WhatsApp Business has become more than 200 million monthly users in recent years. This means that many companies are sending messages to users – and some of these messages could be considered spam. For customers, the only option was to either let them send messages and offers or block the business account completely. WhatsApp is finally changing that.

The company is currently testing new ways for users to provide feedback to businesses on what type of messages they would like to receive or not. This involves buttons like “interested/not interested” and “stop/resume” for specific categories of messages.

Meta said it would begin testing interactions globally. For example, in the screenshot below, users can indicate whether they are interested (or not) in receiving “Offers & Announcements.” They can also choose to no longer receive this type of message. In the future, users will have the option to resume messages if they want to receive offers from a brand during the holiday season.

Businesses can send messages through the WhatsApp API based on one of these four categories: marketing (offers, new products), utility (order updates, account balance), authentication (passwords to single use) and service (customer requests).

Although these categories exist in the backend, clients previously had no way to stop one type of message while continuing to receive others. For example, you might want to receive purchasing updates and authentication codes from an e-commerce site, but if you’re not interested in marketing messages, you don’t have the option to provide those comments manually.

In countries like India and Brazil, a phone number associated with WhatsApp is the primary communication channel for many users, unlike email. When you are by email you have the option to unsubscribe from promotional emails, there were no such indicators on WhatsApp. This led users be overwhelmed by professional messages containing spam.

The company plans to introduce new controls for business messaging. In a conversation with TechCrunch in September on the sidelines of a WhatsApp Business event in IndiaNikila Srinivasan, VP of Product Management for Message Monetization at Meta, hinted at this feature.

“An important thing we do is give you transparency about your interaction and engagement with companies. Second, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. On top of that, we’re starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity,” she said.

Srinivasan also mentioned that educating businesses and helping them understand why some of their campaigns are not meeting platform or user standards will ultimately reduce spam.

Earlier this year, the company began restricting the number of marketing messages a person can receive in one day without explicitly defining the limit.

For a long time, WhatsApp presented itself as a place for people to have personal conversations. Over the past few years, the company has introduced features to create and join communitieshas broadcast messages as a creator or publisher, and, for businesses, to communicate directly with customers. Communities and broadcast channels have their own tabs in the app.

However, business communications still appear in the main chat inbox and there is no way to filter them. During its Q3 2024 quarterly call, the company reported that the WhatsApp Business platform is a key growth driver for its family of other apps’ revenue, which has garnered $434 million during the quarter. The company will have to find a balance between making money and not alienating WhatsApp’s core users by bombarding them with professional messages.

When we asked Srinivasan about this balance as well as the possibility of creating a separate space for business messages, she pointed out that several of WhatsApp’s newer features are optional and separate from the main inbox.

“The main thing you want to do with WhatsApp is to be in your inbox. When I think about whether we could create a distinct experience for businesses, I really like the inspiration we have to help businesses. Whatever we’re doing in terms of business education and investing in user controls, it’s because we want the quality level of what actually belongs in your inbox to be really high,” he said. she declared.

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