Best practices to maintain Account Health and prevent being blocked
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It is important to build and maintain a high quality customer experience on WhatsApp so that customers can keep using this channel to communicate with your business.
The WhatsApp Business API has different control elements to ensure the WhatsApp environment is healthy and users are not bombarded by unwanted messages. A block or report action against your business keeps you from contacting those users and impacts your phone number reach and the template availability. Learn more on Phone Number Quality Rating and Message Template Statuses docs.
This means that when using the WhatsApp Business API, a business needs to be aware of the rules and warning alerts, ensuring the strategy is aligned with Meta policies and provides a good experience to WhatsApp users.
To assist you in maintaining a high-quality experience for your customers, we've outlined key elements and best practices below:
There are different elements that monitor and ensure an account’s health. Here is a summary of them:
The WABA must be owned by the Business who is sending messages. Adding users who do not belong to this company can cause your Business Manager to be blocked.
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The WABA must be owned by the Business who is sending messages. Violations of policies can apply to the entire WABA, even if the issue involves only one reported phone number.
Read more:
The Display Name must have the same brand as the Business who is sending messages. Impersonating other businesses or sending messages as a third party will cause the WABA and Business Manager to be blocked.
Messaging Limits and Quality Ratings are managed in the phone number level, but policy violations can impact the entire WABA.
Read more:
To start a conversation with a user, you always need a Template Message. This is, then, an essential part of your account’s health. If you have a vague, low quality or abusive template, your full account will suffer the consequences.
Initiating conversations with users requires a high-quality Template Message. Templates that are vague, of low quality, or abusive can negatively impact your account.
Read more:
360dialog (or any other BSP) does not have control over the decision to approve a template.
All reviews and approvals are conducted by a specific Trust and Safety team inside Meta. They may not provide detailed information on why a specific message template was rejected, while a similar one with the same content was approved. However, please be assured that Meta's team thoroughly reviews every request. If you do not agree with their decision, you have the option to appeal it.
Overall, Template Messages need to be:
Expected - Make sure users have explicitly opted-in to receiving this message. This consent should not be bundled with transaction updates or other actions. The opt-in should also clearly state what types of messages are expected, to be received via WhatsApp, and the business name.
Timely - customers should receive the message at a logical time (ie. soon after engaging with the business, or at a requested cadence)
Relevant - the message is personalized, contain valuable information, and outline clear call to action(s) for the customers
Any tiny detail can prevent a template from being approved. If you are creating duplicates or similar templates but are confused if one of them is approved and the other isn't, double check the small details that might differentiate the two.
For example, if you duplicate an approved template or create a new one with similar content, please make sure that the language is the same for both. A simpler variation such as en_GB instead of en can cause the template rejection. It's important to also watch out for small word changes and different emojis.
Below are some tips for increasing the chances of getting your Template Messages approved:
Clarity: be specific and clear. The reviewers may not know a customer’s business and need more clarity.
Avoid spam promotion: You should avoid using language or tactics that are designed solely to promote a product or service, without providing any real value or benefit to the user. It's important to be mindful of several activities that could fall under this category, such as upselling, cold-calling, or using language that may sound overly promotional.
Spelling: check for spelling and grammatical errors and use appropriate formatting (e.g., double curly brackets for parameters).
Name: make your message template name clear. Instead of using a name like template_014, use bus_ticket_details. Remember that someone from Facebook will be reviewing your templates. Providing more clarity gives reviewers context around how the template will be used.
Create context: if you need to write a message template to re-open the 24-hour window, we would suggest starting with some mention of the previous conversation thread. Make sure it's easy to navigate and understand, and that it provides a positive user experience.
Choose an appropriate category: don’t forget to use the correct message template type. Choosing the correct one will increase the chances of getting your templates approved and will provide more information to WhatsApp during the approval process. Avoid message templates with mixed content, to facilitate the categorization approval process. You can include allow_category_change=true in your API request to avoid template rejection due to miscategorization. Including this parameter and value will allow Meta to assign whatever category they determine to be appropriate.
See Template Messages.
Header (optional): you can add a title or choose which type of media you'll use for this header. Image, PDF and Video is supported. See Template Elements.
WhatsApp provides a marketing opt-out button that can be added to any template message. See Quick Reply buttons.
Clients must take the necessary steps to store which clients have chosen to opt-out of receiving marketing templates and stop sending these messages to them.
There is no WhatsApp or 360dialog feature to collect this information.
Not doing so will negatively impact your block rate and quality score.
