Opt-in and opt-out on WhatsApp

WhatsApp requires that a person has agreed to hear from your business before you message them. This is Meta's own policy, on top of whatever your country's privacy law says, and it is enforced in the most practical way possible: through quality rating, which measures whether recipients block you.

What a valid opt-in looks like

Meta's requirements are less about the mechanism than about clarity. An opt-in holds up when:

• The person took an action. They ticked a box, sent a message, scanned a code, replied to a request. A pre-ticked box is not an opt-in, and neither is "we assumed you would want this".
• Your business is named. Not a brand they do not recognise, not a parent company.
• WhatsApp is named. They agreed to be messaged on WhatsApp, specifically — not "by us, somehow".
• They know what they will get. "Order updates" and "offers and promotions" are different consents. If you collected one, you may not send the other.

The opt-in does not have to happen on WhatsApp. A checkbox at checkout, a line on a booking form, a paper form at the counter — all fine, and all worth keeping a record of.

Ways to collect it that work well

• At checkout or booking. An unticked box saying something like "Send me order updates on WhatsApp from Aster & Fern". The highest-quality consent there is: the intent is fresh, and all four points above are satisfied in one line.
• A conversation the customer starts. Someone who messages you first has opened a 24-hour window, and continuing that conversation needs no separate consent. Permission to message them later is a different thing, and this is the cheapest place to get it: ask in plain text inside the window — no template, no cost — after you have answered what they came for.
• A QR code or link that says what it signs them up for. Scanning a code opens a conversation; on its own that is not consent to anything you send afterwards. Either put the code on something that states what they will receive, or treat the scan as the start of the conversation above and ask inside it.

Ways that do not

• A list bought from anyone. These are the single fastest route to a red rating.
• Numbers scraped from anywhere.
• A general "we may contact you" in terms and conditions. WhatsApp was not named, and the person did not act.
• An old email list, messaged on WhatsApp. They consented to a different channel.
• An opt-in request inside a utility template. A utility template that solicits marketing consent is marketing content, and Meta reviews it as such — so it is rejected, or approved and then billed and judged as marketing. Ask inside a conversation the customer opened instead.

Opt-out

Every marketing message must give a way to stop, and the way to stop must work without a human reading it.

• Offer it plainly. A "Stop these messages" quick-reply button is better than asking people to type a keyword, because it cannot be mistyped.
• Honour it immediately, and everywhere. Someone who opts out of promotions has not opted out of the delivery update for the order they placed this morning — but they must not receive another promotion, from any list.
• Never make them ask twice. A second promotional message after an opt-out is what produces a block, and a block is what moves your quality rating.

Juno keeps an unsubscribe list at the workspace level: a contact who opts out is excluded from marketing broadcasts automatically, rather than depending on whoever builds the next list remembering.

Why this is not only a compliance topic

Email taught everyone that a bad list costs you open rates. On WhatsApp a bad list costs you the channel. Blocks feed quality rating, quality rating feeds your messaging limit, and a number that falls far enough is restricted from sending at all — including the order confirmations your actual customers are waiting for.

The businesses that do well here are messaging fewer people than they could, more often than they expected, about things those people asked for.