Customers can tell WhatsApp, or you, that they don’t want marketing messages from your business. When they do, Soosh marks them as opted out and leaves them out of marketing messages. They still get order updates and other utility messages, and your team can still chat with them.
Why it exists
Section titled “Why it exists”WhatsApp lets every customer turn off marketing messages from any business, from inside WhatsApp. It’s Meta’s way of keeping promotions welcome. A customer who can say “no more offers” is less likely to block or report you, and blocks and reports lower your number’s quality.
Meta also limits how many marketing messages one person gets from businesses overall. So a marketing message can be held back even when the customer hasn’t opted out.
How Soosh finds out
Section titled “How Soosh finds out”Soosh marks a contact as opted out in 4 ways:
- The customer turns off your marketing messages in WhatsApp. Meta tells Soosh, and the contact is marked. If they turn them back on, the mark goes.
- The customer replies with a stop word. A message that is only
STOP,UNSUBSCRIBE,STOP ALL,OPT OUTorOPTOUTmarks them. Capital letters and a full stop or exclamation mark don’t matter. A longer message, like “please stop the offers”, doesn’t count. - A marketing message fails because they turned them off. Soosh marks the contact, and the campaign’s results show Turned off your marketing messages.
- You import contacts with the column Opted out of marketing set to Yes. An import never removes an opt-out.
If Rahul answers a campaign with “STOP”, Soosh marks him, sends him a short confirmation and starts no bot reply. This works whether or not your bot is on. Template footers that tell customers to reply STOP rely on it.
A customer who opted out can opt back in by replying START, SUBSCRIBE,
UNSTOP or OPT IN. Soosh clears the mark and confirms. These words do
nothing for a customer who hadn’t opted out, so a flow or keyword reply built
on “start” keeps working. There’s no switch on the contact page to change the
mark by hand.
What Soosh does for opted-out customers
Section titled “What Soosh does for opted-out customers”Opted-out contacts show Opted out of marketing in the chat and on their contact page. In the chat’s contact details, Marketing messages says they’re opted out. Contacts (opens Soosh in a new tab) counts how many contacts are Opted out.
Soosh then leaves them out of marketing messages everywhere:
- Campaigns. When you add people with a marketing template, opted-out contacts are skipped, and the Add customers window says how many. If someone opts out after you added them, Soosh skips them when it sends.
- Follow-ups. Automatic follow-ups to a campaign skip them too.
- Chats. Soosh won’t send a marketing template to them from a chat.
- Shopify messages. Marketing messages from the Shopify integration skip them.
Utility and authentication templates still go to opted-out customers. So do your team’s normal replies when the customer writes to you.
What it means for you
Section titled “What it means for you”- Your audience can be smaller than the tag. If 500 customers have the tag VIP and 20 opted out, a marketing campaign reaches 480.
- Category changes matter. If Meta moves a utility template to marketing, opted-out customers stop getting it. See Template categories.
- Watch the number. A growing opt-out count means your offers are too frequent, or not what those customers want.
- “Held back” isn’t an opt-out. A message that fails with Held back by WhatsApp to protect engagement hit Meta’s limit on marketing messages for that person. Soosh doesn’t mark them. Try them later, or send to people who engaged recently.