Recurring WhatsApp Broadcasts: Daily, Weekly, Monthly

A recurring WhatsApp broadcast is a schedule rather than a message: you write the campaign once, pick a cadence — daily, weekly on chosen weekdays, or monthly on a chosen day of the month — and ConvoFly creates and sends a fresh occurrence at each scheduled time. The series itself never sends anything; each occurrence does.

That distinction is the whole point. Because every occurrence is assembled at send time, it rebuilds the audience from your segment instead of replaying a list you froze weeks earlier. A "new this week" campaign aimed at active buyers reaches whoever is active that week — people who qualified since the last run are added, people who no longer qualify drop out, and you never touch the campaign again.

This guide covers how to set the cadence, what changes between occurrences, how recurring compares with one-off broadcasts and drip campaigns, how a repeating send interacts with Meta's rolling 24-hour messaging limits, what each occurrence costs, and the scheduling edge cases that quietly break campaigns months after anyone was watching.

How to set up a recurring broadcast

The recurrence controls live in the ordinary broadcast composer — there is no separate "automation" area to learn.

1. Start a broadcast the normal way (see how to send your first WhatsApp broadcast) and pick your approved template.
2. Choose your audience — a tag, a saved segment, or a fresh one you build in the picker.
3. In the schedule section, switch from One-time to Repeat.
4. Set the frequency: daily; weekly, where you tick the weekdays it should run; or monthly, where you pick a day of the month.
5. Set the time of day. It is interpreted in your organisation's timezone, so a 09:00 weekly drop lands at 09:00 local, not at some server's idea of morning.
6. Optionally set an Until date so the series retires itself instead of running forever.
7. Test-send to yourself first — a mistake in a one-off send is embarrassing once, but a mistake in a weekly series repeats every week until someone notices.
8. Save. The series appears with its own status and its own list of past occurrences.

ConvoFly checks for due occurrences every minute, so a 09:00 send goes out at 09:00 rather than drifting into a vague batch window later in the morning.

Why each occurrence rebuilds the audience

This is the behaviour that separates a recurring broadcast from "export a CSV and re-upload it every Monday". At each scheduled time ConvoFly creates a new send and re-resolves the audience definition from scratch.

Concretely, suppose your segment is customers who bought in the last 90 days and it currently matches 640 people. Next Friday it might match 655: eleven new buyers have joined and twenty-six have aged past the 90-day mark and dropped out. You did nothing. The campaign simply reflects the state of your customer list on the day it runs.

The same mechanism means the campaign automatically respects anything that changed in the meantime — a contact who opted out between occurrences is excluded from the next one without you having to remember they exist. See managing opt-outs and frequency for how that is enforced.

One-off vs recurring vs drip: which should you use?

These three tools look similar in a menu and behave completely differently. The deciding question is what the timer is attached to: a single moment, the calendar, or the individual contact.

A useful rule of thumb: if the message would make sense pinned to a wall calendar, it is recurring. If it only makes sense relative to something the customer did, it is a drip campaign.

Worked example: a Friday new-arrivals drop

Here is the full shape of a real weekly campaign, with numbers.

• Template: an image-header template showing this week's arrivals, with a personalised first name and a button through to the collection page.
• Audience: segment bought in the last 180 days AND not opted out — 1,240 contacts this week.
• Cadence: weekly, Fridays, 10:00 local.
• Until: left blank — it runs indefinitely.

At 10:00 on Friday the occurrence is created, the segment re-resolves (1,240 today, 1,268 next week as new buyers roll in), and sending begins. WhatsApp paces bulk sending, and ConvoFly sends at roughly 120 messages a minute — so 1,240 recipients takes about 10 minutes to drain, not an instant. The composer shows an estimated sending time next to the recipient count before you commit, so a send still finishing at 10:09 reads as normal progress rather than a fault.

Each Friday's occurrence keeps its own delivery statistics, which is what makes a recurring campaign genuinely improvable: you can line up eight consecutive Fridays in reports and see whether changing the send time or the image moved read rates. A one-off send gives you a number; a series gives you a trend.

Daily recurrence plus a date filter: birthdays, renewals and reminders

The most useful combination in the whole feature is daily recurrence paired with a date filter on the segment. Because each day's occurrence rebuilds the audience, it reaches exactly the handful of people who match that day:

• Birthdays — filter birthday · day & month is today. Every morning it greets that day's birthday customers. On a 3,000-contact list that is roughly 8 people a day, so it costs almost nothing and never needs attention. Full walkthrough: birthday and anniversary campaigns.
• Renewals and expiries — filter renewal_date · is in exactly 7 days to nudge people a week before they lapse.
• Appointment reminders — filter appointment_date · is in exactly 1 day to remind tomorrow's bookings. See date-based reminders.

