Can you broadcast on WhatsApp to your customers without getting banned?
Short answer: Yes — to your own customers who have saved your number, and you stop the moment they ask. Those are WhatsApp's own three conditions. "Blasting" a list of numbers belonging to people who do not know you is a different thing: that is what gets an account reported, and that is what WhatsApp bans.
What is the difference between a blast and a broadcast?
| Broadcast | Blast | |
|---|---|---|
| Recipients | Customers who have bought, asked, or requested updates | A list of numbers bought, scraped from groups, or collected |
| Do they know you? | Yes | No |
| Does WhatsApp provide a tool? | Yes — broadcast lists inside the app | No — and lists it as a cause for bans |
What are WhatsApp's conditions for broadcasting?
From the official WhatsApp Business app page:
"Only contacts who've added your number to their phone's address book will receive your broadcast message. If your contact isn't receiving your broadcast messages, check to make sure they've added you to their address book."
— WhatsApp Help Center, How to use broadcast lists on the WhatsApp Business app
This is what most people do not know: you can put 256 numbers into a broadcast list (WhatsApp's official limit), press send, and see every message marked "sent" — but only people who saved your number receive it. The rest, silence. Not because of a ban. Because it simply never arrived.
On frequency:
"…frequent use of broadcast messages may lead people to report your messages, and we ban accounts that are reported multiple times."
— WhatsApp Help Center, How to use WhatsApp responsibly
The mechanism is: people report → account banned. Not "send 200 messages → account banned". The real question is not "how many can I send", but "how many people on this list genuinely want to receive it".
What happens when a customer replies "stop"?
"If a contact asks you to stop messaging them, you should remove the contact from your address book and refrain from contacting them again."
— WhatsApp Help Center, How to use WhatsApp responsibly
The problem: when a broadcast goes out from a list, replies are not visible one by one. Three people write "no more please", nobody notices, the next message reaches them again — and the fourth person reports you.
When is a broadcast worth it?
When someone is there to handle the replies. Do the sum: broadcast to 300 customers at 10pm. If 15% reply — that is 45 people asking about sizes, shipping, cash on delivery at the same moment. One owner. Whoever is not answered that night, some will not reply the next day.
A broadcast with nobody to answer the replies = 45 unanswerable questions you created yourself.
How does Merpati handle broadcasts?
- Broadcasts go out from the inbox, not a blind list. Every reply is visible.
- "Stop", "don't want", "unsubscribe" flags that number — the next message is not sent to them. "Start" reopens it. The owner does not maintain that list by hand.
- Every reply is answered by the AI from the owner's business information — 45 questions at 10pm answered one by one, and the owner sees them the next morning.
- A sent / delivered / read / replied report for every broadcast, so the owner knows how many actually received it.
Start with the customers who have already bought
Sign up at merpati.my, connect the number you already use, and send your first broadcast to customers who have bought from you — not an external list. WhatsApp's three conditions are handled automatically.
Sources
- WhatsApp Help Center, How to use broadcast lists on the WhatsApp Business app — faq.whatsapp.com/653415899610349
- WhatsApp Help Center, How to use broadcast lists ("You can include up to 256 contacts in each broadcast list") — faq.whatsapp.com
- WhatsApp Help Center, How to use WhatsApp responsibly — faq.whatsapp.com/361005896189245
Quotations verbatim from the official WhatsApp pages.