Opt-in
Opt-in is essential for driving high-quality conversations with your customers.
Businesses should create and send notifications with the below attributes in mind to drive a high-quality user experience:
- Expected: People have already opted in to receive this information from the business over WhatsApp so are not surprised when the business messages them
- Relevant: The messages are personalized to the specific person (Ex: based on recent purchases or recent engagement with the business, personalized content in the message itself), concise, contain necessary information, and clearly outline any next steps for the person
- Timely: People receive these messages when they are relevant
To ensure these messages are expected, businesses must obtain opt-in in advance of sending any proactive notifications, including non transactional notifications.
- Businesses must clearly state that a person is opting in to receive messages from the business over WhatsApp
- Businesses must clearly state the business’ name that a person is opting in to receive messages from
- Businesses must comply with applicable law
Additional best practices to create a high-quality opt-in experience:
- Users should expect the messages they receive. Set this expectation by:
- Obtaining an opt-in that encompasses the different categories of messages that you will send (ex: order updates, relevant offers, product recommendations, etc.)
- Obtaining separate opt-in by specific message category
- This aligns to the WhatsApp Policy and mitigates the risk of users blocking your business because they receive unsolicited messages
- Provide clear instructions for how people can opt out of receiving specific categories of messages and honor these requests
- Ensure opt-in and opt-out flows are clear and intuitive for users
- Avoid messaging customers too frequently
- Clearly communicate the value of receiving these important updates on WhatsApp
As a reminder, people are in control when they message with businesses on WhatsApp.
People can block or report a business at any time. When people block a business, they also can choose to tell WhatsApp why, such as “Didn’t Sign Up”. WhatsApp leverages these quality signals to determine the phone number quality rating and when applicable, they surface this as feedback to businesses as a potential reason for red (low) or yellow (medium) quality.
WhatsApp takes action to limit the reach of low quality messages. They may rate limit or automatically remove specific templates if a business’s quality is low for a sustained period of time. Over time, they may leverage additional quality signals and introduce new types of enforcement to enable high quality conversations between people and businesses using the API.