The single prerequisite is that the date field is actually filled in on your contacts. An empty birthday field never matches, so a campaign that looks perfectly configured will send to nobody and give you no error to investigate. Check the match count in the audience picker before you activate: if it says 0 today, send yourself a test by temporarily setting your own record to today's date.

What a repeating campaign does to your messaging limit

Every occurrence is a business-initiated send, so it counts against your number's messaging limit. Meta defines that limit as "the maximum number of unique WhatsApp user phone numbers your business can deliver messages to, outside of a customer service window, within a moving 24-hour period" (Meta, WhatsApp messaging limits). The tiers are 250 → 2,000 → 10,000 → 100,000 → unlimited, and every new WhatsApp Business portfolio starts at 250.

Two practical consequences for recurring campaigns:

• Size the cadence to the tier, not the ambition. A weekly send to 1,240 people is comfortable on the 2,000 tier. The same list on a daily cadence would attempt 1,240 unique recipients every single day — still inside 2,000, but it leaves almost no headroom for order updates, support replies or a one-off promotion on the same day.
• Recurrence is how most stores climb tiers. Meta raises your limit one level within 6 hours when you both send high-quality messages and have used at least half your current limit in the last 7 days. A weekly campaign to 1,240 contacts clears the 250 tier's 125-person threshold many times over; a store that sends cautiously twice a quarter never clears it and sits at 250 indefinitely. Details in messaging limits and tier caps.

If an occurrence would exceed your daily allowance, ConvoFly defers the remainder rather than pushing your number over the line — the overflow continues rather than failing outright.

What each occurrence costs

A recurring campaign is not billed once. Every occurrence is a separate set of template sends and is charged accordingly. Meta moved to per-message pricing on 1 July 2025, and states plainly that "you are only charged when a template message is delivered" (Meta, WhatsApp pricing).

Which category your template sits in changes the arithmetic:

Rates vary by country and Meta publishes them in downloadable rate cards rather than inline, so budget by multiplying your country's rate by recipients × occurrences per month. For a fuller breakdown see how much a WhatsApp broadcast costs.

Media stays durable across occurrences

If your template has an image, video or document header, ConvoFly keeps a durable copy of the file and re-uploads fresh media to WhatsApp for every future occurrence. This matters because uploaded media identifiers expire — a naive implementation would send perfectly for a fortnight and then start failing with a broken header on week three, long after anyone was checking.

You can still change the media between occurrences by editing the series; the change applies from the next scheduled run onward. See adding media, buttons and offers.

Managing, pausing and cancelling a series

• The series has its own status and its own row, separate from the individual sends it has produced.
• Cancelling the series stops all future occurrences immediately. Past occurrences and their statistics are untouched.
• Each occurrence keeps its own delivery stats, so week-over-week comparison in reports is a like-for-like read.
• An Until date is the safest setting for anything seasonal. A Ramadan or Christmas series with no end date will still be cheerfully sending in March.

Scheduling edge cases worth knowing

• Day 31 monthly sends only fire in months that have 31 days. That is seven of twelve months. If you want a genuinely monthly statement, pick day 28 or earlier.
• Very large lists take real time. At roughly 120 messages a minute, 10,000 recipients is around 83 minutes of sending. Schedule the start time accordingly if the content is time-sensitive.
• A recurring campaign inherits your template's fate. If Meta later rejects or pauses that template, the series has nothing valid to send. Check in occasionally — a silent series is easy to miss.
• The audience can go to zero. A date-filtered daily send legitimately matches nobody on many days. That is correct behaviour, not a failure, but it means "no send today" is not evidence the campaign works.

How often is too often?

There is no Meta-published frequency ceiling, so this is a judgement call — but the feedback loop is unforgiving. Blocks and "report" taps feed your number's quality rating, and a low rating can freeze or drop your tier. Meta references quality rating as a factor in raising limits without publishing numeric thresholds, so treat any specific score quoted elsewhere with suspicion.

Practical guidance that holds up: keep promotional recurrence to weekly at most for a general list, reserve daily cadence for date-filtered campaigns where each person receives one message a year rather than one a day, and set a per-contact marketing frequency cap so overlapping campaigns cannot stack up on the same person. A customer on three weekly series is receiving three messages a week from you whether or not any single campaign looks reasonable in isolation. More in broadcast best practices.

Common mistakes

1. Setting it and never opening it again. Put a calendar reminder to review the series once a quarter — audience size, delivery rate, and whether the offer still exists.
2. Using recurring where a drip belongs. A welcome message should start when the customer signs up, not next Tuesday at 10:00 with everyone else.
3. No Until date on a seasonal campaign. The most common cause of an out-of-season message going out to a live list.
4. Forgetting the audience is dynamic. Your Friday send reaching 200 more people than last month is your segment growing, not a bug — but it also means your cost grew by 200 messages.