How not to get your WhatsApp number flagged

Your number is your business. Meta scores every WhatsApp Business number on how recipients react to your messages, and a poor score quietly costs you reach before anyone tells you. Here is how it works and what keeps you in the green.

The five rules

1. Only message people who genuinely enquired. No bought lists, no scraped numbers, no inherited database of strangers.
2. Start small and build up. A new number begins at 250 new conversations a day. Earn the higher tiers over weeks.
3. Say who you are in the first line. If the reader has to think "who is this?", they reach for block.
4. Give an easy way out and honour it instantly. One ignored "STOP" hurts your number more than a hundred unanswered messages.
5. Never send one identical text to hundreds of people. Vary it, stagger it, personalise it.

How Meta scores your number

Every number carries a quality rating: green (high), yellow (medium) or red (low). It measures not how much you send, but how people react to it.

The rating is calculated over a rolling window, so a bad week fades once the following weeks are clean.

Why the rating matters: messaging limits

Your rating drives your messaging limit: the number of unique contacts you may start a conversation with in any 24 hours. Replying to someone who messaged you first never counts against it.

You climb by sending steadily and keeping a green rating. If your rating falls to red and stays there, Meta drops you a tier or restricts the number. A restricted number can still answer people, but it cannot start conversations. For a broker, that is the whole top of the funnel gone.

The 24-hour window

Once a client messages you, a 24-hour window opens and you can write freely, in your own words, as often as you need. That is where nearly all your real work happens.

Outside it you may only send a template Meta approved in advance. That is why everything Aria sends to a cold or dormant contact is a template, and why a reply changes everything: it reopens the window.

Getting templates approved

Meta reviews every template before you may use it. Rejections nearly always come from three things:

• Promotional language inside a UTILITY template. If you are selling, categorise it as MARKETING and accept the fee. Sneaking an offer through the cheaper category is the commonest rejection of all.
• Placeholders that read like spam. "Hi {{1}}, {{2}} {{3}}" tells the reviewer nothing. The fixed text should make sense on its own.
• Missing context. A reader should be able to tell who is writing and why from the message alone.

Edit a rejected template and resubmit. Repeatedly submitting the same rejected text counts against the account.

What actually gets numbers flagged

One behaviour causes most of the trouble: a large batch of identical messages to people who never gave you their number, or who have not heard from you in a very long time.

Warm, expected, staggered and personalised is safe. Cold, bulk and identical gets flagged. Everything else here is detail around that sentence. Two more things worth knowing:

• Do not connect a number previously used for bulk marketing. Its history comes with it.
• Keep a real business profile. Your photograph or agency logo, real name, a description and a website. A blank profile on an unknown number gets blocked on sight.

If your rating drops

Yellow is a warning, not a disaster, and it is recoverable in days if you act. In order:

1. Stop all outbound campaigns. Send no templates for at least three to seven days.
2. Reply to inbound only. Conversations you did not start rebuild a rating fastest, so answer everything and answer quickly.
3. Work out what caused it. Which campaign went out just before the drop, and on which list?
4. Retire that list. Do not try it again more slowly. A bad list is bad at any speed.
5. Wait. Ratings recalculate over a rolling window, so a clean stretch pulls you back up on its own.

If the number is restricted rather than merely yellow, the same steps apply with more patience.

Where to check your number

Check it once a week. It takes fifteen seconds.

Your number is listed with its Quality rating and Messaging limit side by side. If it is anything but green, read the section above before sending another campaign.

Still stuck?

If your number is restricted, a template keeps being rejected, or messages are accepted but never delivered, write to support@aria-app.dev or call +971 58 528 0043 with the number and what you last sent.