About WhatsApp deliverability
Learn about WhatsApp deliverability, including the factors that play a role in message delivery and reasons why your messages may not be delivered.
Before sending messages, you'll need to connect your WhatsApp Business Account to Klaviyo.
WhatsApp message delivery
Delivery vs. deliverability
Delivery and deliverability are 2 distinct concepts you may be familiar with. Deliverability refers to how likely your message is to land in the recipient's inbox, and is affected by things like recipient engagement. This concept is most relevant to email marketing, where inbox providers make decisions on how to sort your emails.
Meanwhile, delivery is more straightforward and refers to whether or not a message was successfully delivered. With WhatsApp, delivery is more relevant than deliverability as there are no intermediaries between Meta and recipients that determine where a message should be delivered.
There are a number of factors that play a role in whether your WhatsApp messages are successfully delivered to recipients.
Message limits
Meta sets message limits for your business portfolio. These limits count the unique WhatsApp recipients you can reach outside a customer service window (the 24 hours after their latest message to you) within a rolling 24-hour period. All WhatsApp phone numbers in the portfolio share the same limit. Once you reach it, you must wait for capacity to become available in that rolling period before messaging additional recipients outside a customer service window.
The message limits per rolling 24-hour period are:
- 250 unique recipients
- 2,000 unique recipients
- 10,000 unique recipients
- 100,000 unique recipients
- Unlimited unique recipients
Increasing your message limits
New business portfolios start with a limit of 250 unique recipients in a rolling 24-hour period. Following best practices and maintaining a high quality rating can help you qualify for higher limits.
You can qualify for a limit of 2,000 unique recipients per rolling 24-hour period through either of these methods:
- Go through the business verification process.
- Deliver messages outside customer service windows to 2,000 unique WhatsApp recipients within a rolling 30-day period, using templates with a high quality rating.
After you complete a verification or sending path, Meta reviews your message quality and notifies you whether the increase is approved. If your limit remains at 250, review Meta’s notification for the next steps. You can contact Meta support if you need help with the decision.
If Meta requests more information, you may need to complete the identity verification process.
Once your limit reaches 2,000, Meta can increase it automatically. To qualify, send high-quality messages across your phone numbers and templates, and use at least half your current limit in the last 7 days. When these criteria are met, Meta increases the limit by 1 level within 6 hours.
User consent
Before sending marketing or transactional WhatsApp messages, collect explicit consent for the messages you plan to send.
When a customer messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens in which you can respond with free-form messages. Each new message from the customer restarts that window. Opening this window does not by itself subscribe them to ongoing WhatsApp marketing.
You can collect consent for WhatsApp messaging from profiles through:
- Sign-up forms
- Meta QR codes and subscribe links
- Subscribe keyword
- API
When collecting consent, clearly state that the person is agreeing to receive messages and name the business they will hear from. Including disclosure language about the messages you plan to send is a marketing best practice. You may want to update any disclosures like your terms of service and privacy policy to include information regarding what your brand will do with WhatsApp consent. Klaviyo cannot provide legal recommendations regarding these policies, and you should consult with your legal team.
Examples of disclosure language
These are just examples of disclosure language for collecting WhatsApp consent. You should work with your legal team to create a set of disclosure language for your brand.
When marketing consent is being collected
By submitting this form, you consent to receive informational (e.g., order updates) and/or marketing messages (e.g., cart reminders) from [company name] including messages sent by autodialer. Consent is not a condition of purchase. Unsubscribe at any time by replying STOP.
When transactional consent is being collected
By submitting this form, you consent to receive informational (e.g., order updates) from [company name] including messages sent by the autodialer. Consent is not a condition of purchase. Unsubscribe at any time by replying STOP.
Template approval and best practices
WhatsApp only allows you to start conversations with customers using templates that have been approved by Meta in advance. Typically the approval process takes a few minutes, but can take up to 24 hours.
Once a template has been approved, you can begin sending it to customers. If a template is rejected, you can make edits and resubmit it for approval, or appeal the decision with Meta.
In general, you should aim to avoid vague or irrelevant messages, and personalize messages for specific recipients using placeholders. Make sure your messages are timely, and respect quiet hours. You should also avoid sending multiple messages to a single profile in a day.
Follow these WhatsApp guidelines to increase your template’s chances of being approved:
- Use templates to initiate conversations and encourage end users to respond with quick replies.
- Avoid open-ended welcome or introductory messages.
- Clearly specify the purpose of each message, preferably within 5 lines.
- Keep messages concise and informative.
- Avoid abusive or threatening language.
- Select the appropriate message type and language.
- Replace the word "survey" with "feedback."
- Upload samples for media files, placeholders, and call-to-action buttons when registering templates.
