A WhatsApp message template is a special type of message that is required for any business-initiated or re-engagement conversations via the WhatsApp channel.

As a registered WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP), Clickatell makes it easy for you to submit and manage your message templates. 

Log in to your Clickatell Portal and go to the WhatsApp account you want to create a new message template for. The actual creation of the template takes place in Facebook Business Manager (see here) and you can view your templates and the status of each from within the Clickatell Portal.  

Once your template is approved by WhatsApp, you can start sending! 

Note: Clickatell has no direct say in whether your message template is approved by Meta or not, however, here are some tips and best practices to help improve your chances.

Message template rejected? Read here to learn more about possible reasons why. 

There are several ways to improve the read rate of your WhatsApp message templates. It is important to keep your read rates high, as low read rates might negatively impact the quality rating of your messaging template, and ultimately, lead to the disabling of your message template.

Here are some recommendations to improve the read rates of your templates:

• Audience: Tailor your messages to the specific audience.

• Timing: Time your marketing to correspond with the most likely period your audience will read it.

• Frequency of messages: Monitor how many marketing conversations a customer receives per day and week to avoid overloading the customer.

• Cooldowns: Give customers who have stopped engaging with your templates a break.

• Opt-in: Follow good Opt-In practice

• Opt-out: Always include the option to opt out of marketing conversations on WhatsApp.

• Relevance of the message: Make sure the subject line or preview text clearly indicates the message's relevance.

• Optimize the first 60-65 characters: Use the first part of your message to captivate the client.

Find out more:

• How does read rate impact my marketing template's quality rating?

• Where can I see my marketing template read rate?

• About your WhatsApp Business Message Template's Quality Rating

If you are a Clickatell client, you can use One API to send your approved templates, specifying the template name and relevant parameters in your API calls when sending messages to customers.  

To make it even easier, you can also use one of Clickatell’s powerful applications included in your subscription package:  

• Chat Flow  

  • Fire off WhatsApp message templates as part of your automated workflows to kick-start a conversation and encourage re-engagement. 

• Chat Desk  

  • As a support agent, you can send WhatsApp message templates to customers directly from your web-based application to open conversations and speed up your replies. 

• Campaign Manager  

  • Up your marketing game by creating WhatsApp campaigns to send enticing message templates such as vouchers, special offers, product news, and delivery updates in bulk to a list of recipients. 

As of 1 April 2024, the quality rating of Marketing message templates will be influenced by template read rates, in addition to the number of blocked and reported messages.

A low read rate (and/or a high number of blocks and reports) will lead to a drop in template quality scores. Meta does not explicitly provide specific thresholds or percentages of when a read rate is considered low, and how many blocks/reported messages will lead to a drop in template quality. However, Meta has indicated that from an industry standard perspective, a marketing template read rate of between 65% and 80% is satisfactory.

Read rate trends over time will be taken into account rather than relying on immediate response times, allowing for a reasonable (although not explicitly defined) time to pass from the sending of a marketing template before the read rate is taken into account for a quality score.

 Find out more:

• Where can I view my marketing template read rates?

• How do I improve the read rates of my marketing message templates?

• About your WhatsApp Business Message Template's Quality Rating

A message template is a special format used by businesses to send a WhatsApp message to customers. It looks and acts like a normal WhatsApp message, with the main difference being that WhatsApp must pre-approve it before you can send it to customers. Message templates are required outside of an open conversation window and can only be sent to customers who have opted in and given you permission to send them messages. 

Read more regarding the Opt-In rules in the WhatsApp Business Policy.

Templates also simplify messaging by letting you reuse often-used, generic messages with variable details instead of creating them from scratch every time. When customers get a notification from your verified business for the first time and haven't saved you as a contact yet, WhatsApp shows these approved message templates without warnings, reducing the risk of it being marked as spam. 

