Phone Number Validation and Customer Consent: Critical for WhatsApp Marketing

When it comes to conducting marketing campaigns via WhatsApp: phone number validation and obtaining customer consent. This is a critical step that every business must consider before launching their campaign to avoid problems and ensure customer satisfaction. Let's delve into the details.

• Verify whether phone numbers have an active WhatsApp account. Although this might seem like an evident step, it's not uncommon for businesses to overlook this aspect. Before you start sending your meticulously crafted marketing messages, you need to ensure that the phone numbers on your list are associated with an active WhatsApp account. Otherwise, you could be wasting resources on messages that will never reach their intended destination.
• Obtain customer consent. It should be remembered that no customer appreciates unsolicited messages. Therefore, before sending any marketing communication, it's imperative that customers have given their consent to receive these messages. This is not simply about a generic agreement somewhere in the terms and conditions, but about clear, informed, and specific consent for WhatsApp communications.
• Respect privacy policies. WhatsApp has strict policies on privacy and the use of their platform. To avoid account suspension, these policies must be adhered to meticulously. There are other recommendations to follow if you want to avoid being banned by WhatsApp, which you can find in this article.

If you need to validate if a mobile number has WhatsApp installed, you can use our number validator to do it individually or you can create a 2Chat account to do massive validation with 2Chat API

However, what happens if these precautions are not taken? Let's look at the risks of sending WhatsApp messages to numbers not enabled for the app.

• Wasting time and resources is one of the most obvious risks. As we mentioned earlier, sending messages to numbers that don't have an active WhatsApp account is a waste of time and resources.
• Damage your brand's reputation. If messages are sent to numbers not enabled for WhatsApp, they may end up going to incorrect or outdated numbers. This can cause annoyance to the people who receive these messages in error, which could harm the reputation of the brand.
• Sanctions by WhatsApp are a real risk. If the platform's policies are not respected, the company could face penalties, including account suspension.

Therefore, it is vital that all businesses planning to launch a marketing campaign on WhatsApp follow these guidelines. By doing so, not only will compliance with policies and regulations be ensured, but a long-term relationship with customers can also be built. Until next time!