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WhatsApp Business has grown to over 200 million monthly users over the past few years. This means that there are a lot of companies sending messages to users – and some of these messages could be considered spam. For customers, the only option was to either allow them to send messages and offers, or block the business account completely. WhatsApp has finally changed that.
The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to companies about what type of messages they would like to receive or not receive. This includes buttons such as “Interested/Not Interested” and “Stop/Resume” for some specific message categories.
Meta said it will begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not interested) in receiving “Offers and Ads.” They can also choose to stop receiving these types of messages altogether. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they want to receive offers from a brand during the holiday season.
Businesses can send messages via the WhatsApp API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers and new products), utilities (order updates, account balance), authentication (one-time passwords), and service (customer inquiries).
Although these categories exist in the backend, there was previously no way for customers to stop one type of message and still receive others. For example, you may want to receive purchase updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you’re not interested in marketing messages, you don’t have the option to provide this feedback manually.
In countries like India and Brazil, the phone number associated with WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While using email, you get the option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, and there were no such indications on WhatsApp. This led to users being laden by Unsolicited commercial messages.
The company is considering introducing new controls for commercial correspondence. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of the WhatsApp Business event in India, Nikila Srinivasan, VP of Product Management for Message Monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.
“One of the important things we do is give you transparency in your engagement and engagement with businesses. Secondly, if you don’t want to engage with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition, we started thinking about how to give more preferences for users to express more details.
Srinivasan also mentioned that educating companies and helping them understand how some of their campaigns may not meet platform or user standards will ultimately reduce spam.
Earlier this year, the company began limiting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly specifying the limit.
For a long time, WhatsApp has marketed itself as a place where people can have personal conversations. Over the past few years, the company has introduced features to build and join communities, to broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Communities and streamers each have their own tabs in the app.
However, business communications still appear in the main chat inbox, and there is no way to filter them. In a Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company noted that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other app revenues, which have generated significant revenues. $434 million per quarter. The company will need to find a balance between making money and not alienating core WhatsApp users by bombarding them with commercial messages.
When we asked Srinivasan about this balance, along with the possibility of creating a separate place for work messages, she pointed out that many of WhatsApp’s newer features are optional and separate from the main inbox.
“The essence of what you want to do with WhatsApp is to have it in your inbox. When I think about whether we create a separate experience for businesses, I really like the inspiration that we have to help businesses. Everything we do in terms of educating businesses and investing in “User Controls is because we want the bar of what actually belongs in your inbox to be really high.”
You can contact this reporter at im@ivanmehta.com or on Signal: @ivan.42
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