This is the procedure, not the pitch. Seven steps from having no WhatsApp Business account to a first campaign that will not get your number restricted — with what goes wrong at each step, which is the part most guides leave out.
Three things have to be true before any of the rest is worth doing, and each of them has stopped somebody a week into this.
Through Meta’s embedded signup, so the account and the number stay yours. Rechlio is a Meta Tech Provider, which is why there is no platform fee on top and why Meta bills you directly for conversations.
Your first message to anyone who has not written to you must be a template Meta approved in advance. Submit it while you are still building the list — review time is not yours to control, and this is where schedules slip.
An industry and a city. If you cannot say in one sentence why a business is on the list, it should not be — and that sentence is also what makes the template writable.
Five hundred businesses is not five hundred prospects. Scoring costs ₹2.00 a lead and its job is to put the fifty most plausible at the top, so your first two hundred messages go somewhere sensible rather than alphabetically.
The default send window is Monday to Friday, 9:30am–6:30pm IST. Leave it on. Arrival time moves B2B reply rates more than wording does, and commercial messaging hours are regulated.
A reply opens a 24-hour window in which you can write normally. When it closes you are back to templates. This is the step where campaigns are actually won or lost, and it is a staffing decision more than a software one.
Automated follow-ups to someone who already replied is the fastest way to turn interest into a block, and blocks drive the quality rating on your number down.
Most rejections are not technical. They are a promotional message filed under a non-promotional category, a missing opt-out, or a template that is mostly variables and could therefore say anything.
More on template review — the three categories, and how the quality rating works.
Find 500 businesses in the category and city you sell to: ₹1,500 at ₹3.00 each.
Score all 500 against a description of your company: ₹1,000 at ₹2.00 each.
Send your approved template to the top 200 on WhatsApp: ₹0 to Rechlio, plus what Meta bills you for 200 conversations at their rate for your category.
Classify the replies as they arrive: ₹0.25 each.
Rechlio’s side of that campaign is ₹2,500 plus ₹0.25 for each reply classification. What Meta charges is between you and Meta, and the cost calculator has a field for it.
An illustration, not a forecast. The costs are Rechlio’s real rates; anything about response is a worked assumption, not a benchmark.
Notice what the arithmetic says: the expensive part is qualification, not sending. That is the opposite of how WhatsApp tooling is usually priced, and it is why messaging all 500 unscored would be a false economy — three hundred extra conversations, and three hundred extra chances at a block.
This guide is written to be useful whether or not you use Rechlio. If you want the product page instead of the procedure, WhatsApp outreach is the one that covers it.