WhatsApp to Introduce Option to Unsubscribe from Business Marketing Spam

In the last couple of years, WhatsApp Business has grown up to more than 200 million monthly users.
WhatsApp to Introduce Option to Unsubscribe from Business Marketing Spam

In the last couple of years, WhatsApp Business has grown up to more than 200 million monthly users. That means tons of businesses sending messages to users-which some of these could be considered spam. Customers have only had the option to let them send messages and offers or block the business account entirely. WhatsApp is finally changing that.

The company is now testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses about what kind of messages they would want to receive — or not receive. This includes buttons like "interested/not interested" and "stop/resume" for some categories of specific messages.

Meta said it will start testing interactions globally. For instance, in the screenshot below, users can check if they are interested (or not interested) in receiving "offers and announcements". They can also opt to receive no more of such a kind of message in the future. In the future, users would be allowed to resume messages if they wish to receive offers from a brand during a festive season.

Businesses can send following four categories of messages through WhatsApp's API: marketing or offers, new products, utility or order updates, account balance information, authentication: one-time password; and service or customer inquiries.

These categories exist on the backend, but customers were never able to opt out of one type of message and keep others. So, you may want to get purchase updates or authentication codes from a shopping application, but wouldn't want marketing messages and haven't been able to opt out manually for them.

In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number attached to WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. While on email, you get an option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, there weren’t such indicators on WhatsApp. This resulted in users being overwhelmed by spammy business messages.

The company has been thinking about introducing new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in India, Meta's VP of product management for messaging monetization hinted at the feature.
"One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses.". Two, if you don't want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. That helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. Apart from that, we are beginning to think about how we could give more preferences to users to express more granularity, she added.

Srinivasan also said that educating businesses and helping them understand how some of their campaigns are not meeting the platform or users' standards will eventually reduce spam.

It started restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in a day without explicitly defining the limit earlier this year.

For years, WhatsApp has presented itself as a space to have private conversations between individuals. More recently, the company has added features that enable communities to be created and joined, allow for casting messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to message directly with customers. Communities and broadcast channels each have their own tab in the app.

However, business messages still appear in the main chat inbox, and there is no filter for them. The company said during its Q3 2024 quarterly call that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps revenue, which raked in $434 million in the quarter. The company will have to balance making money with not turning core WhatsApp users off by bombarding them with business messages.

When we posed this question to Srinivasan-along with the possibility of a separate place for business messages-she noted that several of the newer WhatsApp features are optional and separate from the main inbox.

The heart of what you want to do with WhatsApp is be in your inbox. And when I think about whether we would create a separate experience for businesses, I really love the inspiration that we have for helping businesses. Whatever we are doing in terms of educating businesses and investing in user controls is because we want the standard of what actually belongs in your inbox to feel really high," she said.

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2024-11-21 18:19:33