> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://howto.paigeme.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Send a WhatsApp template to many customers at once

> Broadcasts send an approved WhatsApp template to a group of your contacts — a promotion, a reminder, an announcement. Opt-outs and dead numbers are excluded for you.

Your bot answers people who message it. **Broadcasts** are the other direction: reaching out to many customers at once with an approved template — a seasonal promotion, a reminder that bookings open Monday, a notice that you're closed next week.

You'll find **Broadcasts** as a tab at the top of your project, next to Conversations.

<Note>
  Broadcasts needs turning on for a project before the tab appears, from **Settings → Project**. It's also a paid feature, so it's locked once your trial ends.
</Note>

## Before you start

You need two things:

1. **An approved template.** WhatsApp doesn't let businesses send whatever they like to people who haven't messaged recently — every broadcast goes out as a [template](/guides/templates) that Meta has reviewed and approved. Approval takes minutes for a utility template and can take hours for a marketing one, so do this first.
2. **Contacts to send to.** Either from people who've messaged your bot, or [imported in bulk](/guides/contacts-import).

## Building a broadcast

Click **New Broadcast** and you'll go through six steps.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Template">
    Name the broadcast — for you, not your customers — and pick your template. Only **approved** templates appear here.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Variables">
    If your template has `{{1}}`-style placeholders, fill each one. Two choices per placeholder:

    * **Static text** — the same words for everyone.
    * **Contact field** — each person's own **Full name**, **Phone number**, or **Username**.

    A contact field is what turns one template into a personal message. The preview below shows how it'll read.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Audience">
    Either pick a [saved segment](/guides/broadcasts/segments), or build a one-off filter here from tags. **Opted in only** is on by default — leave it that way.

    A live count tells you how many people you're about to reach. If it says zero, you can't continue.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Schedule">
    Pick a date and time, or save it as a draft to come back to. See below — this step matters more than it looks.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Test Send">
    Send the real template to up to three numbers first. It doesn't touch your audience or your daily cap, and it's the only way to see the thing exactly as a customer will. Worth the thirty seconds.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Confirm">
    Review it all, including the estimated WhatsApp cost, and save.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Scheduling is how a broadcast sends

This catches people out, so it's worth being blunt:

<Warning>
  **There's no "send now" button.** A broadcast only ever goes out at a time you schedule. If you choose **Save as draft**, it sits there indefinitely — a draft will never send on its own, no matter how long you leave it.

  If you want a broadcast to go out shortly, schedule it for a few minutes' time.
</Warning>

## What it costs

Paige doesn't charge for broadcasts, and they don't use your credits. **Meta bills your connected number directly** for the messages, and the estimate on the Confirm step is a rough guide rather than a quote.

The one limit is a **cap of 1,000 messages per project per day**, resetting at midnight UTC.

<Note>
  If a broadcast hits the cap mid-send it quietly pauses and picks up where it left off the next day. It'll sit showing **Sending** with a stuck Queued count, and nothing tells you why — so if a large broadcast seems frozen, the cap is the first thing to suspect.
</Note>

## Who actually receives it

Two groups are always excluded, whatever your filter says:

* **Anyone who opted out.** This is checked when the broadcast sends, not when you build it — so someone who sends STOP after you schedule is still excluded.
* **Numbers confirmed not to be on WhatsApp.**

That second one is worth understanding. Paige doesn't know whether an imported number is on WhatsApp until it tries. Your first broadcast to fresh imports is what finds out: the dead ones fail once with **Not on WhatsApp**, and they're quietly left out of every audience after that. A first broadcast with more failures than you expected usually means exactly this, and it's self-correcting.

## Watching it go out

Open a broadcast to see live counters — **Total, Queued, Sent, Delivered, Read, Failed, Canceled** — updating as it goes.

<Note>
  These are buckets, not totals. Each person sits in exactly one, and they move along: Sent → Delivered → Read. So a broadcast everyone has read shows **Sent: 0**. That's success, not failure.
</Note>

Below that, every recipient is listed with their status. Failures say why in plain language:

| What you'll see               | What it means                                                                        |
| ----------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **Not on WhatsApp**           | The number isn't reachable. Won't be tried again.                                    |
| **Rate limited — can retry**  | WhatsApp throttled you. Worth retrying.                                              |
| **Blocked by quality limits** | Meta has restricted your number's sending, usually after too many blocks or reports. |
| **Template rejected**         | Meta withdrew approval for the template.                                             |
| **Account paused**            | Meta has paused your WhatsApp account.                                               |
| **Delivery failed**           | Something else. Copy the raw reason for the detail.                                  |

## Cancelling and retrying

**Cancel** stops a scheduled or sending broadcast. Anything already sent has left and can't be recalled — cancelling only stops what's still queued. It can't be undone.

**Retry failures** appears once a broadcast has finished with failures. It re-queues only the ones worth retrying — a rate-limited send, say — and skips the permanent ones like *Not on WhatsApp* or *Template rejected*, since retrying those would just fail again.

## Opt-outs and STOP

Your bot handles opt-outs on its own. If someone replies **STOP**, **UNSUBSCRIBE**, or **OPT OUT**, Paige marks them opted out immediately, before the message reaches your bot. They're excluded from every broadcast from then on.

The word has to start the message, so "please don't stop messaging me" won't trigger it.

<Warning>
  **Opting out is one-way.** There's no button to opt someone back in, and re-importing them won't do it — imports skip contacts that already exist rather than updating them. Undoing an opt-out means editing that contact's row directly in [the database](/guides/database-tab), which you should only do if the person has genuinely asked to hear from you again.
</Warning>

Your customer gets no confirmation reply when they opt out — they send STOP and hear nothing back. That's worth knowing if someone asks whether it worked.

<Note>
  This applies to bots Paige hosts. If you run your own backend, opt-out handling is yours to implement.
</Note>

## Next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Segments" icon="users" href="/guides/broadcasts/segments">
    Save an audience once and reuse it across broadcasts.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Broadcasting assistant" icon="megaphone" href="/guides/broadcasts/broadcasting-assistant">
    Build segments, draft templates, and assemble campaigns by chatting.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Import contacts" icon="upload" href="/guides/contacts-import">
    Bring a list of numbers in from a CSV.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Message templates" icon="file-text" href="/guides/templates">
    Write and submit the templates a broadcast needs.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>