For most stores, a cautious place to start is no more than one campaign message per customer per week, and no more than two messages a week in total once automated sales messages such as cart reminders and win-back offers are included. In a sale week the total can go up to three: the launch, a mid-campaign message if you genuinely have news, and a closing reminder. If more people are leaving your list, messages are going unread and clicks fall a little with every send, you may be writing more often than your customers want; the same signs can also come from a weak offer or weak copy.
Writing down a weekly cap is only half the job. You also need to decide in advance which automated messages count toward that cap, how far apart to write to customers who do not read your messages, who gets a message on which day of a sale week, and which customers to give a rest when opt-outs go up.
Count messages per customer
Store teams usually look at their own calendar when they plan how often to send WhatsApp campaign messages: a new-season announcement on Monday, a discount in the shoe category on Thursday. On the calendar, those are two separate jobs. On the phone of a customer whose last purchase was a pair of shoes, they are two messages in the same week. If that customer has also left items in their cart and has been placed in the win-back flow because they have not ordered for a while, the count rises to four. The customer does not know which team sent which message, or with which tool; all they see is the same store writing to them again and again.
So count per customer, and define a week as the seven days leading up to each send date. If you go by calendar weeks, a message sent on Sunday evening and another sent on Monday morning land in different weeks, and your count will not show that you wrote to the customer two days in a row.
Include every message that has a sales purpose in the weekly total: bulk campaign announcements, category discounts, cart reminders, win-back and first-purchase offers, birthday coupons. The customer may have abandoned the cart on their own, but they did not ask for the reminder, and its purpose is to sell; count it too. Meta’s template categorization guide also classes a message that reminds a customer about items left in their cart as a marketing template, even if the customer asked for it. The only messages that stay outside the count are order-related messages and notifications the customer explicitly asked for, such as the order confirmation, shipping details and the stock alert for a product they were waiting for after tapping the “Notify Me When Available” button. Excluding a message from the count applies only to your own rule; if you send the stock alert with a template approved in the marketing category, it is still a marketing message as far as the per-user limit described below is concerned.
For win-back messages, Pushouse itself prevents messages from piling up on the same day: in the WhatsApp We Miss You module, the daily limit per person applies to the total across all modules, so a customer who has already received another message that day does not get a win-back message. The weekly cap, and the days on which your bulk campaigns go out, are yours to decide. Because Pushouse’s WhatsApp bulk messaging module lets you schedule a send for a later date, you can plan all of the week’s campaigns in advance and set each one up for its own day.
Have a single person keep the calendar. If the marketing team, category managers and customer service each plan their own sends, route every request through that one calendar. The day before a send, combine all the lists that will receive a message that week into one file, sort it by phone number and count how many lists each customer appears on.
How many messages are reasonable in a normal week?
Start your first month with the cautious limits below; they are not based on any study:
- Send no more than one general campaign message a week to customers who have bought in the last three months and read your recent messages.
- Write once every two weeks to customers who have ordered before but have not read your last two campaign messages. If they do not read the third message either, move them to the rest group described below.
- For members who signed up but have never ordered, one or two campaign messages a month is enough. If you are not getting results, make the offer more concrete instead of shortening the gap: state the percentage or amount as a number and give the exact end date.
- Do not write to customers whose last purchase was more than three months ago as part of your general campaign calendar; leave them to the win-back flow.
Do not rely on read status alone. Before you count a customer among the non-readers, also check that they have not clicked on your messages and have not ordered during that period.
Our article on the customer groups to separate for campaign messages covers which group gets which offer, how to write to customers who ordered recently and which customers to take off the list altogether. The intervals here set how far apart you write to those groups.
How your messages are spread across the days can also change how frequent they feel. Two messages that arrive on the same day can feel heavier to a customer than two messages spread over two separate days. Keep campaign messages at least two days apart: if one campaign goes out on Monday, the next should go out on Wednesday at the earliest. Avoiding too many messages per day is also one of the recommendations in Meta’s message quality guidelines.
