WhatsApp Adds New Ways for Businesses To Send Promotional DMs

Meta’s adding some new ways for businesses to engage with potential customers on WhatsApp, including business “broadcasts”, which will enable brands to pay to amplify their offers to people who’ve previously interacted with them.

As you can see in this example, soon, businesses will be able to push promotions to people who’ve engaged with them in the past, even outside of Meta’s usual business messaging restrictions.

Users will be able to opt out of future offers direct from the message itself, or mark that they’re “Not interested” in that specific offer. Meta will monitor these responses, and will continually assess the content of those with high disinterest counts to ensure that the business is sending “high quality, engaging and relevant marketing conversations.”

Which also relates to message frequency, and Meta’s also implementing limits on the number of brand messages that a user can receive each day.

As per Meta:

“We want messages from businesses to be helpful and expected, which is why we’ve introduced limits to the number of marketing messages that people can receive, thereby minimizing inbox overload.”

These measures should reduce the intrusiveness of DM promotions, though users generally don’t like getting notifications for ads. As such, this is still a significant risk for the app, and could cause significant backlash, without adequate management from WhatsApp.

That’s why Meta’s working to ensure that users have easy ways to opt out, while it’s also outlined all the various controls and options that users have to avoid brand messaging if they choose.

And hopefully, its transparency and control measures will be enough to counter any user backlash, while also enabling another promotion option for business.

Users will also be able to reactivate offers from a brand if or when they choose:

WhatsApp has always been a challenge for Meta, in that while it has over 2 billion users, monetizing DMs has never been an easy task, for any app.

Meta has tried various approaches, and it is slowly integrating more business tools in key markets, like India, which has over 500 million WhatsApp users on its own.

Promotional options like this add to Meta’s capacity to monetize that reach, but it is treading carefully to ensure it doesn’t turn users off by enabling too many commercial opportunities.