Broadcasts: Send One DM Campaign to Your Whole Saved List

Published June 5, 2026 · 6 min read

You ran the ad. The DMs came in. You saved every contact.

Now what?

Most sellers do one of two things. They copy-paste the same message to 200 people one at a time — that's an hour and a half nobody pays them for. Or they use WhatsApp's own broadcast, which stops at 256 contacts, treats everyone the same, and doesn't fill in anyone's name.

Broadcasts in WASBOT work differently. Pick a list. Write your message — or a short chain of messages. Hit start. WASBOT sends to your whole saved list slowly and safely, drops in each person's first name, and stops sending to anyone who replies STOP.

The same hour of work now reaches every contact you have, in a private chat that reads like you typed it yourself.

What a Broadcast Is

A broadcast is a one-way DM campaign. You write it once, pick who gets it, and WASBOT sends it out — one person at a time, slowly, so your number stays safe.

It is not a group, a status post, or a chat where everyone sees the replies. Each person gets the message privately in their own chat with you. When they reply, it lands in your normal WhatsApp inbox, same as any other message.

It's the same thing you'd do by hand if you had 50 spare hours. WASBOT just does it without the hours.

Sequences: Up to 5 Messages, One After the Other

One line of text is rarely how a sale actually lands. Real campaigns have a hook, then the offer, then a nudge. So a broadcast can be more than one message.

You can stack up to 5 messages in one broadcast. Each one has its own gap before it sends — anything from instant to 5 minutes after the one before it. Each message can carry text, an image, a video, a document, or a voice note. You can also mark a message as a reply to the one before it, so the chat reads naturally.

Here's a launch sequence as an example:

• Message 1 (instant): "Hi {first_name}, our new drop lands Friday. Quick look 👇"
• Message 2 (30 seconds later): photo of the product
• Message 3 (1 minute later, as a reply to message 2): "First 20 buyers get N5,000 off. Reply 'WANT' to lock it in."

Each person gets all three, in order, exactly as you wrote them. To them it looks like you sat there typing for ten minutes. You didn't touch your phone.

That {first_name} part is a token — a placeholder WASBOT swaps out for the real person's name when it sends. More on that below.

On Every Plan — Trial Included

Broadcasts are live for every account. You start sending on whatever plan you're on:

The trial gives you a real taste — 2,000 recipients per campaign, 8 campaigns a day — with a small www.wasbot.app footer added to the messages. Paid plans lift the caps and drop the footer. The recipient cap and the daily campaign cap are the only ceilings; everything else works the same on every plan.

Sent Slowly, On Purpose

WhatsApp does not like bursts. A thousand identical messages fired off in 30 seconds is the fastest way to get a number flagged.

So WASBOT paces every broadcast. Pacing just means it sends slowly, one message at a time, with a gap between each send instead of all at once.

It also adds jitter — small random gaps between messages so the timing looks like a real person typing, not a machine firing on a timer. One send might be 8 seconds after the last, the next 14, the next 6. No two gaps are the same.

New accounts go even slower. A warm account is a number that's been active for a while — chatting, posting status, getting replies — so WhatsApp already trusts it. A brand-new number (under 7 days old) has no trust yet, so WASBOT eases off the pace automatically until it warms up.

You don't tune any of this by hand. The composer picks a safe rate and recommends it. If you want it gentler, you can switch to Fast, Casual, or Slow Drip.

The trade-off is simple: a big campaign takes time to finish at a safe pace. We'd rather your number stay alive than your campaign finish in 20 minutes and get the number flagged in 21.

Who You Send To

Not everyone on your list is the same kind of contact, so WASBOT sorts your recipients into three groups before sending:

• Active chats — people you already have an open WhatsApp conversation with. Safest, and they get the message first.
• In your contacts — saved on your phone, but no open chat yet. A little riskier.
• Imported only — numbers you uploaded but have never messaged. Riskiest, so these get capped per day automatically.

The composer shows you this breakdown before you send. The safest pick is "Active chats only," and that's what we recommend. You can widen it to everyone eligible if you want more reach — imported numbers stay capped per day so you can't accidentally torch your number on a cold list.

Names That Actually Fill In

Every message can use the {first_name} and {last_name} tokens. A token is a placeholder you type once; WASBOT swaps it for each person's real name when it sends. So Hi {first_name} becomes "Hi Ada" for Ada and "Hi Tunde" for Tunde.

WASBOT pulls the name from the person's WhatsApp profile or your saved contacts, whichever has it. For contacts with no name on file, use {first_name|there} — the word after the | is the fallback, so they get "there" instead of an awkward gap.

You can also rotate the wording with {Hi|Hey|Howdy} — each send randomly picks one. Across a few thousand contacts that one line alone turns into hundreds of slightly different openers, which reads better and helps your messages not look like the exact same thing copied 5,000 times.

For big campaigns you can also turn on vary message tail — it quietly adds an invisible character (and now and then a small emoji) so each send looks unique to WhatsApp, while the person reading it sees no difference.