At Clickatell, message templates can fall into one of two categories: Marketing or Utility. Marketing templates are used to send promotional offers, product announcements, and other messages that increase brand awareness and engagement. Utility templates are used to send account and order updates, alerts, and messages that aim to share essential information with customers. 

Learn more about how to create a WhatsApp message template for approval.

Note that certain limitations apply to your message templates until your business is verified.

This feature will first be rolled out in India only.

As of February 13, 2024, restrictions have been implemented on the number of marketing-type message templates that can be sent to individual WhatsApp users, specifically those with Indian phone numbers.

This measure aims to enhance positive user engagement with marketing templates by regulating the volume of marketing messages an individual receives from any business within a defined timeframe.

These limitations only impact newly initiated marketing conversations and do not apply to open marketing conversations between clients and businesses (i.e., where there has been an interaction between the customers and the business already).

In February 2023, WhatsApp simplified its template categories and all message templates now fall into one of only three categories: Marketing, Utility, or Authentication.

Note: Authentication template categories are not currently supported by Clickatell.

Note that from 1 April 2023, Clickatell will automatically update the categories of your existing WhatsApp message templates to reflect this change. This will not affect your messaging in any way.

The three categories are used for use cases as listed below:

• Marketing – Send promotional offers, product announcements, and more to increase awareness and engagement.

• Utility – Send account updates, order updates, alerts, and more to share important information.

• Authentication (not currently supported) – Send codes that allow your customers to securely access their accounts.

As of 1 June 2023, the category of the message template will also define the conversation category. Depending on the template category, business-initiated conversations will either be categorized as marketing, utility, or authentication conversations (all of which require customer opt-in). All user-initiated conversations which help customers resolve inquiries will be categorized as service conversations.

Conversation charges will be based on the template category. See here for more information.

For more information and examples of Template Categorization, see here.

On the 13th of October 2023, Meta introduced the concept of template pacing for all WhatsApp marketing templates.

What is template pacing?

Template pacing is a mechanism that allows customers to provide early feedback on newly created or un-paused marketing templates. Templates sent as part of a messaging campaign are sent normally until a certain threshold is reached, after which further sending of this template is held to allow for customer feedback. This feedback allows businesses to adjust their templates before sending them to too many clients and mitigates the risk of negative feedback impacting their business.

Customers can give positive or negative feedback on the initial batch of templates sent in a campaign. The rest of the templated messages are paused while this feedback from customers is processed:

• Positive feedback: If feedback from the customer base is positive (i.e., the template's quality rating changes to high), the remaining held templates are released and sent to the rest of the customer base.

• Negative feedback: If the feedback is negative (i.e., the template's quality rating changes to low ) the template message status will be set to Pause and no further templates will be sent out. Learn how to unpause these templates here.

• No/not enough feedback: If no or not enough feedback is received from customers on a template campaign within 15 minutes to change its quality rating to high or low, all held templates will be released and sent to customers as normal.

How does template pacing impact my business?

Meta aims for minimal disruption to businesses and to target only poor-quality campaigns.

• Template pacing primarily applies to businesses with a recent history of low-quality campaigns.

• Template pacing only applies to Marketing messages (not Utility or Authorization).

• Template pacing is only applied once per template. After the quality is validated for a template, it will not be paced going forward.

• Template pacing will not impact campaigns with low volumes.

For more information, also see Meta's documentation:

• Template pacing

• Template pausing

• Quality rating

Meta occasionally runs experiments to help them assess the impact of messaging on WhatsApp user experience and engagement. Ongoing experiments (as the one described below) have no fixed end date. To protect the validity of the experiment and ensure the best possible business and consumer experience, they do not provide any exceptions or opt-outs for these experiments.

Marketing Message Experiment

As of June 14, 2023, roughly 1% of WhatsApp users will not receive marketing template messages from any business unless one of the following conditions is met:

• A customer service window exists between the customer and the business.

• An open marketing conversation exists between the customer and the business.

• An open free-entry point conversation exists between the customer and the business.

