Users Can Finally Unsubscribe From WhatsApp Business Spams

Date: November 21, 2024

WhatsApp has finally provided an option for users to unsubscribe from WhatsApp Business accounts if they feel they are being spammed.

WhatsApp Business has gained over 200 million monthly users since last year, showing strong growth for organizations on its platform. However, the rapid growth of businesses on WhatsApp has also increased the number of messages general WhatsApp users get on a daily basis. While they may not be considered spam under standard ethical practices, the collective inflow becomes frequent enough to qualify as spam.

As a result, WhatsApp has introduced a new feature that allows all users to unsubscribe from WhatsApp Business accounts. Before this, users could either mute or block the account, which made them miss out on useful service offerings and deals.

WhatsApp is now testing new ways to help its 3+ billion users reduce noise on the app while staying abreast of the latest deals and offerings from their favorite brands. This effort includes options to share ‘interested/not interested’ feedback and the choice to stop/resume certain types of messages.

While businesses regularly send promotional messages, the platform is also used as a primary communication channel between them and their users for orders, transactions, reports, and other important aspects.

Meta said that it will be testing the efficacy of this new feature globally. With the choice to select which type of messages they want from subscribed businesses, the rate of blocking businesses may drop significantly.

Credit - WhatsApp

One important thing we do is to give you transparency that you are interacting and engaging with businesses. Two, if you don’t want to interact with them, the strongest signal you can send is to block them and report them. This helps us understand that this is not a business you want on the platform. In addition to that, we are starting to think about how we can give more preferences to users to express more granularity.

Nikila Srinivasan, VP of product management for messaging monetization at Meta.

WhatsApp revealed that WhatsApp Business garnered $434 million in the third quarter of 2024. This means that innovating new avenues to make business-client interaction seamless has become an inevitable part of their growth.