STOP / Unsubscribe, Built In

Anyone who replies STOP is added to your opt-out list automatically. Opt-out just means "this person asked to stop hearing from you" — once they're on it, they never get another broadcast from you again. The composer can add a small "Reply STOP to unsubscribe" line to the last message in your sequence. It's off by default; turn it on with one click.

This isn't just being polite. It's how you stay on the right side of the people who didn't want the message — and how you keep your list clean.

If someone changes their mind later, you can take them off the opt-out list from the settings page.

A Safety Brake That Stops the Campaign

While a broadcast runs, WASBOT watches whether your messages are actually landing. This is a circuit breaker — the same idea as the trip switch in your house. When something starts going wrong, it cuts the power instead of letting the whole thing burn.

For a broadcast, that means it stops sending when real send failures pile up:

• 5 failed sends in a row pauses the campaign.
• More than 10% of sends failing pauses the campaign.

A paused campaign isn't lost. Open the detail page, see what went wrong, fix it (rest the number for a day, clean the list, slow the pace), and pick up where it left off.

And you don't have to wait for the brake — you can stop any campaign yourself, any time, from the same page. If something feels off, hit stop.

One thing we're honest about: WhatsApp never tells anyone when a contact blocks them. There's no signal for it, so no tool — ours included — can count blocks or react to them. Anyone claiming a "block rate" meter is guessing. Our safety comes from slow pacing, random gaps, stopping on real failures, and the stop button in your hand.

Watch It As It Runs

The detail page shows you everything while the campaign is going:

• Top cards — how many messages were delivered, read, and failed across the whole sequence. For a 1,000-person × 5-message campaign that's 5,000 sends counted, not 1,000.
• Per-message stats — each message in the sequence with its own delivered / read / failed count, so you can see where people drop off.
• Recipients list — every contact, where they are in the sequence, and what failed if anything did.
• Replies — anyone who replies shows up here and in your normal WhatsApp inbox.

You get the receipts your advertisers ask for without leaving the app.

How to Set One Up

1. Open the Broadcasts page in your dashboard.
2. Click New broadcast. Pick the WhatsApp number that'll send it.
3. Pick a contact list. The breakdown shows who's eligible.
4. Choose who gets it — Active chats only is the safest pick.
5. Write your first message. Add a token like {first_name|there} if you want the name to fill in.
6. Click + Add another message for each follow-up (up to 5 total). Set the gap between each — 30 seconds feels human, 1 minute feels considered.
7. Pick a pace — the recommended one is the default, and what most people want.
8. Hit Review & start.

That's it. The whole thing runs without you. Watch the progress page, reply to the DMs coming in, and focus on closing the leads.

Use It Responsibly

Be straight with yourself about this: sending DMs to a lot of people carries a real risk of WhatsApp restricting or banning your number. Broadcasts are far safer than blasting from your phone, but no tool can make that risk zero. WhatsApp decides what looks like spam, and a cold blast looks like spam.

So use it the way it's meant to be used:

• Only message people who already know you — ad leads, past buyers, people who opted into your list. Not strangers.
• Keep your account warm — chat, post status, reply to people. An active number is a trusted number.
• Start small. Send to a few hundred first, watch how it goes, then grow. Don't make your first-ever broadcast a 30,000-person blast.
• Never blast cold strangers. That's the single fastest way to lose your number.

Treat your WhatsApp number like the asset it is. One ban can cost you your whole list.

Sequences — Coming Soon

Broadcasts are one-shot: you send the campaign, it goes out, it's done. We're building a more structured tool for the slower stuff — a drip, meaning messages spaced out over days, and follow-ups that go out only to people who didn't reply the first time.

You'll be able to use it alongside broadcasts or instead of them, depending on the job. It's not live yet — but it's coming.

What This Is Not

We're being deliberate here so the wrong person doesn't show up:

• Not a cold-message tool. Imported numbers you've never messaged get heavily capped. Use this for people you have a relationship with.
• Not a guarantee against bans. It's a much safer way to send, but WhatsApp can still flag any number it decides to flag.
• Not a replacement for the autoresponder. Broadcasts go out on your schedule. The autoresponder replies back when someone messages you. They work together — broadcast goes out, replies come in, autoresponder handles the FAQs.

Who This Is For

If you sell on WhatsApp, broadcasts are some of the cheapest leverage WASBOT gives you.

• You run ads → leads land in your DMs → today you copy-paste? Broadcasts.
• You have a list of past buyers you should follow up with? Broadcasts.
• You launched a new product or event and want every saved contact to know? Broadcasts.
• You're a coach with a cohort that needs the same five-message intro every week? Broadcasts.

If you only use WhatsApp for personal chats, you can keep scrolling.

Try It Now

Broadcasts are live on every plan. Start on the trial — write a real message, add a name token, and send it to up to 2,000 contacts a day with a small www.wasbot.app footer. Upgrade when you want the caps lifted and the footer gone.

Open broadcasts →

Pricing is on the pricing page. Setup takes about 60 seconds. Your first broadcast finishes before the next ad campaign you'd normally pay for would even publish.

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Questions about broadcasts? Check our Help Center or email us at support@wasbot.app.