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Six things that catch people out when they start messaging customers first. Permission comes before everything else, so settle it before you write a template.
1. You need opt-in before you may send at all
Not a nicety and not something to arrange afterwards. You must have permission from the person to receive future messages from you on WhatsApp, and that permission has to name your business and say WhatsApp specifically. A general "yes to marketing" tick from three years ago is not it.
This is the caveat that decides whether the rest of the list is even relevant, so settle it before you write a template.
2. People reply
The one teams forget. Send a thousand delivery notifications and a proportion will answer, often with a question. Those are conversations arriving in your queue, and somebody has to be there.
A proactive campaign without staffing for the replies produces a worse experience than not sending at all.
3. Timing is personal
WhatsApp arrives on a phone with a notification. Nine in the evening is a different thing there from an email at nine in the evening. Send during reasonable hours in the recipient's time zone.
4. Templates get disabled
Quality ratings fall when people block or report, measured over a rolling 24 hours. Let it drop and your number's status changes to flagged or restricted, and the template stops working, taking your notification flow with it.
You are told: a low rating or a change in your number's status produces an email and a notification in Business Manager. Someone has to be reading those, which is the part that usually fails.
5. What it costs depends on the template, and that is changing
Marketing templates carry a cost per message. Utility templates sent inside an open 24-hour window are free today. So a flow that seemed sensible at a hundred a day can be a different proposition at ten thousand, depending entirely on which kind you are sending.
From 1 October 2026 that changes. Utility templates inside an open window will be charged per message, and so will ordinary non-template replies sent in that window, which are free today. Marketing template pricing stays as it is, and messages from customers to you stay free. Ask us what that means for your volumes before you build a flow that depends on the current position.
Check the templates themselves too, because the category is not fixed: a utility template can be reclassified as marketing, and marketing costs more. Reviewing them before October is cheaper than discovering it on an invoice.
6. Opting out has to work
Somebody replying "stop" has to stop receiving messages. That means a process, not just an intention, and it means the person handling the reply knows what to do.
Continuing to message somebody who asked you not to is the fastest way to damage the channel for everyone.
Start small. One template, one use case, a few hundred messages. Watch the replies, the opt-outs and the quality rating for a fortnight before scaling.
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