A US business builds its lifecycle calendar around email: weekly newsletter, abandoned cart, win-back. That works reasonably well against the general base. Against the Hispanic segment of that same base, the same calendar underperforms, not because the copy is bad, but because email is not the channel that customer actually uses every day.
US Hispanic adults do not use WhatsApp as an exception. They use it more than anyone else
According to Pew Research Center (2025), about a third of US adults use WhatsApp, up sharply from 23% in 2021. That average hides a real gap between groups: Hispanic adults use the app more than White adults do. For a brand selling to Hispanic consumers in the US (the reason a dedicated landing for that market exists), treating WhatsApp as a channel reserved for people physically in Latin America misses the segment that already uses it the most, inside the US itself. It is not a niche behavior: it is the real communication habit of a large share of any US brand’s customer base.
What actually changes, without duplicating the work
This is not about abandoning email and rebuilding every flow on a different channel. It is about knowing which channel earns more attention at each step:
- Post-purchase confirmations and support: WhatsApp gets much higher open rates than email for this kind of message, because it is the channel that person already checks several times a day, not one they open once a week.
- Win-back: a Hispanic customer who ignored your last three emails has not necessarily churned. That message may never have really competed for attention against the WhatsApp thread where they already talk to everyone else.
- Segmenting by actual preference, not assumed preference: the way to know if a customer prefers WhatsApp is to see if they respond there, not to guess from their last name or their browser language.
It is the same lifecycle logic behind our customer retention framework: communication gets built by stage and by the channel the customer is actually on, not by whichever channel is easiest to automate from the business side. A CDP connected to WhatsApp is not a curiosity for emerging markets: it is infrastructure any brand with a Hispanic customer base in the US should already have in place.
If your US retention program treats the whole base as if everyone had the same channel habits, you are probably competing for attention in the wrong inbox with a real part of your customers.