WhatsApp broadcasts: bulk messages to opted-in customers
Endelir sends WhatsApp broadcasts — bulk messages to a contact group — only to customers who opted in, as templates Meta approves in advance, and brings every reply into one shared inbox. Your customer list should not mean thousands of individual chats. Endelir organises the contacts who have agreed to hear from you into groups, sends one campaign to a group using a message template Meta has approved, and brings the replies back as ordinary conversations in your shared inbox.
A list you own, and no sensible way to reach it
The broadcast list in the phone app holds 256 people, and it only reaches those who have saved your number in their own phone. Most of your customers have not. So the announcement you thought went to everyone quietly went to a fraction of them, and nothing told you which fraction.
The alternative is worse: someone spends two days copying a message into individual chats. Replies arrive on one handset with no record of who was asked what, the spreadsheet does not know who asked to be left alone, and the person who said stop last month gets the same offer again.
One group, one approved template, one send
In Endelir a campaign goes to a contact group. You import your list as contacts, put the ones you mean to reach into a group, and pick a template Meta has already approved. Everyone in the group gets their own private message on your business number — there is no group chat, and no recipient sees another recipient.
Consent is not a checkbox on the page, it is a condition of sending. Before each message leaves, Endelir checks that the template is approved, that the contact has not opted out, and — for a Marketing template — that the contact's permission is on record. A contact who fails that check is refused rather than sent to, and the campaign report shows it.
How it works
- 1 Your list becomes contacts Import a spreadsheet of the customers who have agreed to hear from you: phone number, name, and any fields you want to write into the message later.
- 2 You build the audience as a group A campaign targets a contact group, not a pasted list of numbers — pasting numbers into the composer is switched off. A group is a list you build and keep: select contacts, add them to the group, and it stays as you left it.
- 3 You choose an approved template Templates are pulled from Meta with their status and category. Only an approved one can be used, and a sale announcement is a Marketing template.
- 4 Personal fields fill the gaps Where the template has variables, they are filled from the contact record — first name, city, or a custom field you imported.
- 5 You send it, or set a time Send it now, or schedule it. The time you pick is the time in your own timezone, and the campaign waits in the queue until then.
- 6 It goes out one contact at a time Each message is sent individually and checked against the rules first. A repeat run of the same queued message is collapsed, so nobody receives the campaign twice.
- 7 Replies come back to the inbox A reply is an ordinary conversation. It can be assigned to a person, answered by a keyword reply, or picked up by a chat flow.
What this looks like in practice
A retailer has 4,000 customers who gave permission to receive offers, collected at the till and on the website. There is a weekend sale on. The old approach was a poster, an email nobody opened, and one person messaging the regulars by hand.
Now the same list sits in Endelir as contacts. Rather than one send to all 4,000, the campaign goes to the group that bought in the last ninety days, with the store city written into the template, and it is scheduled for Thursday evening. The rest of the list gets a different message, or nothing. Replies — sizes, timings, is my size in stock — arrive in the shared inbox and go to whoever is on duty.
What can happen next
Who this suits
What to know before you send one
Every template has a category, and it should match what the message actually is. A sale, a discount code or a new-arrivals announcement is Marketing. An order update, a booking confirmation or an appointment reminder is Utility. The categories are not interchangeable, and writing a promotion as though it were an order update is the sort of thing that costs a business its number.
Marketing is permission-based. Endelir sends a Marketing template only to a contact whose consent is on record, and never to one who has opted out — so keep your own permission records as you collect them, and import the list you are actually allowed to write to. A bought or scraped list is not that list, and this is not the software for it.
Two separate limits apply. Meta decides how many people your number may start a conversation with in a day, and moves that limit as your number builds a record. Your Endelir plan decides how many messages you may send in a month, the software enforces it exactly, and the number for each plan is on the pricing page.
What to watch
- How many contacts the campaign actually went to, against how many were in the group
- How many were delivered, and how many were read
- How many failed, and what the failure says
- How many people replied, and what they were asking for
- How many opted out after each campaign
- Which groups answer, and which stay quiet
Related
Questions people ask
Can I send one WhatsApp message to 4,000 customers?
Yes, as one campaign to a contact group, and each of the 4,000 receives their own private message rather than a group chat. Two limits sit above it. Meta decides how many people your number may start a conversation with in a day, and raises that as your number builds a record. Your Endelir plan decides how many messages you may send in a month; the software counts them and refuses the one that crosses the line rather than sending it quietly. The plan numbers are on the pricing page. The other condition is permission: the 4,000 have to be customers who agreed to hear from you.
Do customers need to opt in before I send them a broadcast?
Yes, and Endelir treats it as a condition of sending rather than advice. A Marketing template goes out only to a contact whose consent is recorded against them; a contact without it is refused and shows in the campaign report as refused, not delivered. Anyone who has opted out is excluded from every marketing campaign automatically, so nobody has to remember to remove them. Collect the permission the way your business actually collects it — at the till, on the form, in the chat where they first wrote to you — and keep your own record of when and how it was given.
Is a WhatsApp broadcast the same as a WhatsApp group?
No, and the difference matters to your customers. A group is a shared room: people see who else is in it, and they see each other's replies. A campaign is sent to each person individually. They see a message from your business, they reply privately, and they have no idea anyone else received the same thing. For sales, offers and service, that is almost always what you want — one customer's phone number is not something to show the other 3,999.
Can I personalise a broadcast for every customer?
Yes, where the template has variables in it. Each variable is filled from that contact's own record, so the message can carry a first name, a city, a policy number or any custom field you imported with the list. "Hi Priya, the sale at our Goa store starts on Friday" reads as though someone wrote it, because in a sense someone did. Two practical notes. The data has to be on the contact record, so import the fields you intend to use — a blank where a name should be looks worse than no name at all. And a template with variables can only be sent to a contact group, never to loose phone numbers, because a number on its own has no record to fill them from.
Can customers reply to a broadcast, and what happens if thousands do?
They can reply, and this is the part that separates a campaign from an advertisement. Every reply becomes an individual conversation in the shared inbox. From there it can be assigned to a person, answered instantly by a keyword reply for the routine questions, handed to a chat flow that asks which branch or which size, or routed to a particular team. A person can take over from automation at any point, which pauses the automation on that conversation. Plan for the replies before you plan the send: a campaign to a large list is a campaign that puts a large number of conversations in front of your team on the same evening.
Do I need an approved template for a broadcast?
Yes. Any message your business starts, outside the window opened by the customer writing to you first, uses a message template Meta has approved in advance. Endelir pulls your templates from Meta with their current status, and only an approved one can be chosen for a campaign. The category should match the actual purpose of the message: a sale or an offer is Marketing, while an order update or an appointment reminder tied to something the customer already has with you is Utility. Meta reviews templates and decides the outcome, so approval is never something we can promise on its behalf.
Can I upload a purchased list of phone numbers and message everyone?
No. Endelir is not built for that and gets in the way on purpose. A campaign can only target a contact group, so there is no field to paste a bought list into. A Marketing template is refused for any contact whose permission is not on record. Opt-out keywords such as stop, unsubscribe and cancel are honoured the moment they arrive. Having someone's number is not the same as their agreement to hear from your business, and messaging people who never asked is the fastest way to lose the number you have spent years printing on your packaging.
Ready to reach your opted-in customer list?
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