HSM Templates - How to maintain their quality ✅ (and the health of your WhatsApp line 🩺)
In this article, we'll tell you how to achieve high-quality messages and their benefits for your business.
Quality conversations can promote benefits such as: developing long-term relationships with customers, keeping WhatsApp as a distinct channel for sharing valuable information, and reducing the risk of customers blocking or reporting your business and WhatsApp imposing limits on your outreach.
The secret behind a high-quality message
How is quality communication defined in WhatsApp Business Api?
All messages should reflect these three key features:
Expected: The customer has chosen to receive this message from a company via WhatsApp.
Timely: The customer receives the message at a suitable time (e.g., shortly after interacting with the company or at a requested pace).
Relevant: Messages are personalized for the customer, contain valuable information, and pose clear calls to action.
Opt-In or voluntary subscription. What is it, and why is it crucial?
Voluntarily subscribing represents the customer's decision to open a line of communication with a company. It confirms their interest in receiving messages from the company via WhatsApp, knowing they can interrupt the communication at any time.
Meta's business policy has the following requirements:
- The company must make it entirely clear that the person voluntarily subscribed to receive their messages via WhatsApp.
- Companies must make the business name entirely clear to which the person is voluntarily subscribing to receive messages.
- Companies must comply with applicable laws.
Meta uses some tools to help ensure continuity of the connection between businesses and their customers through quality conversations. These tools are: number quality, messaging limits, policy enforcement, and user control:
👉 Number Quality
Your quality rating is based on the number of messages received by recipients in the last seven days and is weighted for immediacy. The rating is determined by a combination of quality clues derived from the conversations you have with your users. This combination may include user feedback clues, such as blocks or reports, to the reasons users state after blocking a company.
How to maintain your high rating
- Only send messages to those users who have voluntarily subscribed to receive communications from your company.
- Draft messages that follow the "expected, timely, relevant" framework.
- Avoid sending open, "welcome" or "introduction" messages.
- Monitor the frequency of sending your messages.
- Ensure 100% that your messages comply with WhatsApp's business and commerce policies.
Category drop
Every time you start a new conversation with a unique customer, Meta will check your phone number quality rating. If the rating was Low in the last 7 days, it will immediately reduce your message limit by one level.
If your quality status reaches a low status or the status of your phone number changes, your status will change to Marked or Restricted.
Marked: This status appears when the quality rating reaches a low level. Companies cannot update message level limits if they have the Marked status. If the message quality improves to a high or medium state before 7 days have passed since the state changed to Marked, the status will return to Connected. If the quality rating does not improve, the status will return to Connected, but you will be placed at a lower message limit level. Restricted: This status appears when you reach your message limit. During a Restricted state phase, you cannot send any notification messages until the 24-hour interval is reset. You can reply to messages sent by customers.
👉 Messaging Limits
Messaging limits determine the number of individual users your company can send messages to daily. This includes new conversations as well as conversations already established with users. The messaging limit does NOT restrict the number of messages your company can send, but only the number of users you can try to send messages to. It also does NOT apply to messages sent in response to a conversation started by a user within 24 hours.
Limits by level
- Level 1: Allows your company to send messages to a thousand individual customers in a continuous 24-hour period.
- Level 2: Allows your company to send messages to ten thousand individual customers in a continuous 24-hour period.
- Level 3: Allows your company to send messages to a hundred thousand individual customers in a continuous 24-hour period.
- Level 4: Allows your company to send messages to an unlimited number of individual customers in a continuous 24-hour period.
You will be automatically upgraded to a higher level based on the volume and quality of the messages you send. Similarly, you can be downgraded if users block or report your messages.
👉 Policy Enforcement by Meta
Templates on hold
If a message template reaches the lowest quality rating (status "Active" and "low quality"), it will automatically be paused for a while to protect the quality rating of phone numbers that have used that template.
The pause duration is set as follows: 1st incident: Paused for 3 hours 2nd incident: Paused for 6 hours 3rd incident: Disabled.
When a message template is paused (status: "on hold"), it cannot be sent to customers, and you should stop any automatic text messaging campaigns that rely on it. You may want to edit a paused template if you feel that modifying its content will reduce the amount of negative feedback it receives.
👉 User Control
WhatsApp has a number of controls for the customer when exchanging messages with a company.
These controls help them decide which companies can send them messages and when to receive them. Customers can choose to block or report a company at any time, and they also have the option to send feedback to WhatsApp about the reasons behind a block. This information helps Meta determine the business phone number's quality rating.
Reasons for blocks
When people block a company, WhatsApp gives them the option to indicate the reason, for example: • I no longer need it • I didn't sign up • Spam • Offensive messages • Other.
When appropriate, if a company has a medium (yellow) or low (red) quality rating, Meta points out comments like "I didn't sign up" or "Offensive messages" among the reasons to put a template on hold and the modification of the business phone number quality rating. This helps provide detailed information about a company's quality rating and the chances of improving it.
So, how do you proactively manage quality? Delivering high-quality messages and experiences to your customers is a fundamental part of any reliable conversational messaging strategy. You can guide yourself with this checklist:
Now you know why exchanging high-quality messages with your customers can ensure your success with the WhatsApp Business Platform in the long run and help promote your company's growth. 🚀
How do you proactively manage quality?
Delivering high-quality messages and experiences to your customers is a fundamental part of any reliable conversational messaging strategy. You can guide yourself with this checklist:
- Re-evaluate the flows to opt in favor of and against receiving messages to ensure that the information sent to your customers is as expected.
- Make sure your message templates are expected, timely, and relevant. Determine if the volumes of certain templates have increased or if new templates have been recently added.
- Re-evaluate the frequency of your messages. Ensure that your customers are not receiving messages more often than desired.
- Review the content of the messages to ensure it clearly presents the benefits for your customer and that the language used is concise and appealing.
- Review the bot's functionality to ensure it is operating as expected and that customer inquiries can be resolved quickly and effectively.
- Find out if there have been changes in customer perception by studying the metrics your business can generate; for example, customer satisfaction.
- "Review the 30-day quality history table, as well as the quality reasons behind the red and yellow indicators, and/or the quality of the templates. These elements can help you determine when the quality dropped and why.
- Ensure that your company complies with our trade and business policies.
Now you know why exchanging high-quality messages with your customers can ensure your success with the WhatsApp Business Platform in the long run and help promote your company's growth. 🚀