Broadcasts
A broadcast sends one message to many contacts over a messaging channel: WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger or Instagram. Each platform's own rules are applied for you — you do not have to remember which one allows what.
Open it from Broadcasts in the main navigation.
On Telegram, Messenger and Instagram a broadcast is close to what you would expect. On WhatsApp almost every rule on this page exists because Meta enforces it, and the cost of breaking those rules is not an error message — it is your number's reputation. The sections marked WhatsApp are the ones that protect it.
Before you send: get the list in
Most campaigns start with a list somebody sends you. See Contacts → Importing a list for the import itself, including how to keep columns your account has never seen before and how to tag everyone in a file at once.
The two things worth doing during the import, because they are far more work afterwards:
- Keep the extra columns. A file with
CityorPolicy numbercan turn those into custom fields as it imports. Those fields then become audience filters here. - Tag the whole file. One tag per import ("June list", "Fair leads") is the simplest audience you will ever build, and it also records where each person came from.
Creating a broadcast
New broadcast asks for four things: a channel, an audience, a message, and optionally a time.
Name it for yourself
The name is internal — the recipient never sees it. Write what you will want to read in the reports list in three months, not a title.
The audience
You can combine as many conditions as you like; a contact must match all of them:
| Condition | What it does |
|---|---|
| Contact type | Visitors, leads, customers, or all |
| Tags | Any of the selected tags, or all of them |
| Custom fields | equals · contains · is not empty · greater than · at least · less than · at most |
| Last interaction | Had a conversation in the last N days, or not in the last N days |
| Marketing opt-in | Only contacts who have given one |
As you build it, the panel counts the matches live — "1,240 recipients match this audience". Read that number before you send. It is the cheapest possible check against a filter that says something other than what you meant, and it costs nothing to get wrong at this stage.
If the audience is larger than the messages left in your plan for the period, the panel says so before you send rather than after.
The message
Two kinds:
Free text reaches only the people who messaged you in the last 24 hours. Everyone else is skipped — not failed, skipped. This is WhatsApp's rule, not ours, and it is why the panel warns you as soon as you pick free text.
Template reaches everyone, because an approved template is what WhatsApp accepts outside that 24-hour window. Pick the template, fill in its parameters, and the panel shows you which ones the template expects.
Send now, or schedule
Leaving the schedule empty sends immediately. A scheduled campaign can still be cancelled up until it starts.
WhatsApp: how fast we send, and why not faster
This is the part people are surprised by, so it is worth reading once.
The warm-up ladder
A WhatsApp number that has never sent a campaign starts at 25 new conversations a day. It climbs on evidence: 25 → 50 → 100 → 250 → 500 → 1,000, and after that the ceiling is Meta's own.
- A rung is left behind after two good days on it — days where you used at least 60% of the allowance, under 5% of attempts failed, and Meta recorded no quality complaint. The days need not be consecutive; a quiet weekend does not erase Tuesday's evidence.
- These early rungs sit deliberately below Meta's own 250 → 1K → 10K tiers. The point is to build quality signal before ever pushing against Meta's ceiling, because the ceiling is the place where getting it wrong is expensive.
A number that has already been sending thousands a day for months is not dragged back to 25 — the ladder reads its own history and starts it where it already comfortably sits.
Falling back down
If Meta signals a quality problem, the ladder drops on its own:
| Signal | What happens |
|---|---|
| Quality warning (amber) | One rung down, climbing paused 3 days |
| Number flagged, or spam/rate limits | Two rungs down, climbing paused 7 days |
Sending continues at the lower rung — a full stop would punish you twice. The pause freezes only the climb. Every demotion is written to your channel's event log with its reason, so "why did my daily limit drop?" always has an answer you can read.
The cap that actually applies
The daily cap is the lowest of: the ladder's rung, half of Meta's own tier, and any limit an operator has set for you. An operator can lower it; nobody can raise it above what the ladder and Meta allow.
When a campaign pauses itself
A campaign in progress can stop and wait rather than push messages into a refusal. The panel tells you which of these happened and what to do:
- WhatsApp paused your template. A pause lifts by itself — 3 hours the first time, 6 the next, and a third disables the template permanently. Resume the campaign once it lifts. Do not "fix" the template to get around it: editing puts it back into review, and it cannot be sent at all until Meta approves the new version — usually longer than simply waiting.
- The template was edited in WhatsApp Manager and no longer takes the same parameters. The rest would have been refused, so the campaign stopped.
- Meta is reviewing your account's quality and dropped the messages it was holding. It usually clears by itself.
- Daily limit reached. Not a problem — the rest goes out automatically as the 24-hour window frees up.
In every case nobody is dropped. Resuming picks up exactly where it stopped.
WhatsApp: does this number even have WhatsApp?
A phone number in a spreadsheet is not a promise that its owner uses WhatsApp, and Meta gives no API that answers the question directly. So ConnectWiz learns it from evidence and remembers it per contact:
- Unknown — never tried. New contacts start here and are included in campaigns: everyone deserves one attempt.
- Reachable — either they messaged you, or a message to them went through.
- Unreachable — a send failed in the way Meta reports for "no WhatsApp account". These are excluded from later campaigns automatically.
Two ways back from unreachable: the person messages you (which proves the number works), or you deliberately send them a template by hand — a manual send is treated as "I know what I am doing", and a successful one marks them reachable again.
The effect is that repeated campaigns stop re-dialling numbers that are known not to work. That matters because failed sends are exactly what Meta's quality score notices.
Watching it run
The list shows counters as they move: sent / total · skipped · failed.
Open a campaign for its report:
- The funnel — targeted → queued → sent → delivered → read → failed. Note that targeted and sent differ by the people who were skipped, and the report says why.
- Most frequent failure reasons — grouped, so one bad column in a spreadsheet shows up as one line rather than four hundred.
- Day by day — how the campaign spread out under pacing.
- Export CSV for the per-recipient detail.
One line you may see and should not worry about: "N more weren't delivered because of WhatsApp's own marketing experiment." Meta holds back a slice of marketing messages on purpose. It is permanent for those recipients, it is not billed, and it means nothing is wrong with your template or your list.
Cancelling
Cancel broadcast skips everyone not yet reached. Messages already sent cannot be recalled — no platform allows that — so the confirmation says so plainly.
Related pages
- Contacts — importing lists, custom fields, tags, and the marketing consent record
- Channels — connecting WhatsApp and the other platforms
- Usage and quotas — what a campaign consumes