Broadcasting is a powerful tool in Manychat that enables you to send mass messages to your contact base, helping you engage with your audience and grow your business when it matters most. With Broadcasting, you can engage all your contacts at once or focus on specific segments tailored to key criteria, ensuring your messages resonate with the right audience to maintain strong customer connections.
Here are some examples of use cases for broadcasting content on WhatsApp:
- Send transactional updates
- Share promotional messages, such as relevant offers
- Segment and learn about your audience using tags based on their responses
- Re-engage with clients to promote your services
⚠️ Important: Your business must be located in an approved country, which Facebook verifies according to the country setting in your Business Manager. For more details, please see Meta’s article Country Restrictions.
24-Hour Session Rule
WhatsApp applies a 24-hour rule, which allows businesses to send messages to users within 24 hours of the user’s last interaction. Conversations on WhatsApp are measured in fixed 24-hour sessions. Based on this rule, your contacts are divided into two groups:
- Contacts with an active 24-hour session: The 24-hour session begins whenever the first message is delivered by a business, either in response to a customer or when a business initiates the message.
- Contacts with an expired 24-hour session.
As a business, you can send two types of messages:
- Regular Message — Send unlimited regular messages during an active 24-hour session.
- Message Template — Send a message to your client outside of the 24-hour window on WhatsApp, including newly imported contacts.
You can initiate your broadcast with either a regular message or a message template. If you start with a regular message, your broadcast will only reach clients who interacted with your business in the last 24 hours. However, if you start with a message template, it will be delivered to all recipients, regardless of whether their 24-hour session is open or expired.
⚠️ Note: You can send broadcasts only to those clients who opted-in. This condition will automatically apply in broadcast settings.
⚠️ Note: It's essential to have your contacts' explicit permission before reaching out to them.
How to create a WhatsApp broadcast
There are two ways of creating a broadcast:
- You can broadcast from an existing automation
- You can create a new broadcast from scratch
Broadcasting from an existing automation
To do so, go to your Manychat account > Broadcasting > Broadcast From Automation and pick an Automation from the list. Note that you can make changes to the broadcast and these changes will not affect the original automation because you'll be editing an automatically created copy.
Creating a new broadcast from scratch
To do so, go to your Manychat account > Broadcasting > New Broadcast:
After clicking the button, a window appears showing various channels that may be connected to your business. Select WhatsApp to proceed.
Similar to the flow builder, create a step or an automation that you would like to send out to your WhatsApp contacts.
By default, the type of message is set to the Message Template to re-open the 24-hour messaging window.
⚠️ Note: To send message templates in your broadcast, the following conditions must be met:
- You must have an active PRO subscription, as sending message templates is a paid feature.
- You need to maintain a sufficient balance in your Wallet.
⚠️ Important: If you use a message template to send a message outside the 24-hour messaging window, and some contacts have interacted with your account within the last 24 hours, those broadcasts will be free of charge. However, if this message initiates a new session, you will be charged for a business-initiated conversation. Additionally, any time a template message is delivered, it will result in a conversation charge unless it is sent within an active conversation of the same category. For more information on the pricing and billing structure, please refer to the WhatsApp pricing guide article.
You can choose an existing message template or create a new one. Keep in mind that new templates require Meta approval. It usually takes a few minutes but can take up to 24 hours.
If the 24-hour messaging window is still open, you can go to flow builder and switch type to regular (within 24 hour window).
No charges will be applied if you send a message template to your contact within the 24-hour messaging window.
⚠️ Note: If your message template includes any buttons, you’ll need to go to the flow builder to link buttons to the next message, action, or other steps:
Customizing broadcast settings
Next, go to Target Audience to apply additional conditions or select a List to make your targeting more relevant:
Once you apply your conditions, you'll see the contacts that meet those criteria:
After finalizing your settings, click Send Now or schedule your broadcast for later:
Important notes
💡If you’re experiencing issues with wallet payments, please refer to our article: WhatsApp Credit Line troubleshooting.
💡If your message templates were not delivered, please refer to our article: Why WhatsApp messages are sometimes not delivered.
If your broadcasts aren’t being delivered and the reasons aren’t addressed in the provided resources, please contact Manychat Support for assistance.