Restrictions for Marketing Messages

Marketing messages are a very powerful opportunity that helps build relationships with people who are interested in your company, products or services. Marketing messages need to be relevant to users, so they need to be tailored to the scenarios in which they will be useful to people. Users can leave feedback on your messages, but they can also block them, which can limit the use of marketing messages.

2 Key Changes

If we take the topic of creating a high-quality user experience, then important changes have appeared here. A limit has been introduced on the number of marketing conversations where a person receives messages from a certain company for a certain time. The restrictions are effective, starting from a small number of messages that will be read with a lower probability. However, even such a restriction has certain advantages: a small number of users will be affected, and their engagement will improve. The restrictions will come into effect from February 6 and, for now, only for Indian users.

Changes will also be introduced to increase template engagement. Here, you will need to add message-read data as a metric to the scoring system for templates. What will this give? This will allow you to identify and possibly temporarily pause marketing messages that have a low read rate. For businesses, this will be an advantage because before scaling volumes, they will be able to repeat all the steps for templates that have the lowest engagement. This change will come into effect on April 1 and will be valid worldwide.

What actions should be taken?

  • Be attentive and monitor the volume of error codes. This is necessary so that you can effectively isolate the affected users.
  • When you receive one of these error codes, you may think that it is related to restrictions. If you suspect this is the case, do not send the message template immediately. If you do, you will receive another error response.
  • Retry sending the template by increasing the time intervals until the message is delivered. The intervals need to be increased because the restriction may be in effect for a certain period of time.

Best practices to improve read rates 

Experts have identified the main 7 points to advise you on how to improve your reading rates. Apply these tips, and you will notice the results.

  1. Custom audience. You need to personalize messages for specific groups of users. This will increase relevance.
  2. Timing. Experts advise to avoid days when competition is very high. For better interaction with users, avoid peak seasons and weekends.
  3. Frequency of messages. You cannot overload the client, so carefully monitor the number of marketing messages each day. Find out how many messages the client receives weekly.
  4. Pauses. Monitor customer behavior and offer inactive ones a short break. But here you will need to make sure that they can completely opt out of marketing messages.
  5. Opt-in. Ask for a subscription before the favorite messages that your company plans to send. Add an additional option to subscribe to marketing content. This will help prevent unwanted negative reviews.
  6. Opt-out. Users will have the opportunity to opt out of marketing messages. However, you need to make sure that the content and subject clearly convey the relevance of the message.
  7. First 60-65 characters. This is the first visible part that the user encounters. This part should be interesting and convey the main idea. You need to clearly personalize the content to improve the effectiveness of customer interactions.

You should know that there are no specific numbers for the read rate. But many companies with high customer engagement try to keep the rate between 65 and 80%.

Other Important Updates 

Meta is introducing important updates. Let's examine these updates and learn about their features and benefits.

Frequency Capping

Meta has launched Frequency Capping as an integrity check. This check ensures that the user receives marketing messages from a certain number of brands during a certain period of time. The number of brands and the period should not be known to companies and BSPs. If a conversation has already been opened between the brand and the WhatsApp user, then the template messages that have already been sent to him will not be affected.

Template Pacing

The essence of this function is to first send messages to a small group of users. The following steps are taken based on the results: if the feedback is good, the template gets the High-Quality status; if the feedback is bad, the template gets the status – Low Quality. In this case, it will be suspended.

Template Pausing 

The point of suspending Low-Quality templates is to save the rating of used phone numbers. The duration of the pause will be as follows: all templates of the suspended type will not be able to be sent to users. You will need to stop all messaging campaigns that rely on this template. Even if an attempt is made to send a paused template, the API will deny all these attempts. Campaigns can be resumed only when the template status becomes Active.

Template Recategorization

Starting in July, Meta plans to introduce significant changes to the approved template category. It will be done if Meta determines a certain category is inaccurate based on the template category recommendations. Such a procedure will happen every month on the 1st. This update will be important because it will ensure that all approved templates on their WhatsApp Business are definitely categorized against all template category requirements.

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