Building and maintaining your WhatsApp deliverability

Meta assigns a quality rating to each WhatsApp Business phone number based on how customers respond to your recent messages. The rating is displayed in three levels:

• Green (high): Your messages are performing well.
• Yellow (medium): Your quality is at risk. Review your recent content and audience.
• Red (low): Your quality is poor. If it doesn't improve, then your messaging limit can be reduced or your number can be restricted.

The rating is based on a recent window of messages, so it can recover after you address the cause. The most common causes of quality rating drops include the following:

• Messaging customers who didn't opt in, or whose consent is old or unclear.
• Sending too many messages in a short period, or messaging the same customers too often.
• Sending content that customers find irrelevant, repetitive, or misleading.

To view your current quality rating, sign in to your Meta Business account, open WhatsApp Manager, and then go to Account tools > Phone numbers. For more information, refer to Meta's documentation about your quality rating.

Your messaging limit controls how many customers you can start conversations with in a 24-hour period. New WhatsApp Business Accounts start with a lower limit, and the limit increases as you maintain a green quality rating and reach more unique customers over time. If your quality rating drops, then your limit can stop increasing or be reduced.

For the current limits that apply to new accounts and per-user marketing messages, refer to considerations.

Meta monitors how customers respond to each of your approved message templates. A template that customers frequently block or report can be paused, and a template that's paused repeatedly can be deactivated. Template quality directly affects your sender reputation and quality rating.

You can check the status of your templates in the Shopify Messaging app under Templates.

To keep your templates in good standing:

• Follow the content guidelines when you create a campaign.
• Make each message relevant to the customers you send it to.
• Avoid sending the same promotional template too frequently to the same customers.

You can send WhatsApp marketing messages only to customers who explicitly opted in to receive them. Sending to customers who didn't opt in leads to blocks and reports, which lower your quality rating quickly.

Every WhatsApp marketing message automatically includes a STOP-to-unsubscribe instruction, and this instruction can't be removed. When a customer replies STOP, they're unsubscribed automatically and excluded from your future WhatsApp campaigns. To keep reaching customers, focus on collecting clear consent through opt-in methods. To learn how to collect and import customer consent, refer to Set up marketing consent for WhatsApp.

Check your quality rating and messaging limit after each large campaign or content change. If your rating drops to yellow or red, then take the following actions:

• Check whether any recent templates were rejected, paused, or removed in the Shopify Messaging app under Templates.
• Check whether your phone number's status changed to flagged or restricted in WhatsApp Manager.
• Reduce your sending volume and send only to your most engaged customers.
• Review your recent templates and address any content issues before you resume your usual volume.