Auto-Reply When People Answer Your WhatsApp Broadcast

A broadcast auto-reply is an automation that watches for replies from the specific people who received one specific broadcast, and sends them the follow-up — a price list, a catalogue, a discount code — within seconds, without anyone on your team touching it. The trick that makes it safe is scoping: you tag everyone the broadcast reaches, and the automation only fires for contacts carrying that tag.

Without that scoping, a rule that reacts to the word “yes” would fire on every unrelated conversation in your inbox — a customer confirming an address, a shopper answering “yes, that size” — and each of them would receive a price list they never asked for. The tag is what turns a blunt keyword rule into a campaign-specific one. This guide builds the whole thing, explains the 24-hour window it depends on, and covers the ways it goes wrong.

Why this works: the 24-hour customer service window

WhatsApp does not let businesses message people freely. Outside a customer service window you may only send pre-approved templates, and those cost money. But when a customer messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens, and inside it the rules invert.

Meta's pricing documentation is explicit: “all non-template messages are free”, and they can only be sent inside an open customer service window (Meta, WhatsApp pricing). Messages sent inside that window also fall outside your daily messaging limit, which counts unique recipients reached “outside of a customer service window” (Meta, messaging limits).

An auto-reply fires the instant a customer replies, which means it is always comfortably inside that window. That has three consequences worth stating plainly:

So the follow-up you send by auto-reply can be an actual PDF price list with a caption, sent immediately and at no per-message charge. The same PDF sent three days later to someone who went quiet is impossible without an approved template. Speed is not just good service here — it is the difference between free and paid, and between allowed and blocked.

Step 1: tag everyone who receives the broadcast

Do this before you send, because it cannot be added retrospectively.

1. Build your broadcast as usual and choose the template that asks the question — for example one that ends “Would you like our latest price list?”.
2. In the Basics section, find the field labelled Tag everyone who receives this — optional.
3. Type a tag name specific to this campaign, such as pricelist-ask. If the tag does not exist yet, ConvoFly creates it. Existing tags appear as suggestions as you type.
4. Test-send the broadcast, then launch it.

Every contact the broadcast reaches now carries pricelist-ask. That tag is the only thing distinguishing “people who were asked about the price list” from everyone else in your inbox.

Step 2: build the automation

Go to Automations and create a new automation. You start on a canvas with a Customer Message Received trigger block already in place — that block covers WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Add these blocks beneath it, in this order:

1. Check Customer Tags → set it to has tag pricelist-ask. This is the scoping step: someone saying “yes” in an unrelated chat is not tagged, so nothing happens for them.
2. If Customer Message Contains → list the words your customers actually use: yes, send, please, price, list, ok, sure. Leave the match mode on contains rather than exact, so “yes please send it” still matches.
3. Check Customer Tags again → set it to lacks tag pricelist-sent. This stops the price list going out twice to someone who replies more than once.
4. Send WhatsApp Message → attach the price-list PDF and add a short caption such as “Here's our latest price list — anything you want a quote on, just ask.”
5. Update Customer Tags → set the mode to add and add pricelist-sent, marking this person done.

Click Save, then Publish, and confirm the automation is enabled. From that point on, anyone who received that broadcast and replies affirmatively gets the PDF within seconds.

Why the order of the blocks matters

Put the tag check before the keyword check, not after. Both orders technically work, but the tag check eliminates the overwhelming majority of inbound messages in one step — on a busy inbox that might be 95% of traffic — while the keyword check has to inspect message text. Cheap filters first is the general rule for building automations that stay fast as your volume grows.

The “lacks tag” check belongs immediately before the send, not at the top, so that it reflects the most recent state of the contact.

Choosing the words to match

The keyword list is where most of these automations quietly underperform, because owners write the words they would use rather than the words their customers do.

