As a business, reaching out to your customer base via WhatsApp can be made as easier as sending a text to a friend. You can do this by upgrading to WhatsApp Business API and automating your conversations for different use cases based on the segment of audience you’re targeting. 

Before sending any messages to your (prospective) customers, you need to draft templates for those and send it to WhatsApp for approvals. Once approved, you can craft messages using the templates and schedule or automate them to be sent immediately or later. You can even set up a string of messages to be shared at regular intervals of time to keep your customers engaged using the drip marketing capability. 

You can use approved WhatsApp templates to send messages to users who have never reached out to you earlier and those who have not messaged you in the last 24 hours. Before sending messages to any user, ensure you have received an opt-in from them to receive messages from you. This is mandatory as per WhatsApp policies.

The world’s most popular messaging platform continues to rule the roost as it ensures this level of professionalism by mandating and approving WhatsApp message templates–for all communication between businesses and individual users. This helps the former streamline their communication and build focused conversational journeys while respecting user privacy and preferences. Talk about a win-win.

It is important for businesses who are utilizing WhatsApp automation to send messages to users only with their explicit consent. If not, this might result in users reporting the WhatsApp Business API account as spam, which might result in the blocking of the business’ number.

Let’s say you’ve submitted a WhatsApp message template but the Meta-owned platform rejected or blocked it. What should you do next? 

Don’t worry, help is at hand. 

What is a WhatsApp message template?

WhatsApp templates are pre-approved messages for marketing, utility, and authentication conversations. Ensure your messaging is genuine and professional and each text offers something worthwhile to your users.  

These help nurture and convert your leads to deals, build a brand, improve customer engagement besides increasing your team productivity and efficiency.

If you have a verified WhatsApp Business manager account, you can create up to 6,000 templates. However, unverified accounts can still create up to 250 templates.

How does the template approval work?

Once you have drafted the template using Business Management API or the WhatsApp Business Manager, you can submit it for approval. 

The approval can take up to 24 hours, and WhatsApp will keep you in the loop regarding the approval status. Your templates can have the following statuses:

1. In-Review: This indicates that the template is being reviewed.
2. Rejected: The template has been rejected during the review process or violates WhatsApp’s business policy.
3. Active - Quality pending: The message template can be sent to customers and is awaiting quality feedback and engagement data from customers.
4. Active - High Quality: The message template is ready to be sent to the larger customer base and has received little to no negative customer feedback. 
5. Active - Medium Quality: The message template can be sent to customers. However, it has received negative feedback and low read rates from multiple customers.
6. Active - Low Quality: The message template has received negative feedback from multiple customers. While you can still send this message templates with this status, they are at risk of being paused or disabled soon. At this stage, it is recommended that you address these issues before sending it further. 
7. Paused: The template has been paused and cannot be sent to customers due to recurring negative feedback.
8. Disabled: The template has been disabled and cannot be sent to customers due to recurring negative feedback.
9. Appeal Requested: This indicates that you have requested an appeal on the template approval. 

Approved message templates immediately move to the ‘Active - Quality pending’ status. You can use the message template as long as it is in ‘Active’ status, regardless of the quality rating. If the template continuously receives negative feedback based on usage or customer engagement, the status will change. It cannot be sent to customers until it becomes active again. 

Template pacing and quality rating of the message templates

WhatsApp uses a template pacing mechanism to provide early feedback on the marketing and utility templates. The purpose of template pacing is to identify templates that have received poor feedback and engagement, giving you time to address the issues before they are sent to a larger customer base and avoiding the likelihood of number blocking and negative feedback from customers. 

During template pacing, messages will be sent to an unspecified number of customers. On reaching this threshold, WhatsApp pauses the process of  sending further messages to the remaining users you’ve selected to await quality feedback on the sent messages. If they receive high engagement rates from the first cohort of customers indicating good quality, messages sent using the template will be  delivered to the rest of the  chosen customer base. Otherwise, it will be paused, giving you a chance to edit the template. 

The following types of message templates are subjected to template pacing:

1. Newly-created templates
2. Paused messages waiting to be unpaused–often seen in low-quality message templates. 
3. Previously-created templates awaiting active status. 

For utility messages, template pacing occurs only when a utility template is paused. Once a utility message template is paused, all other templates will likely be paced for the next seven days. 

What happens when your message template is rejected?

As far as your message template content is concerned, it can rejected due to the following reasons: 

1. Variable parameters in the template are missing or have mismatched curly braces. 
2. The message template starts or ends with a variable. 
3. Variable parameters contain special characters. 
4. Variable parameters are not sequential. 
5. Variable parameter values are not defined.
6. The content contains spelling or grammatical errors, contains threatening language, or is a duplicate of an existing template.  
7. The submission format for testing your API connection needs to be corrected. 
8. The URLs for your links are shortened or do not belong to your business. 
9. The message template(s) contains content that violates WhatsApp Commerce Policy or WhatsApp Business Policy.

Best practices to avoid WhatsApp message template rejections

Creating a WhatsApp marketing campaign involves strategic planning. Dealing with message template rejection is not a problem anybody would want to deal with, mainly because it is time-consuming and might delay your entire campaign. While you can quickly resolve some of the technical errors in the message template, keep in mind the following best practices to ensure that your campaigns run smoothly without rejection hiccups.

Get customer opt-ins before reaching out to them 

Customer opt-ins are a cornerstone of successful WhatsApp marketing campaigns. Respect for privacy is paramount, especially on a platform like WhatsApp, where users are highly active. Secure opt-ins from customers at the point of sign-up, clearly outlining the channel's purpose (promotional or informational), the option for customers to reach out, and a straightforward opt-out process if needed.  

Avoid frequent messaging

Engage with customers only if needed and when you are sure customers would benefit from the engagement. Frequent promotional messages seem too intrusive and might push customers to block or report your business. 

Experiment with campaigns that foster engagement

In a stricter sense, promoting your business is about the product/service you offer, the benefits, and the discounts and offers. But things have changed drastically in the last decade, where promoting business is about personalization. You need to engage your customers right from the get-go, knowing what they seek at every stage of their buyer's journey and providing content accordingly. 

Customers often look forward to such content and are likely to engage more. As a result, it would make sense to plan your campaigns accordingly, increasing your quality ratings and, thereby, your campaign effectiveness.

Actively seek customer feedback 

Understanding what your customers want from your business is crucial. Customers appreciate when their feedback is taken seriously and acted upon. Use WhatsApp Flows to actively collect customer feedback and engage with them regularly, fostering a sense of community and improving your service.

Understand WhatsApp policies 

When in doubt, stay true to WhatsApp Business and Commerce policies. The sooner you get the gist of the policies, the easier it will be to get all the approvals ready and kick-start your campaigns. 

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