- Include opt-out instructions.
- Avoid duplicate templates. If a template is submitted with the same wording in the body and footer of an existing template, the duplicate template will be rejected.
- Make sure the message template does not contain content that violates WhatsApp’s Business Policy.
- Do not request sensitive identifiers from users.
- Do not ask people to share full-length payment card numbers, financial account numbers, and other sensitive identifiers. This also includes documents that might contain sensitive identifiers.
- Requesting partial identifiers (e.g., the last 4 digits of their social security number) may be permitted.
Other formatting guidelines for templates
Be careful when using variable parameters:
- Do not start or end with a variable parameter.
- Avoid too many variable parameters relative to the message length.
- Avoid adjacent variable parameters (e.g., {{ person.first_name }} {{ person.last_name}}).
- Avoid variable parameters that are missing or have mismatched curly braces.
- Do not include special characters (such as a #, $, or %) in a variable parameter.
- Do not start newline characters (e.g., \n) with variable parameters.
- Avoid emojis or newline characters in the footer.
- Refrain from using emojis, asterisks, formatting markup, or \n in the header.
- Avoid grammatical or spelling errors.
- Only share URLs that include your brand name and avoid URLs with random characters.
WhatsApp quality ratings
WhatsApp rates the quality of your business phone numbers and the templates that you send. You can monitor these ratings and make changes to templates that receive negative feedback.
Phone number quality rating
Your WhatsApp business phone number is assigned a quality rating once you start sending messages. Maintaining high-quality messages across your phone numbers and templates helps your business portfolio qualify for higher messaging limits. Poor message quality can also lead Meta to restrict your messaging.
The phone number quality rating is based on recipient engagement with your messages over the past 7 days, with more recent messages impacting your rating more heavily. Meta uses factors like blocks, reports, and the reasons users provide when they block a business when determining your rating. It is important to maintain a strong quality rating while scaling your message limits.
The quality ratings for your phone number in Meta:
- High
- Medium
- Low
If your quality rating drops, review recent templates for relevance, recipient feedback, and sending frequency. Focus on sending useful messages to engaged subscribers.
Learn how to maintain a high WhatsApp quality score.
Template quality ratings
Individual templates also have quality ratings assigned by Meta. Low quality or repeated negative feedback can lead to a template being paused or disabled. A paused or disabled template cannot be sent; check its status before using it again.
The quality ratings for your templates are:
- High quality
- Medium quality
- Low quality
Templates will have a rating of Quality pending after first being approved.
You also see the following statuses related to your template approval status:
- Pending
- Rejected
- Paused
- Disabled
- In appeal
You should reach out to Meta support if you have questions regarding a template’s approval.
Troubleshooting WhatsApp delivery errors
Since April 1, 2025, Meta has blocked WhatsApp marketing template messages sent to US phone numbers (a +1 dialing code with a US area code). Attempts to deliver these messages fail with error code 131049.
You may experience delivery errors when attempting to send to recipients via WhatsApp. Errors can be grouped into 4 different types:
- Authorization
- Integrity
- Throttling
- Other
Learn more about resolution steps for specific errors and see associated error codes.
Meta also limits the marketing template messages each person can receive across all businesses. Your message can fail with error code 131049 even if you have not recently messaged that person. If the failure is due to this recipient limit, wait at least 24 hours before trying again. Repeated retries can prolong the restriction. Learn more about WhatsApp per-user marketing limits.
Authorization errors
Authorization errors refer to issues with authentication or permissions in WhatsApp. Examples of authorization errors include expired access tokens and changes in permissions.
Integrity errors
Integrity errors refer to violations of the WhatsApp platform policies. Examples of integrity errors include attempting to send to users in restricted countries or account blocks due to violations of the WhatsApp Terms of Service.
Throttling errors
Throttling errors refer to issues with the quantity or frequency of sends from your account. Some examples of throttling errors include sending too many messages to the same recipient’s phone number in a short period of time, or reaching spam rate limits because too many previous messages were blocked by users.
Other errors
If an error does not fall into the Authorization, Integrity, or Throttling groups, it is classified as Other. This error group includes a variety of different issues, but some examples include the sender and recipient phone number being the same, WhatsApp services being temporarily down, or messages failing due to an unknown reason.
A message can also fail because the recipient is part of an experiment run by Meta. These failures can return error code 130472.
Undisclosed errors
There are also some cases where a message appears as sent, but is not actually delivered. In these cases, Meta will not disclose the cause of the delivery error due to privacy and policy reasons.
Some reasons for these undisclosed errors include:
- The recipient did not come online during the 30-day window where Meta holds messages for offline customers.
- The customer has blocked the business phone number, or another business phone number owned by your business.
- The customer is in a restricted or sanctioned country.