How to send a WhatsApp broadcast to thousands of contacts
In short
The WhatsApp Business app limits a broadcast list to 256 recipients and only delivers to people who have saved your number in their contacts, so a large send is not possible from the app. Sending to thousands requires the WhatsApp Business Platform, an approved marketing template, and recorded opt-in for every recipient. Messages go out at the rate your number is permitted — 20 per second on a coexistence number — and Meta charges per message delivered.
Checked
The question is usually asked as “how do I raise the 256 limit”. You cannot, and the reason tells you what to do instead.
Why the app cannot do this
A broadcast list in the WhatsApp Business app has two limits, and the second is the one that ruins sends:
- 256 recipients per list.
- Delivery only to people who have saved your number in their phone contacts.
That second rule is WhatsApp’s anti-spam design and it is absolute. It is why a business adds 256 customers to a list, sends, and finds it reached forty — the regulars who had the number saved anyway. The people you most wanted to reach are exactly the ones who did not get it.
There is no setting, no upgrade and no trick. Sending at scale means the WhatsApp Business Platform.
What a large send needs
An approved marketing template. Outside the 24-hour window you cannot type freely. Write it, submit it, wait a few minutes. Why templates get rejected.
Recorded opt-in for every recipient. Not a purchase, not a support conversation, not a list you bought. What counts as opt-in.
A clean contact list. Numbers in E.164 form, with the country code. An Indian mobile stored as 98765 43210 is not something Meta can deliver to; +919876543210 is. A decent import normalises this and reports the rows it could not parse rather than silently dropping them.
A way to stop. Every marketing template carries an opt-out, the tap comes back as an ordinary inbound message, and it has to be honoured automatically.
What the send actually does
Messages go out at the rate your number is permitted. A coexistence number — one still in use in the WhatsApp Business app — is fixed at 20 messages per second, or 72,000 an hour.
Meta charges per message delivered, at the marketing rate for the recipient’s country. A disconnected number, a handset that never comes back online and somebody who has blocked you all produce an accepted send, no delivery, and no cost.
The things that go wrong
Sending to people who did not opt in. Blocks and reports drive your quality rating down, the rating drives your sending limit down, and the limit does not come back quickly. One purchased list can end a number.
An unresolvable variable. Hi {{1}} against a row with no first name produces “Hi ,”. Meta rejects that at send time, and where it does not, the customer reads it as exactly what it is. Give the variable a fallback or leave those rows out.
Sending the same thing twice. A send has no undo. Retries, redeliveries and two people both clicking Send are all real, and a broadcast that arrives twice is a reason to block. Any tool doing this properly claims each recipient row atomically before calling Meta, so exactly one attempt can win.
Counting the list instead of the audience. A list of 10,000 does not send 10,000 messages: the opted-out, the unparseable and the duplicates come out first. The number worth approving is the one after those are removed, and you should see it before you send.
A sensible first send
- Start with the people who most recently bought from you or wrote to you, not the whole list.
- Send to a few hundred, read what comes back, and look at the block rate before scaling up.
- Send at a time a person would want to hear from you. WhatsApp is where people keep their family.
- Have somebody ready to answer. A broadcast that works generates replies, and a reply opens a free 24-hour window in which you can talk to a warm customer without a template.
