The anti-ban playbook for WhatsApp marketing
What actually gets numbers restricted, and the pacing settings we recommend for shops sending a few thousand messages a month.
WhatsApp does not publish its spam thresholds, but the pattern is clear: restrictions follow bursts, identical messages and unhappy recipients, not volume alone.
Pace like a person
A human never sends 200 messages in a minute. Keep a random delay between 8 and 18 seconds, respect quiet hours (21:00 to 07:00) and let Marketa shuffle the order of recipients. The app's defaults are already there; the point is not to lower them.
Send to people who know you
The best predictor of a healthy number is who you write to. Build broadcast lists from contacts extracted from your own sessions, filter them by city or language, and keep a way to opt out in the message.
Personalise and localise
Use {{name}} and {{city}}: identical texts are a spam signal.
Send in the customer's language; French and English templates make this automatic.
Keep an opt-out line. A single "STOP" honoured beats ten reports.
Watch the failure rate
If more than 5 % of sends fail in a batch, something is wrong: numbers not on WhatsApp, or a disconnected session. Auto-pause stops the campaign so you can fix it instead of burning the number.