LINE marketing in Japan for international brands: official accounts, ads and what actually brings customers back

Ask a Japanese customer for an email address at the till and you often get a polite pause. Ask them to add the brand on LINE and the phone is already in their hand.

LINE passed 100 million monthly users in Japan at the end of 2025, according to LY Corporation, in a country of about 123 million people. It is where messages from family, work and the delivery company arrive, and brands that sell things people buy again sit in the same inbox.

In the outside reviews we do of international brands in Japan, LINE is the opportunity that comes up most often. Rarely because the brand has no account. Usually it has one, with a few thousand friends, a welcome message written at launch, and nobody who can say how much it sells.

This guide is for the country manager or marketing lead who decides what to do with LINE and then has to explain the result to head office.

Two separate products: the official account and the ads

The LINE Official Account (LINE公式アカウント) is a channel you own. People add you as a friend; you message them, give them coupons, show a rich menu (the panel of buttons at the bottom of the chat) and answer questions one to one. The monthly plan depends on how many messages you send.

Ads are a separate product, bought by auction, and here most English guides are out of date. On April 1, 2026, LINE Ads and Yahoo! JAPAN's display ads were merged into one platform, LY Ads Display Ads (LINEヤフー広告 ディスプレイ広告). Old LINE Ads campaigns are scheduled to stop running around late October 2026, and the old platform closes on March 31, 2027. If your campaigns, audiences and tags have not moved yet, raise it with your agency this month.

Measurement changed too. The old LINE Tag does not work on the new ad platform. Its replacement is LY's measurement tag (計測タグ), which since January 21, 2026 also works with official accounts, for counting conversions and building audiences of site visitors. LY plans to retire the LINE Tag at a date not yet announced.

The short version: the account is where repeat sales come from. The ads mostly fill the account and find people who look like your buyers.

What the account costs in 2026

There are three plans, all prices excluding tax. The free Communication plan includes 200 messages a month. Light costs ¥5,000 for 5,000 messages. Standard costs ¥15,000 for 30,000 messages, and it is the only plan that lets you send more. From October 1, 2026, extra messages cost ¥3 each up to 200,000 a month and ¥2.50 each beyond that.

The detail that catches people out: a message is one send to one person. One broadcast to 20,000 friends uses 20,000 messages, so four broadcasts a month is 80,000. Replies in chat, automatic replies and the greeting message are free. (Some English guides still quote the allowances from before June 2023, when the free plan dropped from 1,000 messages to 200.)

Past a few thousand friends, every full-list send has a visible cost.

Growing friends who will buy

Friend count is the vanity metric of LINE. A list built on a one-off giveaway looks good in a slide and then quietly blocks you. In a 2025 Mobilus survey of 655 LINE users, about 70% said they had blocked an official account.

The friends worth having are added close to a purchase, with a reason to stay:

• Checkout and the thank-you page, with a concrete promise: delivery updates, refill reminders, restock news.
• Stores: a QR code at the till and on the receipt, and staff who mention it. A small first-purchase coupon is fine here, because the person is already buying.
• Your website: a LINE button in the header and on product pages. Obvious, and missing on many international brand sites we look at.
• Packaging inserts in orders from your own online shop.
• Friend-add ads in LY Ads, aimed at site visitors and people who resemble your buyers. Japanese LINE tool vendors quote roughly ¥100 to ¥400 per friend in 2026; broad, cheap targeting brings the friends who block.
• A verified account (認証済アカウント), which gets a badge, appears in LINE's search and is required for the new measurement tag.

Give each source its own QR code or link, so the account records how each friend arrived and you can later see which sources produce buyers.

What to send, and how often

Our view: send less, and split the list more. For most consumer brands, two to four messages a month is plenty. Food and retail with weekly offers can do more.

Good messages ask customers to do something they already wanted to do. A refill reminder timed to the product (a 30-day serum, reminded on day 25). A restock of the size that sold out. Early access for existing buyers before a sale. Japan's calendar matters too: year-end gifting, the summer and winter sales, and your own category's peaks.