• Include the local language. If your customers reply in Roman Urdu, add haan, ji, bhejein, bhej dein. Write in whatever your customers actually type.
• Include emoji. A thumbs-up is a very common affirmative and matches nothing unless you list it.
• Include the noun, not just the yes. Plenty of people skip the affirmative entirely and reply “price list please” or just “list”.
• Avoid words that appear in negatives. Matching on no as a fragment will also match “not now”. Keep the list to unambiguous affirmatives.

After the first campaign, open the inbox, read the replies that did not trigger a send, and add the phrasings you missed. Two rounds of this usually gets coverage from roughly two-thirds of replies to nearly all of them.

Buttons instead of typed words

The most reliable version of this campaign does not rely on keywords at all. If the broadcast template was approved with a quick-reply button labelled something like Yes, send it, tapping it sends that exact text back to you as a normal reply. Your If Customer Message Contains block then only needs to match the button's own wording, and there is no spelling, language or emoji variation to chase.

There is also a Wait for Button Reply block, which pauses a running automation until the customer taps a template button and then continues down the matching branch. Use it when the automation itself sent the buttoned message; use the keyword approach when the message came from a broadcast. Setting up buttons is covered in adding media, buttons and offers.

Stopping duplicate and runaway sends

Two safeguards, and they do different jobs:

• The lacks tag pricelist-sent check plus the Update Customer Tags step is a permanent one-shot guard for this campaign: once a contact has been sent the file, they can never be sent it again by this rule.
• The Pause Before Repeating block is a time-based cooldown — you give it a name and a number of minutes, and the rule will not fire again for the same contact within that period. Use it for rules that should repeat eventually but not rapidly, such as an FAQ answer.

For a one-off price list, the tag pair is the right tool. For an evergreen rule that answers a common question, a cooldown of a few hours is more appropriate than a permanent block.

A realistic timeline

Concretely, for a broadcast to 1,800 tagged contacts:

1. 12:00 — the broadcast starts. At roughly 120 messages a minute it takes about 15 minutes to reach everyone.
2. 12:01 onwards — the first replies arrive. Each one opens that person's 24-hour window and triggers the automation within seconds.
3. 12:00 to roughly 14:00 — the bulk of replies land. WhatsApp replies cluster heavily in the first couple of hours.
4. Next day, 12:00 — the windows opened by the earliest repliers close. Anyone you have not answered by now needs an approved template again.
5. Day 2 or 3 — for the people who never replied at all, run a separate follow-up campaign for non-responders using a template.

If you already sent the broadcast

Tags cannot be applied to a broadcast after it has gone out, so an automation built now will not recognise that batch. For the people who already replied, use re-target by delivery outcome and select the Replied group, which sends your follow-up to everyone who responded to that specific campaign. Then set the tag properly on the next one.

Reusing it for the next campaign

You have two sensible patterns:

• One tag per campaign. Use eid-catalog-ask, winter-sale-ask and so on, and duplicate the automation for each, changing the tag and the attached file. Cleaner reporting, slightly more setup.
• One reusable tag. Keep pricelist-ask for every price-list broadcast and reuse the same automation. Less setup, but you must clear or rotate the pricelist-sent tag when the price list is updated, or returning customers will never receive the new version.

Honest limits and troubleshooting

• Nothing sends at all. Check the automation is published and enabled — saving alone does not activate it.
• It fires for the wrong people. The tag check is missing, or it is set to the wrong tag name. Tag names are exact.
• Late replies get nothing. If someone replies to a week-old broadcast the automation still fires and the window is open at that moment, so the send works — but if you try to reach silent contacts later, a template is mandatory.
• Free text will not send outside the window. WhatsApp rejects it, and ConvoFly reports the failure as “Outside the 24-hour window — send a template to reopen the chat”. This is a Meta rule, not a ConvoFly limitation, and it is not retried.
• Volume is not free of consequences. The replies are free, but the broadcast that provoked them is charged on delivery. Keep the audience relevant — see managing opt-outs, frequency and quality.

Set up properly, this is one of the highest-leverage things in the product: a broadcast that ends in a question buys you a free, unlimited 24-hour conversation with everyone who answers it, and the automation makes sure none of those conversations wait on a human being.