WhatsApp broadcast best practices: segments, timing, frequency and per-user limits

WhatsApp broadcast best practices come down to five decisions you make before pressing send: who receives the message, when, how often, what it asks them to do, and what happens when someone says stop. Get those right and a broadcast feels like a useful note from a shop the customer knows. Get them wrong and the same message produces blocks, a falling quality rating and a growing pile of failed sends. This article is about the marketing side of a broadcast. If your main worry is the number itself being restricted, read our step-by-step guide on sending bulk WhatsApp messages without getting blocked alongside it.

A broadcast here means a message template sent through the WhatsApp Business Platform to many opted-in contacts, as a campaign. It is not the broadcast list feature of the WhatsApp Business app, which works differently and is disabled on numbers that use coexistence.

Segment by engagement, not just by attributes

Most businesses segment by what they know about a customer: city, last purchase, product category. That is useful, but the single best predictor of whether a broadcast lands is whether the person has engaged with your recent messages. Meta's per-user marketing limits are themselves based on engagement, so a cold contact is both less likely to read and more likely to be capped.

A practical three-tier split that works for most Indian businesses:

In Broadchat you build these in CRM → Segment with the rule builder, and keep simple labels such as diwali-buyer or wholesale in CRM → Tags. After each campaign, the report lets you filter recipients by read and reply status; use those filters with Retarget in CRM → Bulk Campaign to send a follow-up only to people who read but did not reply, instead of to the whole list again.

Find your own send window

You will find many articles quoting a best day or hour for WhatsApp. We do not publish one, because nobody has shown us evidence that applies across a jeweller in Surat, a coaching institute in Kota and a cloud kitchen in Pune. Your customers' routine decides it. A better method is to test:

1. Pick two plausible windows for your audience, for example 11 am and 7:30 pm on a weekday.
2. Split one segment into two random halves and schedule the same template to each half in a different window (Broadchat campaigns can be scheduled to a date and time).
3. Compare replies, not just reads. Use the Replied In filter (24h, 48h, 7d) in the campaign report.
4. Repeat the test two or three times before trusting a pattern.

Some timing rules are common sense rather than data. Avoid late-night sends: they annoy people and leave replies unanswered until morning. If your team is offline at night, add a Working Hours step in your chatbot so replies after hours get an honest "we will reply at 10 am" message. And remember that your broadcast creates work: send when someone can answer the replies.

Set a frequency cap before Meta sets one for you

WhatsApp limits how many marketing templates a person can receive from businesses, based on their engagement. Meta does not publish the exact numbers. When a message hits that limit it fails with error 131049, and Meta's guidance is to wait at least 24 hours before trying again. See our explainer on error 131049 and the per-user marketing limit for the full picture.

Because the platform caps you anyway, decide your own limit first, so the messages that do arrive are the ones you care about most. A reasonable starting point for most retail businesses is one promotional broadcast per contact per week, with exceptions for genuine events such as a festival sale. Write it down, and check each new campaign's segment against the previous campaign before scheduling.

Two rules make frequency easier to manage:

• Utility is not a loophole. Order, booking and payment updates are utility and are not subject to per-user marketing limits. Promotions are, whatever you call them. Meta recategorises templates automatically, and repeated misuse can bring error 131064 across your account. See how template categories work.
• Replies change the rules. Marketing messages sent inside an open customer service window do not count toward the per-user limit. That is one more reason to design broadcasts that invite a reply.

Respect your portfolio's messaging limit

Separate from per-user limits, your business portfolio has a messaging limit: how many unique people it can reach with templates outside a customer service window in a rolling 24 hours. The tiers are 250, 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 and unlimited, shared by all numbers in the portfolio. A 9,400-contact list on a portfolio at the 2,000 tier takes at least five days to reach everyone. Plan big campaigns around the tier you are on today, not the one you hope to reach. Broadchat's campaign pacing respects the number's limit and throughput, so the campaign continues over time rather than failing in a burst.

Write one message with one action

Broadcasts that try to say everything get skimmed. A strong marketing template has:

• A specific opening with the customer's name and a reason they would care ("Your size M kurta is back in stock").
• One action, preferably as a quick-reply button (Show me, Book a slot) rather than a link. A tapped button is a reply, so it opens a 24-hour customer service window in which your chatbot or team can continue freely.
• An image only when the image sells. A product photo helps; a generic festive banner with no product rarely does.
• An honest way out. A footer such as "Reply STOP to stop offers" costs nothing and keeps reports and blocks down.

Keep the list clean

• Remove numbers that failed as invalid or not on WhatsApp in your last two campaigns; export the report as CSV to find them.
• Merge duplicates saved with and without the country code.
• Move contacts who have not read anything in 90 days into your cold segment.
• Never import a bought or scraped list. People on it have not agreed to hear from you, and Meta's policy requires opt-in that names your business. Our guide to building a WhatsApp opt-in list covers legal ways to grow one.

Handle STOP replies the same day

WhatsApp's Business Messaging Policy requires you to honour opt-out requests. In Broadchat, the workflow is:

1. Open the campaign from CRM → Bulk Campaign and set the Reply is filter to Stop Notification. This lists recipients whose reply starts with "stop".
2. For each, open the contact and untick Subscribed to broadcasts. Campaigns sent to All Contacts From CRM include only subscribed contacts, and you can add the subscribed condition to your saved segments.
3. Also check replies under Other for messages such as "please don't send these" or "band karo", which mean the same thing in plain words.

Broadchat does not unsubscribe contacts automatically from a STOP reply today, so make this a named person's daily task during campaign weeks, or add a Match Keyword chatbot that confirms the opt-out to the customer and alerts your team.

Pre-send checklist

For budgeting, Meta charges per delivered template; marketing templates cost more than utility ones. Current India figures are on our WhatsApp API pricing explainer, and the pricing calculator turns a segment size into an estimate.

Where this fits

Broadcasts are one part of a WhatsApp marketing plan; the full sequence, from opt-in to automation to measurement, is in our WhatsApp marketing strategy guide. To judge whether a campaign paid off, see measuring WhatsApp campaign ROI. Broadchat's broadcast campaigns include segments, scheduling, retargeting and per-recipient reports, and agencies can run them for clients under their own brand through the partner program.