What is Meta's new Frequency Capping Update?

Don’t you love using WhatsApp for all your marketing campaigns? Nothing’s better than landing straight into your users' DMs for everything. However, as enticing as it may sound, Meta realized some brands might be exploiting this and spamming their Indian users. To control this, it has come up with a new update, “Frequency Capping”.

‍

What is Frequency Capping?

Frequency Capping puts a limit on the number of marketing messages a brand can send to its users in India in a specific time frame. 

Frequency Capping restricts promotional messages sent through approved WhatsApp Business templates. There's a limit on how many of these messages a user can see from all businesses in a certain period (think of it like a quota). This timeframe and the number of messages are constantly adjusted by Meta to optimize the user experience.

‍

Why did Meta do this?

Meta is also responsible for making sure WhatsApp users do not feel overwhelmed by all the messages coming in. This restriction should help businesses have more meaningful conversations with their users on WhatsApp. This can lead to increased engagement, better CTRs and also conversions. 

‍

Are your Messages Affected?

Frequency Capping only applies to promotional messages transmitted through WhatsApp Business API. These messages will NOT be affected:

1. Day-to-day conversations between businesses and their users in a 24-hour period
2. Messages related to Click-to-WhatsApp Ads (CTWA) will remain unaffected

‍

What Challenges are you going to face?

Businesses might face some marketing messages failing to reach their target audience. Don't jump to conclusions though! These failed deliveries could be due to other reasons besides Frequency Capping, as you'll still get standard error codes.e is due to Frequency Capping, remember other factors can still affect deliverability.

How to Solve for Frequency Capping?

Meta’s intentions behind this update are to make sure users do not get overwhelmed or feel spammed by businesses on WhatsApp. Here are 3 ways you can make sure you are the least affected by Frequency Capping:

1. Focus on initiating meaningful conversations with your users. Once they have warmed up and the session is open, the rules get relaxed.
2. Prioritize qualitative messages as compared to bombarding your users with multiple messages throughout the day. 
3. Perform A/B tests and see what works best for you. Once you have ample data, you can use it to design your WhatsApp promotional messages accordingly.

‍

Conclusion

The Frequency Capping update will clearly make brands more conscious of their WhatsApp promotion campaigns. This can help increase user experience and would encourage them to engage and convert more.

If you are a business looking to build your WhatsApp marketing, Engati can help smoothen out the process for you. You can book a 1-1 10 minutes session with us here.