Plan the sale week day by day
In busy weeks such as 11.11, the late-November sales or the end-of-season sales, the number of messages tends to grow on its own, because there seems to be something to say every day. Before the campaign starts, and even before the early-access message goes out, write down the per-customer cap and decide who gets which message on which day. For a seven-day campaign that runs from Monday to Sunday night, you can start with this plan:
- On the Sunday evening before the campaign, an early-access message goes to a small group only: customers with communication consent who have a high order value and shop often.
- On Monday morning, the launch announcement goes to customers who did not get the early-access message, have communication consent and are not in the rest group.
- On Wednesday or Thursday, if there is news, a mid-campaign message goes to customers who read the launch or early-access message or tapped its link but have not ordered in the campaign yet. Customers who got a cart reminder or another offer during the campaign week do not go on this list.
- On Sunday, the last day, a single closing reminder goes to customers who received the launch or early-access message but have not ordered in the campaign. Remove from the closing list anyone who has already received three sales messages that week, automated messages included.
As long as you stick to this plan, no customer receives more than three campaign messages during the week; because the mid-campaign message goes to a narrow group, most customers finish the week with two. There are two or three days between the launch and the mid-campaign message, and three or four days between the mid-campaign message and the closing reminder. When you write the copy for each stage, you can adapt the early-access, launch, mid-campaign and last-day messages in our campaign message examples.
You do not have to switch off your automated flows during a sale week, but you do have to account for them. If a customer who received a personal 15% offer from the win-back flow sees your 25% general campaign in the same week, the personal offer loses its point; the customer may also ask which of the two rates applies. Whenever two offers clash, choose one of them and send the customer only that one.
If the campaign is extended or two campaigns run back to back
If you extend the campaign, do not send customers a second “last day” message; announce the extension on your site only. Set a separate rule for two busy periods that come one after the other, such as 11.11 and the late-November sales: a customer who received three messages during the first campaign should get no campaign messages for at least a week after it ends. If the second campaign starts before that week is over, send that customer the launch message a few days late. Plan a two-week summer sale as two separate weeks. Each week has its own cap, but the “last day” message goes out only on the last day of the campaign.
Signs that you are sending too much
On WhatsApp, the cost of sending too many messages may not end with the campaign in question. A customer who has had enough can tap block or report. The WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy says WhatsApp can use this kind of feedback to restrict how many messages a business is able to send.
There is a separate limit on the recipient’s side as well. According to Meta’s documentation on per-user marketing limits, every marketing template delivered to a customer counts toward the limit WhatsApp may set for that person; once the limit is reached, the message you send does not reach the customer. Two of the factors that decide how tight that limit is are the share of recent marketing messages the customer has read and the number of messages from friends, family and businesses currently in their WhatsApp. Meta recommends waiting at least 24 hours before resending a message that failed because of the limit. Your messages share the customer’s phone with everyone else’s; irrelevant, frequent messages can reduce the chance that an important campaign of yours reaches that person later on.
Before customers tell you “you message me too often,” the numbers usually show it. After each campaign, compare the results for the same customer group with your earlier sends, and look for the four signs below.
Opt-out requests are rising
Look at frequency first when, after a send, the share of customers who tap the opt-out button or message you asking to be taken off the list rises noticeably above the average for recent campaigns to the same group. WhatsApp users also have a way to do this without writing to you: according to Meta’s documentation on marketing templates, a user can use the “Offers and announcements” setting to stop a business’s marketing messages altogether or to say how interested they are in them. Choosing “Not interested” can also affect the limit on marketing messages you can send to that user. Once a customer has stopped them, your messages to that customer are not delivered. If the share of undelivered messages in your sending report grows from one campaign to the next, silent opt-outs or messages caught by Meta’s per-user limit may be increasing.
Reads and clicks fall with every send
When the share of customers who click goes down with each of three consecutive campaigns to the same group, customers may have started to scroll past your messages without opening them, or may be less interested in your offers than they used to be. Take a drop in the read rate even more seriously; as explained above, a customer’s read rate for marketing messages is one of the factors that set the per-user limit. To tell whether the drop comes from the copy or the frequency, write less often for a month to a randomly chosen part of the same group, then compare the two parts. If the drop continues only in the part you write to often, the problem is most likely frequency; if it appears in both parts, look at the offer and the copy first.
