The list you already own will outperform any advertising you buy this month. Customers who enquired and never closed, buyers from two years ago, everyone who attended a demonstration: that audience knows who you are, and reaching them costs almost nothing.
It is also the fastest way to lose the WhatsApp number your whole team depends on, if it is done carelessly.
What actually gets a WhatsApp business number blocked?
Messaging strangers, sending too fast and sending from a personal account, far more than volume. In order of severity:
Messaging strangers. People with no relationship to your business report messages as unwanted, and reports are the input the platform weights most heavily. A bought list produces them at a rate no amount of good writing offsets.
Speed. A thousand messages leaving in one burst from a number that normally sends twenty looks exactly like what it looks like. Spreading the same thousand over a period keeps the pattern ordinary.
Sending from a personal account. A Business API account exists for this, carries the right identity and behaves predictably at volume. A personal number sending campaign traffic is operating outside its design.
Fix those three and volume itself stops being the risk factor people assume it is.
Should you message your whole list or a segment?
Message a segment. The instinct is to message everybody, and it is almost always wrong. A campaign to a defined group performs better and costs less reputation than the same message to the whole database.
Useful segments in most businesses: everybody at a particular pipeline stage, everybody from one lead source, everybody in a city where you are running an offer, everybody who has not been contacted since a given month, and everybody who bought a specific product and might want its companion.
The last one deserves a mention because it is consistently the highest performing and the least used. Existing customers are the easiest people in the world to sell to and the group most businesses never contact deliberately.
How should a bulk WhatsApp message be written?
Write it as though one person will read it, because that is what happens. Nobody receives your campaign as a campaign; they receive one message on a phone.
Say who you are in the first line, because the number may not be saved. Put the useful thing before the offer. Keep it to something a person can read without expanding the notification. And give a way to respond that is not a link, since a reply to a message is worth ten clicks on anything.
Blanks that fill from the record make the message read as though somebody typed it. The customer name and one relevant detail is usually enough.
Where should replies to a WhatsApp campaign go?
Into a shared inbox where an unanswered reply stays visible, attached to the customer record. This is the part most teams get wrong, and it wastes the campaign entirely.
A message to nine hundred people produces perhaps forty replies. If those land in one person personal WhatsApp, most are read once and forgotten, and a customer who took the trouble to answer hears nothing. A shared inbox where a reply is visibly unanswered until somebody deals with it converts a campaign into conversations.
Attaching the reply to the customer record matters too, so whoever picks it up can see the calls and notes that came before rather than starting cold.
What is a good first WhatsApp campaign to send?
Filter to everybody who enquired more than three months ago and never bought. Write four sentences: who you are, that you spoke previously, one thing that has changed since, and a question they can answer in three words. Send it over an evening rather than in a minute. Have somebody watching the inbox the next morning.
The same campaign as four steps:
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1. Filter | Everybody who enquired more than three months ago and never bought |
| 2. Write | Four sentences: who you are, that you spoke before, one thing that has changed, a question they can answer in three words |
| 3. Send | From your Business API account, spread over an evening rather than in a minute |
| 4. Watch | Somebody on the shared inbox the next morning, so no reply goes unanswered |
Most businesses running that campaign for the first time are surprised by the reply rate, because nobody had asked those people anything in a year.
Dialmio sends campaigns in measured batches from your own Business API account, collapses duplicate numbers so each person receives one message, and lands replies in a shared inbox and on the lead thread. The detail is on bulk WhatsApp campaigns.