Send a campaign without getting your number blocked

WhatsApp is the highest-opening channel most businesses have. It is also the one where a bad campaign has consequences, because Meta scores your number and acts on the score.

How Meta judges you

Two things, and they are linked:

Quality rating — green, yellow or red, driven mostly by how many recipients block or report you.
Messaging limit — how many unique customers you may message in 24 hours. It rises as you send well-received messages, and falls when the rating drops.

A red rating restricts the number. Enough of it, and the number is disabled. This is why the advice below is not politeness — it is operational.

Only message people who agreed to hear from you. The consent ledger records who opted in, when, from where and what wording they were shown — so when someone asks, you can answer.

Buying a list is the fastest way to lose a number. People who never heard of you report rather than block, and reports are weighted heavily.

Before the first campaign

Warm the number up. A brand-new number sending to five thousand people on day one looks exactly like spam. Start small — a few hundred — and grow as the rating holds green.
Segment. A relevant message to 500 people beats a generic one to 5,000 and does less damage. Segment on order history, locality, pipeline stage or a custom field.
Check the template category. Promotional content must be a marketing template. Disguising it as utility is reclassified by Meta and counted against you.
Send yourself a test and read it on a phone. Line breaks and variable substitution look different there.

Sending

Time it. Business hours in the recipient's timezone. A marketing message at 11pm gets blocked, not read.
Pace it. Spreading a large send over hours keeps the rating stable and gives your team a chance to answer the replies.
Be ready for replies. A campaign that nobody answers is worse than no campaign. Have people on the inbox for the hour after it goes out.

Frequency

The honest guideline is at most weekly for most businesses, and monthly for many. The question to ask before each send is whether the recipient would be glad to get it. If the answer is no, the number pays for it.

Opting out

Every marketing message must give a way to stop. Opt-outs are honoured automatically — someone who has opted out is excluded from future campaigns without anyone having to remember.

Honouring them quickly is the cheapest protection there is: a person who can stop easily does that instead of reporting you.

Watching it

After a send, look at delivery, read and reply rates, and at the block and report numbers. The last one matters most. If it is climbing, stop and change the content or the list before the next campaign, because the rating takes far longer to recover than it does to fall.