How to Send Your First WhatsApp Broadcast (Step by Step)

A WhatsApp broadcast is one pre-approved message sent to many contacts at once, delivered to each person as a private 1:1 chat. Sending your first one takes about ten minutes of actual work, plus however long Meta takes to approve your message template — usually minutes to a few hours, though Meta publishes no guaranteed turnaround.

Every broadcast after the first takes roughly two minutes. This walkthrough covers the six steps in order, names every screen and button, and flags the two places where first-timers reliably go wrong.

Before you start: three things you need

1. Your WhatsApp number connected to ConvoFly. One business number, verified through Meta's onboarding.
2. Contacts who opted in. People who clearly agreed to hear from you on WhatsApp — a checkout checkbox, a "JOIN" keyword, a form consent. Meta's WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy requires consent before business-initiated messages. Ten real opt-ins is enough for a first send; a purchased list is never enough.
3. Realistic expectations about volume. A brand-new WhatsApp Business portfolio starts on the 250 unique customers per rolling 24 hours tier (Meta, messaging limits). If your list is bigger than that, the overflow continues the next day rather than failing.

The six steps at a glance

1. Create a message template and wait for Meta's approval.
2. Open Broadcasts → New campaign and pick that template.
3. Choose your audience from one of five sources.
4. Map each {{1}} placeholder to a real value, with a fallback.
5. Test-send to your own number and read it on a phone.
6. Send now, or schedule it.

Step 1 — Create a message template and get it approved

A message template is a message you write in advance and submit to Meta for review. You need one because WhatsApp only allows business-initiated messages that have been pre-approved — the exception is the 24-hour customer service window that opens when a customer messages you first, inside which you can reply freely with anything.

In ConvoFly, open Templates and create a new one:

1. Pick a category. Marketing for anything promotional, Utility for order and delivery updates tied to a purchase the customer already made. Most first broadcasts are Marketing.
2. Write the body, putting {{1}}, {{2}} and so on wherever a personal detail belongs. "Hi {{1}}, our winter sale starts today" becomes "Hi Sara, our winter sale starts today".
3. Add a header image or a button if you want one — a product photo, or a "Shop now" button pointing at your store.
4. Submit for review. Meta checks it against its message template guidelines.

The mistake to avoid here: writing a promotion and filing it under Utility to get a cheaper rate. Meta re-categorizes or rejects it, and repeated attempts damage your standing. Utility means the customer already transacted with you.

Step 2 — Start a new broadcast

Go to Broadcasts → New campaign. You will be asked how you want to reach people — choose One-time broadcast. The other option, Drip campaign, is for a multi-step sequence spread over days; see drip campaigns and sequences when you are ready for that.

Give the campaign an internal name that your future self will understand — "July flash sale — buyers last 90 days" beats "Broadcast 3". Customers never see it. Then pick the template you approved in step 1.

When you select the template, the composer shows two things worth reading. A quality badge from Meta's rating — green High, yellow Medium, red Low — where a red template is blocked from sending to protect your number. And a per-number banner showing your daily messaging limit, your tier, and how much you have used today.

Step 3 — Choose your audience

The audience picker offers five sources. They are not interchangeable, and picking the right one saves rework later.

Segments are the workhorse — see building audiences with segments. For spreadsheet-driven lists, broadcasting from a Google Sheet. For follow-ups, retargeting by delivery outcome covers all five outcomes you can re-target.

Two things happen automatically at this stage. Contacts who have opted out are skipped from every send, and the audience preview tells you how many were skipped. And if you have turned on a frequency cap, anyone already over it is skipped too. Both are configured on the Opt-outs page — see opt-outs, frequency caps & quality.

Recipients are captured as a snapshot when the broadcast starts, so a contact added an hour after launch will not receive an old campaign unexpectedly.

Step 4 — Fill in the personalized bits

Wherever your template has a {{1}}, ConvoFly asks what goes there. You have two choices per placeholder:

• The same text for everyone — a discount code, a date, a product name.
• Something personal to each contact — their first name, city or order number, pulled from their stored attributes.

If you choose the personal option, always set a fallback word. If 40 of your 300 contacts have no first name stored, a fallback of "there" turns a broken "Hi ," into a perfectly readable "Hi there,". This is the single most common cause of an embarrassing first broadcast. Detail in personalizing broadcasts with variables.

Step 5 — Test-send to yourself

Send the broadcast to your own number before anyone else sees it. A test send renders the template exactly as recipients will get it — media, buttons and personalized values resolved against the test number's real attributes, not raw {{1}} placeholders.

Then run this check on an actual phone, not in the builder:

1. Read the copy for typos, missing spaces and awkward line breaks.
2. Confirm the header image or video renders and is the right one.
3. Tap every button and confirm each link lands where you intended.
4. Check one personalized value looks right, and that the fallback reads naturally.
5. Confirm the audience count roughly matches what you expected.

Sixty seconds here is the cheapest insurance in broadcasting. More in test sends & previews.

Step 6 — Send now or schedule

Send immediately, or pick a time your audience is actually awake and looking at their phone. If you want this to repeat on a cadence — a weekly restock alert, a monthly offer — set it up as a recurring broadcast instead of remembering to do it by hand.

This is not the same as WhatsApp's own "schedule message" option in the phone app. That sends one message to one chat from your handset. A scheduled broadcast queues an approved template to a whole audience and sends from our servers whether or not your phone is on.

What happens while it sends

WhatsApp paces bulk delivery, and ConvoFly sends at roughly 120 messages a minute. A 300-person list finishes in under three minutes; a 20,000-person list genuinely takes hours. The composer shows an estimated sending time next to the recipient count before you launch, so a long-running send reads as progress rather than a stall.

You can pause, resume or cancel mid-flight. If the send would push you past your daily tier limit, the remainder is deferred to the next day automatically rather than being failed or risking your number's standing.

After it sends: reading the results

Every recipient carries one of four statuses — sent, delivered, read, failed — updating live. Open the campaign from your Broadcasts list to see each individual contact, and click Export CSV for the full list.

One honest caveat: recipients who turn off read receipts in WhatsApp's privacy settings only ever report as "delivered", even when they read the message. Your real read rate is higher than the report can show, so treat it as a floor. Full guide in delivery stats & reports.

A useful first move the next day: create a new broadcast, choose Re-target, pick this campaign, select Didn't reply, and send a different angle to just those people. That is far better for your quality rating than re-blasting everyone — walkthrough in following up with people who didn't reply.

Five mistakes first-timers make

• No fallback on a personalized value, producing "Hi ," for every contact with a blank name field.
• Skipping the test send and discovering a broken link after 2,000 messages have gone out.
• Filing a promotion as Utility to save money, and getting it re-categorized or rejected.
• Sending to everyone instead of a segment, which raises blocks and lowers your quality rating for no extra revenue.
• Ending on a full stop. A message that ends in a question earns replies, and every reply opens a free 24-hour window in which you can respond without another paid template.

If any of the underlying concepts feel shaky — templates, tiers, the 24-hour window — the primer is what is a WhatsApp broadcast, and the habits that keep your number green are in broadcast best practices.