Get promotional messages approved

A travel agency wants to remind past customers about a weekend package deal, but the customer's last message was four days ago — the free reply window closed long since, and sending anything now requires a message Meta has already reviewed and approved, not whatever the agency feels like typing in the moment.

Message template management is where that approval happens. A user drafts the message, picks its category — marketing, utility, or authentication — and submits it for Meta's review, watching its status move from in-review to approved or rejected. Once approved, that template becomes a reusable building block for broadcasts, reminders, and automated flows anywhere else in the product.

Meta caps template creation at one hundred new templates per WhatsApp Business Account per hour, which rarely constrains a small business drafting a handful of seasonal messages but matters for an agency managing several clients who might otherwise batch-create templates across all of them at once. Spacing out large template-creation efforts avoids hitting that hourly ceiling mid-task.

Categorisation is the part most likely to cause real damage if wrong. A promotional message submitted as utility to dodge the marketing category's stricter opt-in requirements doesn't just get quietly corrected — Meta issues warnings, then applies rate limiting, and continued miscategorisation escalates to a seven-to-thirty-day restriction on utility templates for the entire account, affecting every legitimate transactional message needed during that window, not just the offending template. Authentication templates carry their own hard restrictions — no URLs, no media, no emojis, and a fifteen-character limit on any parameter — that need enforcing before submission, since Meta rejects violations automatically and a business drafting an OTP with a longer parameter simply wastes a review cycle finding that out.

Templates aren't permanent once approved, either. A template that goes unused for twelve consecutive months is automatically archived by Meta, and if it stays archived and unused for a further twenty-eight days, it's deleted outright. A seasonal template — say, a specific festival offer used only once a year — can survive this if reused annually within the window, but a template built for a one-off campaign and forgotten will eventually disappear and need recreating and re-approving from scratch if it's ever needed again.