WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. This means that a large number of companies are sending messages to users, and some of these messages may be considered spam. The only options for customers were to allow messages and offers to be sent, or to block the business account altogether. WhatsApp is finally trying to change that.
The company is currently testing a new way for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kinds of messages they want or don't want to receive. This includes buttons such as “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for specific categories of messages.
Meta said it will begin testing the interaction around the world. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not) in receiving “offers and announcements.” You can also opt out of receiving these types of messages completely. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they would like to receive offers from brands during the Christmas season.
Image credit: WhatsApp
Businesses can communicate via WhatsApp's API based on one of four categories: Marketing (offers, new products), Utilities (order updates, account balances), Authentication (one-time passwords), and Services (customer inquiries). You can send messages using
Although these categories exist on the backend, there was previously no way for customers to stop receiving one type of message while continuing to receive other types of messages. For example, you might want to receive purchase updates or authorization codes from an e-commerce site, but if you're not interested in marketing messages, you don't have the option to manually provide that feedback.
In countries like India and Brazil, the phone number associated with WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, as opposed to email. While using email, you will see an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, but WhatsApp had no such indicator. As a result, users were overwhelmed with spammy business messages.
The company is considering introducing new controls to business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India in September, Nikhila Srinivasan, VP of Messaging Monetization Product Management at Meta, hinted at this feature.
“One of the key things we do is provide transparency that our customers are interacting with and engaging with businesses. A strong signal is to block and report them. This will help the user understand that this is not a desired business on the platform. Plus, to express more granularity. We’re starting to think about how we can give them even more preference,” she said.
Srinivasan also said that educating companies to understand that some of their campaigns may not meet platform or user standards will ultimately reduce spam.
Earlier this year, the company began limiting the number of marketing messages a person can receive per day, without explicitly setting a limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp promoted itself as a place for people to have private conversations. Over the past few years, the company has introduced features for building and engaging communities, broadcasting messages as a creator or publisher, and for businesses to communicate directly with customers. Both community and broadcast channels have their own tab within the app.
However, business communications will still appear in your main chat inbox and there is no way to filter them. In its Q3 2024 quarterly earnings call, the company indicated that its WhatsApp Business platform was a key growth driver for other app revenue, which collected $434 million in the quarter. The company needs to find a balance between making money and not alienating WhatsApp's core users by bombarding them with business messages.
When we asked Srinivasan about this balance and the possibility of creating a separate location for business messages, she said that some of WhatsApp's new features are optional, separate from the main inbox. I pointed out that there is.
“The core of what we want to do with WhatsApp is to be in the inbox. We thought about how we could create a different experience for businesses, and we love the inspiration we have to help businesses. Educating Businesses “Whatever we're doing in terms of investing in and user management, we want them to feel like the standard of what's actually in their inbox is very high,” she said.
Contact this reporter at im@ivanmehta.com or Signal: @ivan.42.