Complaints and blocks are on the rise
The customer service team sees replies such as “you message me every day” or “don’t message me so often”; the marketing team often does not. Count the replies of this kind that come in during the two days after a campaign and note the number next to the campaign results. What customers do without ever writing to you counts as well: according to Meta’s explanation of message quality, quality is judged by how your messages were received over the past seven days, and blocks, reports, mutes, archives and the reasons users give when they block you all go into that assessment.
Meta pauses your template
The fourth sign stops sending outright. According to Meta’s documentation on template pausing, a message template that drops to the lowest quality rating is paused for 3 hours the first time and 6 hours the second time, and is disabled the third time; a paused template cannot be used to send messages to customers. The document adds that if a business keeps sending templates that drop to low quality, its phone number may eventually be affected too. When you get a pause notification, do not stop at fixing the copy. The same document also lists changing targeting and delivery settings among the options, so review who you write to and how often as well.
Let tired customers rest without removing them from the list
Customers who show signs of fatigue do not have to come off your list entirely. Look for customers who appear not to have read any of your last three campaign messages, have not clicked any link and have not ordered in that period, and move them into a rest group for four weeks. During the rest period, the customer keeps receiving the messages they expect, such as order and shipping notifications, but no campaign messages. When the period is over, make your first message a concrete piece of news about a category the customer has bought from before; leave general discount announcements for later. If the customer does not read that message either, write to them once a month.
The first message to a customer whose rest period has ended can also let them choose how often they hear from you:
{{store name}}: Hello {{customer name}}, our new-season {{category name}} products are now on the site. Browse them here: {{category link}}
If you would like to hear about our campaigns once a month, reply MONTHLY. If you would rather not receive campaign messages, just tap the “Stop promotions” button below.
Whatever button or phrase you offer for opting out, check with your own number that your tool records it as an opt-out. When a customer replies in their own words, for example “don’t message me again,” that is an opt-out request too, and you need to process it by hand.
Offer a frequency option only if you can record the replies. Sending a new campaign message the following week to a customer who replied “MONTHLY” is worse than never asking. Before the send, decide who will mark the replies and on which list, and send each customer who replies a short confirmation on the same day:
Thank you. From now on, we will send you our campaign news once a month.
Write the rule down and filter the list before every send
Nobody keeps a frequency rule in their head; write it on a single page and add it to your pre-send checks. A sample rule might read: “No more than two sales messages per customer in the last seven days, at most one of them a campaign; no more than three in a sale week. Campaign messages at least two days apart. Cart, win-back, first-purchase and birthday messages count; order, shipping and stock notifications do not.”
Before the send date, remove from the list everyone who has hit the cap in the last seven days; use your own sending records to count how many messages each customer has received. For splits based on purchase history, you can use the Website AI Reporting screen in Pushouse: type “customers whose last purchase was more than 90 days ago,” and you get the list of customers to leave to the win-back flow instead of the general campaign.
Opt-out requests do not always come through WhatsApp. A customer who phones you and says “stop sending me messages” has made a valid request too: the WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy obliges you to respect a person’s request to opt out of your communications even when it is made outside WhatsApp, and to remove that person from your contact list. Put in writing how customer service passes these requests on to the campaign list. Under Article 8 of Türkiye’s Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce, once a request reaches the service provider (in this case, your store), it must stop sending electronic messages to the recipient within three working days. Three working days is the legal maximum; if you process the request on the day it arrives, no new campaign slips in between.
After each campaign, record the results group by group in the same file: how many messages were delivered, how many people opted out, how many clicks and orders came in. Unless your template is paused or opt-outs rise noticeably, leave the rule unchanged for the first month. If opt-outs do not rise and clicks do not fall over four campaigns, your cap seems to suit your customers for now; at that point, try a second campaign message per week, but only with the group that shops most often. If opt-outs are rising, lower the cap by one message and watch four more campaigns without changing the copy. To go through your rule and your first month’s sending calendar with the Pushouse team, write to us.
