Over the past few years, WhatsApp Business has gained more than 200 million new users every month. And that means that a lot of companies are sending messages to people. Some of these messages might be spam. For clients, the only choices were to either let them send texts and deals or block the business account completely. That will finally change with WhatsApp.
Right now, the company is trying out new ways for people to tell businesses what kinds of messages they should get and shouldn’t get. For certain types of texts, this includes buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume.”
Meta said it will start trying how relationships work around the world. For instance, in the picture below, users can say whether they want to receive “offers and announcements” or not. They can also decide not to get this kind of information anymore. In the future, users will be able to restart messages if they want to get deals from a brand during the holiday season.
Businesses can use WhatsApp’s API to send messages based on one of four types: marketing (new goods, deals), utility (order updates, account balances), authentication (one-time passwords), and service (customer questions).
In the past, customers couldn’t stop getting one type of message while still getting others. These groups exist in the backend. For example, you might want to get updates on your purchases and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but you couldn’t individually let them know you weren’t interested in marketing messages.
In places like India and Brazil, a phone number linked to WhatsApp is often the main way that people talk to each other, instead of email. You can choose to stop receiving promotional letters when you’re on email, but there were no such options on WhatsApp. Users got a lot of spammy business texts because of this.
The business has been thinking about adding more controls to business messages. In September, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging revenue at Meta, talked to Parhlo World outside of a WhatsApp Business event in India. She gave hints about this feature.
“One of the most important things we do is make it clear that you are working with businesses.” The strongest message you can give that you don’t want to talk to them is to block and report them. This tells us that you don’t want this business on the site. She also said, “We are starting to think about how we can give users more preferences so they can be more specific.”
Srinivasan also said that businesses should be taught about spam and be helped to see how some of their campaigns aren’t meeting the platform’s or users’ standards. This will help lower spam in the long run.
The company started limiting the number of marketing messages a person can get every day earlier this year, but they didn’t say how many they would limit.
WhatsApp advertised itself for a long time as a place where people could talk to each other privately. In the past few years, the company has added tools to help people start and join groups, send messages as a creator or publisher, and talk directly with customers as a business. The app has separate tabs for both communities and broadcast stations.
Business chats still show up in the main chat inbox, though, and there’s no way to hide them. The company said on its Q3 2024 quarterly call that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for the group of other apps that made $434 million in the quarter. The company will have to find a way to make money without sending too many business texts to WhatsApp users, which would turn them off.
We asked Srinivasan about this balance and the chance of making a separate area for business messages. She told us that some of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and not part of the main inbox.
Also Read: The Age Limit for Whatsapp in the Uk and Eu Has Been Lowered to 13
“Being in your inbox is what you want to do most with WhatsApp.” I love the ideas we have for how to help businesses when I think about whether we should make a different experience for them. “The reason we’re educating businesses and putting money into user controls is that we want the standard of what should be in your inbox to feel really high,” she said.
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