With great trust comes great quality scores.
In today’s scenario, anyone without WhatsApp is the digital equivalent of being homeless.
If you ask a random person if they want to receive more messages, without any hesitation they will say NO. The same person, if you ask what is their preferred communication channel, they would say it is WhatsApp.
Sending messages people don’t want to read can be a crucial touchpoint where you lose a subscriber forever.
In this blog, I will share insights into WhatsApp quality scores, where you stand as a business, and ultimately how to improve your scores in the long run.
Let’s begin…
What is a WhatsApp Quality Score? How is it measured?
WhatsApp Quality Score is your audience’s sentiment towards the messages you send them. WhatsApp assigns a score based on how well your messages are received, response time, relevance, customer satisfaction, message authenticity, and more.
The scoring scale ranges from 0 to 5.
A higher quality rating score indicates that a business is doing great with its messages and is considered a reputable account by WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, a low-quality rating score can lead to all sorts of limitations starting from - reduced message-sending limits, restrictions to certain API features, limited delivery message capabilities, and more.
In short, as long as you ensure your customers receive relevant messages, your quality score will be high.
\ What Determines Your WhatsApp Quality Rating?
A WhatsApp Quality Rating is determined by a combination of factors like:
- Message Volume - How many messages customers have received over a period of time.
- Recency & Relevance - How well they connect with your messages and how useful do they find it
- Customer Feedback - Such as blocks and reports
- Quality of Contacts - For example, a contact who joined your list a few years ago and no longer finds your messages relevant. Such stale contacts affect your score negatively.
- Tone of the Message - Sales-heavy messages will not be entertained. Instead, focus on relationship building and adding value.
Why is a WhatsApp Quality Rating Important?
A good quality score signifies great trust and effectiveness. It also indicates how well your messages are likely to be perceived and engaged by your customers.
And in the process, you get reported for spam and get blocked which makes matters worse.
In fact, a good quality score goes all the way up to getting a verified, gree-tick approval for your brand on WhatsApp.
Do note, WhatsApp straight away rejects your gree-tick verification request if you have a low-quality score.
Plus, you’ll be restricted to access API features to their fullest unless you improve your quality score.
7 Tips to Improve Your WhatsApp Quality Score/Rating
So now we know what a WhatsApp quality rating score is and how one is determined, how can a business go about improving its score? Here are a few tips that might help to boost your score:
1. Start with understanding your existing quality score
Every WhatsApp API profile is constantly monitored and assigned a quality rating and respective messaging limits. This keeps updating based on your recipient's actions.
In simple words, the more the ‘report spam’ or ‘blocks’, the less your quality ratings. And vice-versa.
Based on the user sentiment, there are three different tiers of messaging quality:
🟢 Green: High quality
🟡 Yellow: Medium quality
🔴 Red: Low quality
2. Send messages to users who have Opted in ONLY
No compromises here.
Never take a customer by surprise by popping into someone’s WhatsApp out of nowhere.
By opting in, your customers agree to receive messages over WhatsApp from your business.
This way, high chance they eagerly wait for your communications, not the other way around.
If you are yet to get started with collecting opt-ins, you must:
- Clearly set the expectations of what they’ll be receiving and the value linked to it
- Make your opt-in model simple to use, minimizing customer effort
- Goes without saying, comply with WhatsApp guidelines and best practices
3. Provide Opt-outs
Feel no shame in providing opt-outs and honoring such requests. Force-feeding will only make matters worse.
Maybe you would have worked hard to make someone subscribe to your services.
But do remember, if they find your content irrelevant anymore, there’s no point in sticking to them.
And this way you can ensure they are not gone forever. It’s just a momentary break and there are high chances once they re-find relevancy, they will end up back with you.
4. Stop being “Salesy”. People hate being sold to.
Offer ends today…
Cash-back guarantee…
Exclusive offer…
Sound familiar?
From our observations, poor quality scores can be tracked all the way to the tone of the messages you send.
Messages that are exclusively sent only for a sale to happen may end up adding no value to the customer.
If your messages are sticking to clichés to convey a point, they no longer mean anything to your subscribers.
You see, such ideas are beaten to a pulp already. So much that they've lost their ability to influence anything at all. Let alone a sale…
5. Be mindful of the frequency
Opt-ins, irresistible content, and brand power are all fine.
But abusing such strengths by sending too many messages will surely backfire. Hands down.
If you appear too frequently in their inboxes, they’ll begin to ignore you at some point, severely reducing your engagement rate.
Frequency doesn't necessarily mean over-messaging only. It also refers to under-messaging.
Although both under and over-messaging have different impacts, the outcome is the same: lower ROI!
Do remember you are not the who’s trying to make a mark for yourself on WhatsApp. Your competitors are trying as hard as you too.
It all comes down to how well you stand apart from them.
6. Segment. Customize. Personalize.
Long, non-personalized messages can lower the quality of your template messages right away.
This especially happens while sending a bulk broadcast in an assumption to speak to a large group in one shot.
Guess what? The moment they find no personalization or relevance, you’ve lost the value already.
It is highly advisable to take the time to understand pain points and provide a personalized experience that is rooted in reality, rather than theory.
Additionally, WhatsApp segmentation using tools like Peach serves as a valuable resource.
It can slice and dice the list to ensure that people receive messages that align with their interests.
7. Be Patient…
As the popular saying goes, it’s easy to break something, and it’s hard to build it.
The same can be said of your quality score.
Since the fundamental significance of your WhatsApp quality rating is trust, it’s important to play the patience game.
Quality scores can’t be improved overnight and require constant engagement and conversations with your customers.
With the right message at the right time, your quality score is surely going up.