How to send a WhatsApp broadcast

Before you start

• An approved template
• A segment with recorded opt-in
• Headroom in your messaging limit

The steps

1. 1

   Check your messaging limit first

   Your tier caps unique customers per 24 hours — 250 on a new number, rising to 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited. Sending to 40,000 contacts on a 1,000 tier does not work, and finding out mid-send is the classic first-week surprise.

2. 2

   Build the audience from opt-in, not from your CRM

   Everyone in the segment should have a recorded permission to hear from you on WhatsApp. A list that is merely "our customers" is the fastest way to lose a tier.

3. 3

   Add a suppression list

   Subtract the people who should not get this one: recent buyers on an acquisition offer, anyone who complained, a cohort you messaged yesterday.

4. 4

   Personalise the placeholders

   Map each {{n}} onto a contact field. Check what happens when a field is empty — a message reading "Hi ," is worse than no message.

5. 5

   Send a test to yourself first

   Send to your own number and read it as a customer would. Most embarrassing sends were visible in the test nobody ran.

6. 6

   Schedule and watch the first few thousand

   Let delivery meter rather than dumping it all at once. Watch delivered, read and failed counts as they come in, and stop if failures spike — that is a signal about the list, not the network.

Where this usually goes wrong

• Sending to a bought or scraped list

  The recipients did not ask for you, a large share will block on the first message, and a new number has no buffer to absorb it.

• Sending the same campaign four times

  Festival weeks tempt this. Two sends is the honest maximum and the second should say something new.

• No opt-out route in a marketing template

  Without a visible exit, people block instead, and blocks are what actually damage your rating.