Warm up a new number

The single most common new-customer mistake: connect a fresh number → import 5,000 contacts → launch a campaign → 30% pre-delivery failures, tier reset, recipients see nothing.

This page is the playbook to avoid that.

Why “fresh number = limited” is real

Three things stack against a brand-new number:

1. Your tier is TIER_250 — Meta’s default cap. You physically cannot reach more than 250 unique recipients in any 24-hour window, regardless of what your wallet or list size says. See Messaging tiers & limits.
2. Your quality rating doesn’t exist yet — Meta scores quality on a rolling 7-day signal. A new number has no signal, so the first sends define the baseline. Bad first sends = a permanent dent in the rating’s trajectory.
3. Meta’s marketing-frequency cap (error 131049) bites harder. Recipients globally rate-limited for marketing (~2 marketing messages per user per day, across ALL businesses) fail with 131049. On a small day-1 list, even 5-10 such failures look like a high spam rate to Meta’s monitoring.

The week-by-week ramp

This is the conservative warm-up — the one we recommend for every new customer. There is no Meta-published “official” warm-up table; this is field-tested across the Vibot customer base.

Week 1 — confirm you’re alive

Goal: prove to Meta the number is operated by a real business sending messages to real customers.

• Volume: ≤ 50 messages per day. Total < 250 across the week.
• Recipients: only customers you have a recent direct relationship with — staff, recent purchasers, opted-in subscribers from the last 30 days.
• Template type: Utility only (order confirmation, appointment reminder, OTP). Avoid Marketing templates this week entirely.
• Send pattern: small batches throughout the day (5–15 messages at a time, multiple times). Don’t burst all 50 at once.
• Watch: reply rate. Aim for ≥ 30% replies. If you’re seeing < 5% replies, your list isn’t engaged — pause and audit before week 2.

Week 2 — first Marketing campaign

Goal: introduce a Marketing template, watch quality, scale within the tier.

• Volume: up to 200/day for the first Marketing campaign. Stay under 250/day total.
• Recipients: your most engaged ~25% of contacts.
• Template type: Marketing template with a clear opt-in reference (“You opted in to updates from Acme on Mar 15”) + an opt-out instruction (“Reply STOP to unsubscribe”). Boring is better than clever.
• Use Vibot’s first-send warning modal. When you launch the first Marketing campaign on this number, Vibot shows an amber modal recommending Conservative drip (5 → 10 → 25 → 50/h). Accept the recommendation.
• