How to Run a WhatsApp Broadcast Campaign, Start to Finish

A campaign is not the message. The message is maybe a fifth of the work. The rest is who gets it, why they should care, when it lands, and what you do with the replies. Skip those and you get a pile of unread blue ticks and a quiet phone.

Here is the order we'd follow, whether you are a pharmacy announcing a health camp or a furniture store clearing last season's stock. It is plain, a bit unglamorous, and it works better than clever copy on a bad list.

Steps 1 and 2: Decide the reply, then build a list you can defend

Before you write anything, finish this sentence: after this message, I want the customer to ___. Visit on Saturday. Reply with a size. Confirm a delivery slot. One action only. A campaign that asks people to visit, call, order online and follow a page gets none of them.

The list matters more than any other part. Include people who bought from you, enquired, or asked to hear from you. Leave out numbers you bought, scraped or copied from a visiting-card box. Besides being a bad idea for ban risk, cold numbers do not reply.

Clean it before sending: remove duplicates, fix numbers missing a country code, drop anyone who has said stop. If you are using the official Meta route, you need recorded opt-in for each contact. We covered how in collecting WhatsApp consent.

Step 3: Split the list before you send

Do not send one message to everyone. A cloth shop might have repeat customers, first-timers and people who have not visited in a year. They need different words. Tags make this simple, and our post on segmenting contacts with tags shows a system that stays manageable. Even three segments is a big improvement over one.

Step 4: Write it, then test it on yourself

Keep it short enough to read without tapping 'read more'. Say who you are in the first line, give the one thing, and make the reply easy. For ideas on wording, see campaign messages people actually reply to.

Then send it to your own number and two colleagues. Check the name placeholder, the link, the spelling of the offer. A wrong price sent to 800 people is an expensive typo.

Step 5: Send it in a way that doesn't look like spam

Blasting hundreds of messages in a minute from one number is how numbers get flagged. A paced queue sends them gradually instead. In WA Getway, messages go out through a paced queue, and you can schedule a broadcast for a chosen time rather than sitting at the screen. If you want to understand why pacing matters, read why your WhatsApp messages need a queue.

Step 6: Handle replies like leads, then read the results

The campaign is not over at send. Replies arrive over the next few hours, and the first ones are the warmest. Decide in advance who answers, and by when. If nobody is assigned, replies pile up and customers conclude you do not care.

Respect STOP. If someone writes it, remove them and move on. They will remember that you did.

After the send, look at the per-recipient results: who it reached, who failed, and which numbers were wrong. Then count the actions you wanted, such as visits and orders, over the next two or three days. Delivered is only the first checkpoint, and we have a separate post on measuring a campaign beyond delivered.

Keep a note of what you would change. Maybe the offer was clear but the link was buried, or one segment replied far more than the others. Next month you will not remember, and the note is what turns a pile of campaigns into a habit that gets better.

1. 1Write the single action you want.
2. 2Clean the list and confirm consent.
3. 3Split into segments.
4. 4Draft, then test on your own phones.
5. 5Send in paced batches or at a scheduled time.
6. 6Assign someone to answer replies.
7. 7Review results, remove failures, note what worked.

Mistakes we see again and again

• Sending to the whole phonebook because it feels like free reach. It is not free if the number gets restricted.
• Changing the offer halfway through the week without telling the people who already got the old one.
• Leaving the replies to whoever happens to pick up the phone, with no one accountable.
• Never removing failed numbers, so the same dead contacts waste every future send.
• Judging the campaign by delivery counts and nothing else.

None of these needs software to fix. They need an hour of agreement on who owns what before the next send.

If your campaigns need to read from your own order or customer system, that is the kind of integration we build on our services page. Otherwise, start small: one list, one message, one clear action.