Using an opt-out button will help you:
Reduce block rate: You’ll have a lower risk of campaign stoppages as a result. A high block rate may cause a campaign to be suspended or the quality rating of your phone number to decline. Giving customers the option to opt out instead of blocking your business ensures that campaigns can run uninterrupted.
Allow faster scaling: Your business may encounter quality issues as you scale your marketing outreach on WhatsApp. This usually happens when customers block certain templates. Allowing customers to opt out of marketing messages may reduce your block rate, which may help you increase your messaging limits faster.
Give customers options for how they want to hear from you: By letting customers opt out of marketing messages, you’ll keep your ability to contact them with critical information such as transactional and customer care messages.
Obtain better insights into customer preferences: Currently, your business can’t see which customers have blocked you. With the opt-out button, you will be able to see who has opted out of your marketing messages. This can help you learn from and improve your campaigns.
We recommend that you continue to optimize the user experience when designing your opt-out flow.
Here are some tips for creating a high-quality opt-out experience:
Honor all opt-out requests: It is important that your business takes the necessary steps to stop sending marketing messages to customers who have opted out. Otherwise, you’ll create a negative experience for your customers, which may impact your block rate and quality score. Also, you should stop sending marketing messages to these customers from all of your WhatsApp phone numbers.
Send a confirmation reply to customers who request to opt out to:
Include an option for customers to opt back in. This is helpful for people who change their minds or who have accidentally tapped the marketing opt-out button.
Ask customers for feedback on why they’ve opted out or what types of content they prefer to receive instead. This can help your business improve marketing messages and audience targeting.
Identify messages to add the marketing opt-out button to: Adding a marketing opt-out button to every message may be repetitive and even encourage customers to opt out. We see opt out works best when included in the following types of messages:
The first message a customer receives from your business.
The first message after a longer period without marketing messages.
Messages that are sent to unengaged customers.
It is imperative to monitor the quality signals (via webhook, WhatsApp Manager, or 360dialog Hub) to assess how your messages are being received by users and act on relevant updates as quickly as possible. Once the account is banned, there is no turning back and an Appeal request should be raised to be able to return messaging.
You will receive webhook events for accounts violations and restrictions. Then, you can act whenever there is a need, like when quality is Low or status is Flagged.
The following webhooks and APIs provide real-time information and updates.
Use the phone_number_quality_update webhook to monitor notifications whenever a Business Account has violated a policy, and when applicable, messaging restriction type and duration.
What to watch for: Any quality ratings different than High. They indicate negative feedback from users and may impact the phone number reach.
Additionally, the Flagged status occurs when the quality rating reaches a low state. If the message quality improves to a high or medium state and maintains it for 7 days, the status will return to Connected. If the quality rating doesn't improve, your status will still return to Connected, but you'll be placed in a lower messaging limit tier.
Learn more on Phone Number Quality docs.
Use the message_template_status_update webhook to monitor notifications whenever a Business Account has violated a policy, and when applicable, messaging restriction type and duration.
What to watch for: The Flagged status. This status indicates negative feedback from users, or low read-rates. After a template enters Flagged status, if the quality rating does not improve within 7 days, the template across all languages will be Disabled. Learn more on Message Template Statuses docs.
On Business Manager, go to the WhatsApp Manager and look for the following tabs:
Phone Numbers Tab
Check the current phone number quality rating column. Mouse over to see the reason users gave for their negative feedback, if available.
Go to Insights and check the quality for the last 30 days.
Message Templates tab
Check the current message template quality rating column:
Violations will be shown in your Client Hub under your WABA. You will also receive Hub notifications whenever a warning is triggered.
We also recommend you to implement a routine of reviewing the user engagement on the conversation flow. This way, before you receive a signal on webhooks that indicates negative feedback from users or low read-rates (quality rating = medium or low, status = Flagged), you can try to understand where you can improve the conversation experience.
As an example, these are two ways you can understand user engagement:
Response time
Monitor how much time it takes for you to answer client messages. Ideally this should be instant, so watch out for increases and peaks. Important metrics: first message response time and average response time.
Customer messaging journey steps
Check if users are getting through the entire messaging journey you planned.
A few questions to help you analyze metrics:
Are users dropping on an unexpected step?
Is there a specific message that is causing confusion?
Are users getting looped in a sequence of steps?
Are users completing the final action you want them to perform?
With this measurement in place you can run A/B testing and see if changes in the experience improves user feedback. Some things you could try to test if it improves the experience:
Change the phrasing
Split the question into more questions,
Aggregating multiple questions into one
After the test, analyze the new metrics and compare them to the old ones.