If you send a marketing template message to a customer who is part of the experiment group, your message will not be sent and you will not be billed for it since no conversation was created. Instead, you will receive a message status error webhook containing error code 472, notifying you of the failure.

Attempting to resend the message will result in the same error. If you must deliver the marketing template message to the customer, we recommend that you contact the customer by some other, non-WhatsApp means, and ask them to message you so you can resend the message within the customer service window.

Also see:

• Why was my Marketing template not delivered without returning an error for failed delivery?

In some cases, you might see a marketing template that is sent (or appears to be sent) to a customer but is never delivered, and no error code is returned for a failed delivery.

In the scenarios stated below, Meta will not provide an underlying reason due to privacy and policy reasons:

1. The customer did not go online during the 30-day window in which messages are held for offline customers.

2. The customer has blocked the business.

3. The customer is in a restricted or sanctioned country.

Also see:

• Why did a user not receive my WhatsApp marketing template message?

All templates must be submitted to WhatsApp and approved before they can be used. Message templates are reviewed daily by a Meta (Facebook) team. Strict guidelines apply to reduce potential abuse and spam.

If your message template(s) was rejected, it may have been for one of the following reasons:

• Variable parameters are missing or have mismatched curly braces. The correct format is {{1}}.

• Template starts or ends with a variable, e.g., {{1}} thanks!

• Variable parameters are not sequential. For example, {{1}}, {{2}}, {{4}}, {{5}} are defined but {{3}} does not exist on the template.

• Variable parameters appear directly next to each other, e.g., {{1}} {{2}}.

• Variable parameters contain special characters such as a #, $, or %.

• The purpose of your template is unclear and variable parameters are not defined. All parameters must have a known purpose. Your template will be rejected if it is not clear what goes into a specific parameter. A sample template will help with your submission.

• Spelling or grammatical errors. Messages with misspellings or grammatical errors may prompt customers to view these messages as spam or a hoax.

• Language defined does not match the content. E.g., Spanish was selected but the content is in English or the content is a mixture of languages containing both Spanish and English.

• Submission format for testing your API connection is incorrect. The correct format is:

  • Message template name: test

  • Content: Hello {{1}}

• The URLs for your links are shortened. Short links obscure the intended link destination.

• The URL domain in your links does not belong to your business.

• The body of your template has more than two consecutive new line characters (\n).

• Text headers include emojis, asterisks, formatting markup, or the \n newline characters.

• Media headers (video, image, document) didn’t include a sample with submission.

• Call to action button URL contains a direct link to WhatsApp (e.g., https://wa.me/14154443344).

• The content contains potentially abusive or threatening content, such as threatening a customer with legal action or threatening to publicly shame them.

• The template’s content is identical to that of an existing template. If a template is submitted with the same wording in the body and footer as an existing template, the duplicate template will be rejected. A rejection notification that includes the rejection reason will appear in Account Quality on WhatsApp Manager and be sent via email. You may refer to the Account Quality notification to see the name and language of the existing template with the same content as the rejected duplicate template. You may also choose to edit the template and resubmit.

• The message template(s) contains content that violates WhatsApp’s Commerce Policy: When you offer goods or services for sale, all messages and media related to your goods or services, including any descriptions, prices, fees, taxes, and/or any required legal disclosures, are considered as transactions. Transactions must comply with the WhatsApp Commerce Policy.

• The message template(s) contain content that violates WhatsApp’s Business Policy: Do not request sensitive identifiers from users. E.g., do not ask people to share full-length individual payment card numbers, financial account numbers, National Identification numbers, or other sensitive identifiers. This also includes not requesting documents from users that might contain sensitive identifiers. Requesting partial identifiers (e.g., the last 4 digits of their Social Security Number) is acceptable. All messaging must comply with the WhatsApp Business Policy.

For more information, also see:

• Message Template Guidelines

• WhatsApp User Guide

• Best practices & examples

• Meta examples