WhatsApp B2B outreach in India, start to finish
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.
Before you start
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.
- A spare number. It cannot be one currently registered on the consumer WhatsApp app, and moving a number across removes the app from it permanently.
- A registered business. Meta verifies businesses, and the name on your WhatsApp Business account should match documents you can produce.
- A lawful basis for the numbers you will message. A published business number means you may contact them; whether you may market to them is governed by India’s data protection law and Meta’s policies, not by your enthusiasm.
The seven steps
Step 1: Connect your WhatsApp Business account
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.
Step 2: Submit a template, before you need it
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.
Step 3: Build a list you can describe
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.
Step 4: Score it before you spend the template
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.
Step 5: Send inside business hours
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.
Step 6: Answer inside 24 hours
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.
Step 7: Stop the sequence for anyone who answered
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.
Writing a template that passes
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.
- File cold outreach as marketing. It is marketing. Reclassifying to get an easier review is the thing Meta is most alert to.
- Say who you are and why you are messaging this business in the first line.
- Put a way to stop in the message, and honour it immediately.
- Keep the variables to the parts that genuinely vary — a name, a city, a product. A template that is 60% placeholder reads as a blank cheque.
- Do not imply a relationship that does not exist. "As discussed" to a business you have never spoken to is both a rejection risk and a lie.
More on template review — the three categories, and how the quality rating works.
A worked first campaign
200 dealers in one city
Find 500 businesses in the category and city you sell to: ₹100 at ₹0.20 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: ₹0.10 each.
Rechlio’s side of that campaign is ₹1,100 plus a few rupees of 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.
What goes wrong
- Sending before the template is approved. Nothing goes out, and the campaign date was promised to somebody.
- Free-form messages to contacts outside the 24-hour window. Refused server-side here, which is a courtesy — elsewhere it is a failed send and a rating hit.
- A list nobody scored. The cost is not the messages; it is the blocks from businesses that were never plausible buyers.
- Nobody staffed to answer. Replies arriving into an unwatched inbox is the most expensive failure on this list.
- Ignoring an opt-out. This stops being a marketing problem and becomes a compliance one.
- Treating WhatsApp like email — volume, subject-line testing, send-and-see. The quality rating punishes it faster than you can learn from it.
Questions
- How long does the whole setup take?
- The parts you control take an afternoon. The parts Meta controls — business verification and template review — take as long as they take, and planning around them is the single most useful piece of scheduling advice here. Do not promise a campaign date before a template is approved.
- Can I use my personal WhatsApp number?
- No. The WhatsApp Business API requires a number that is not registered on the consumer WhatsApp app, and moving a number across is a one-way door — you lose the app on that number. Use a spare number, and use one your customers will recognise on caller ID.
- What is a realistic first campaign size?
- Small enough that you could read every reply the same day — for most teams that is one or two hundred, not a thousand. The constraint is not sending capacity, it is that a message you cannot follow up on is worse than one you never sent, because it burns the contact and the template.
The product side of this
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.