for the second reminder, ready to schedule.
- You know which doubt to ask about, based on what your business sells.
- If your tool only sends one automated reminder (like the abandoned-cart email or text), you'll need to send the second and third ones yourself by WhatsApp, within the window you set.
Test yourself
Answer before opening each one. If one gives you trouble, go back to the section that explains it.
1. An online clothing store notices that most carts get abandoned right when customers see the shipping cost. It's time to write the second reminder. What goes in it?
The question about shipping goes in, not a general discount: something like 'shipping costs $4.90 unless you spend $40 or more, want me to sort that out for you?', because you already know the specific doubt, and answering it is cheaper than lowering the price on the whole order.
2. A spa sends the second reminder asking about the time slot, and nobody answers within 24 hours. Now it's time for the third reminder. What do they write now?
Now the discount comes in, because you've already ruled out that it was a doubt you could resolve with an answer: it's the last reminder in the sequence and the most expensive of the three, so it's saved for the end, not before.
3. A private tutor notices that people who abandon their booking almost never answer the second reminder, and suspects something's off. What should change first, the wording of the question or the timing of when it's sent?
The wording changes before the timing: if the question misses the real doubt, for example, asking about the time slot when the actual problem is whether classes are in person or online, nobody's going to answer no matter how much you adjust the wait time between reminders, which was already settled in an earlier lesson.
But writing the two automatic reminders well doesn't tell you what to do the day the customer finally answers, and silence, an objection, and a no don't all get handled the same way.
Sources
- 50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026. Baymard Institute, accessed October 2026.
- The long-term and spillover effects of price promotions on retailing platforms: Evidence from a large randomized experiment on alibaba. Dennis J. Zhang, Hengchen Dai, Lingxiu Dong, et al., Management Science, 2020 (summary at WashU Research Profiles, Washington University in St. Louis).
- Retargeting Using Advertising and Promotions. Arun Gopalakrishnan and Young-Hoon Park, Marketing Science Institute, Working Paper 21-133, 2021.
- Law 34/2002, of July 11, on information society services and electronic commerce. Boletín Oficial del Estado (Spain's Official State Gazette), consolidated text, accessed October 2026.
- Using WhatsApp in Your Business While Complying with GDPR and Spain's LOPDGDD. INCIBE, National Cybersecurity Institute, 2020.