This week an e-commerce brand we work with launched its seasonal sale with two WhatsApp campaigns: one for customers, one for leads. 72,600 messages, both scheduled for the same hour.
The lists overlapped. 167 people were in both, so they were going to get the same promo twice in the same minute. It happens a lot: two segments put together separately, and the overlap shows up on neither screen. It shows up once the customer has both messages on their phone.
Why this costs more on WhatsApp
The report-spam button is one tap away, and reports lower the number's quality rating. A number with a poor rating delivers fewer messages, and if the rating keeps falling Meta throttles it. That cost arrives later, in the sends you did want to make the following week.
What Smart Sending does
It caps how many proactive messages one person gets from you, counting all your initiatives together. You set it in Settings › Smart Sending, with two rules:
- Message limit: at most N per person in a time window. One a day on WhatsApp, for instance. A message that goes over is skipped, not held for later.
- Cooldown between initiatives: after one initiative messages someone, no other initiative can start with that person for as many days as you choose.
The agent's replies inside a conversation never count. If a customer writes, you always answer.
Separately there are the messages someone needs even if they already got others that day, like the notice that their order arrives today, or a payment that failed. Those go in Exceptions and always send. Before you turn the limit on, Boom lists which initiatives would lose messages under the settings you picked, so you can move them to Exceptions before anything starts getting skipped.
What happened with this campaign
The brand set 1 message per person per day, WhatsApp only. Email stayed unlimited, which is what they wanted. Their order, subscription and payment notices went in as exceptions.
Of the 72,600 messages, 292 were skipped, 0.4%. Of those, 163 were the second copy for someone in both campaigns, and 129 were going to people who had already had a WhatsApp from the brand in the previous 24 hours.
The 167 people in both campaigns came out like this: 163 got the promo once, and 4 got none, because the brand had already messaged them that day. None got it twice.
The part we had not planned for happened afterwards. A win-back campaign running in parallel, which nobody was watching that afternoon, tried to message 28 people who had just received the promo. The limit stopped those too. Nobody configured it for that case; the count is per person and per channel, so it does not care which initiative the message comes from. Those 28 are what convinced me the rule sits in the right place, because there was nobody there to notice.
The exceptions all went out, none were skipped. And every message that was skipped is labelled in Executions with the rule that stopped it, the limit and the channel, so afterwards you can see who did not get it and why.
How to turn it on
- Go to Settings › Smart Sending.
- Add the initiatives that always have to arrive to Exceptions, before you turn anything on.
- Turn on the Message limit. If you have no number in mind, 1 a day on WhatsApp is a reasonable place to start.
The full guide is in our documentation.