The messages that get blocked were written for somewhere else: a global newsletter translated into Japanese, the image you already posted on Instagram. Copy should be written by a Japanese writer, short, with the point in the first line, because that line is what shows in the notification.

Split the list by when people last bought, what they bought, where they came from, and store versus online. The account can target past clickers, people from a given QR code, site visitors or an uploaded ID list; most audiences need at least 50 people.

Measuring extra sales, not opens

Opens and clicks tell you a message was seen. They do not tell you whether anyone bought who would not have bought anyway.

Take a loyal customer who reorders every month. She gets your coupon, taps it, uses it, and the report counts her order as LINE revenue. It isn't extra: you gave a discount on a sale you already had. A programme full of regular buyers can look excellent while it gives away margin.

The fix is plain. Before each important send, pick a random 10% of the people you were going to message and send them nothing. After a fixed window (two to three weeks suits most repeat products), compare the share of each group that bought. The difference, multiplied by the number you messaged, is your extra customers. Subtract the coupon cost on every redemption, including those from people who would have bought anyway, and the message fees. What is left is extra profit. Statisticians call the group you leave out a control group; we just call it holding a few customers back.

It needs three things. Friends connected to purchases, through LINE Login on your shop or a LINE customer tool linked to sales data. A held-back group that is truly random, not "the least active". And patience: small groups are noisy, so repeat over two or three sends before changing anything big.

A worked example

The numbers below are invented to show the method.

A European skincare brand sells online and through two Tokyo counters. Of its 24,000 LINE friends, 6,000 are linked to purchase history, bought a 30-day serum 45 to 120 days ago, and have not reordered.

It holds back 600 at random and sends the other 5,400 a refill reminder with 10% off for 14 days. Three weeks later, 4.0% of the messaged group has bought (216 orders) against 2.5% of the held-back group. The 1.5-point gap means about 81 of the 216 orders are extra.

With an average order of ¥7,000 and a 65% gross margin before discount:

The dashboard says ¥1.5 million. The extra profit is about ¥200,000. Only the second number belongs in the report to head office. The send was still worth doing, and the next test is obvious: the same reminder without the coupon, on a new random split. If the gap holds, the discount was costing ¥151,200 for nothing.

Mistakes we see most often

The account is invisible. No LINE button on the Japanese site, no QR code in store, a greeting message from launch day. Friends arrive by accident.

No measurement tag. Without it you cannot count purchases from LINE or build audiences of site visitors. And after the move to LY Ads, many brands are left with an old LINE Tag the new ad platform ignores.

The same message to everyone. It costs more under per-message pricing, and it trains your best customers to wait for the next discount.

Reporting opens and clicks. Head office gets open rates and "LINE revenue", and nobody can say how much would have happened anyway.

Nobody on the brand side has admin rights. Often the agency set up the account under its own login. Change partners and you can lose the history and the audiences.

A short checklist

• The account is verified and linked from the site, the thank-you page and every store till.
• The measurement tag is on the site, and ads have moved to LY Ads before LINE Ads stops in late October 2026.
• Each friend source has its own QR code or link.
• Messages go to groups split by purchase timing and product.
• Each important send holds back a random 10% and is judged on extra profit.
• Someone on your side holds admin rights to the account and the ad account.

How Meridian helps

Meridian is the marketing office in Japan for international brands. We plan and supervise LINE programmes, Japanese partners do the setup and sending, and head office gets the report in English, with a Japanese summary for the local team. Our customer reactivation pilot tests one segment with a held-back group and reports the extra profit. Our launch or switch service handles the move to LY Ads, tags and admin rights included, and our agency diagnostic checks how your current results are counted. Or start with the free outside review, which looks at your LINE setup next to your search and ads. For the questions to put to an agency, see our guide to evaluating your marketing agency in Japan.