We've all gotten the message from a business we don't remember giving our number to. "Hi, we have a promotion this weekend." You block it, report it or ignore it. The business never finds out it just lost a contact and that its number has one more strike against it.
On the other side is the message you were actually waiting for: the fondita (small family diner) where you eat letting you know there's mole on Thursday, the event venue where you asked for a quote saying a December date just opened up. That one you read, and sometimes you reply.
The difference isn't the wording. It's that in the second case you gave your permission, and in the first you didn't.
What Meta requires
This isn't a courtesy recommendation. The WhatsApp Business messaging policy says you can only contact a person on WhatsApp if they gave you their number and gave you permission to receive your messages, and that you must honor any opt-out request, whichever way it comes in. On top of that, to start a conversation (that is, to write to someone who hasn't written to you in the last 24 hours) you have to use a template Meta reviewed and approved, and Meta reserves the right to pause or reject any of them.
If you ignore this, nothing happens the first time. It happens when enough customers block or report you: your number's quality rating drops, your sends get limited, and in the worst case your account gets shut down. With the number you've always had.
How to ask for permission
The simplest way: by asking. When you hand over an order, when you close an appointment or when someone leaves their number at the counter, you ask whether they want to receive notices and promotions over WhatsApp. If they say yes, you save that they said yes, when, and with what wording. If they don't answer or say no, they get nothing except the reply to what they asked.
In Atenta, that lives in the customer's profile: consent yes or no, date and text. Nobody is eligible for a campaign without those three things, and the screen says so plainly before you send. If you import your customer list from a file, you can mark a global consent only if you truly have it; if not, those customers go into the CRM but not into campaigns.
How to build a campaign that doesn't annoy anyone
A campaign in Atenta is an approved template, a customer segment, the variables (name, promotion, date), a schedule and a sending pace. Before anything goes out, you see the honest preview: how many customers are eligible, why each of the others is excluded (no consent, opted out, in a rest period, invalid number) and how much it will cost in pesos at Meta's rate. Only after you confirm the cost does it get scheduled.
There are also rules Atenta applies on its own to protect your number:
- Nothing is sent between nine at night and nine in the morning.
- The same customer doesn't get two campaigns less than seven days apart.
- If failures or opt-outs climb, the campaign stops itself and lets you know.
- If Meta lowers your number's quality rating, the campaign pauses.
- Any "STOP" a client replies (or anything like it) pulls them out of every campaign instantly, by code, and they get a confirmation.
What to send
What the customer wants to know, at the moment it's useful to them. For an event venue, that a date opened up or that there's a December package, to the people who asked for a quote and didn't book. For a fondita, Friday's special menu to the people who order often. For a gym, the new class to the people who took a trial class and didn't join.
The segment does the work: by tag, area, frequency or product. A campaign to a hundred people who were waiting for it is worth more than one to a thousand who weren't.
Results you can actually read
Sent, delivered, read, replied, orders that came out of the campaign, opt-outs. Live, with the option to pause or cancel. The people who replied land in your inbox like any other conversation, and Atenta handles them with your business's knowledge base, or you take over.
Start with permission
Before you think about your first campaign, start asking for permission today and recording it in each customer's profile, with its date and its wording, from your app. When you want to send something, there will already be someone to send it to.
If you run an event venue, see how Atenta handles people looking for a date. How campaigns work under the hood is in the documentation. And to start building a list that actually wants to hear from you, sign up your business.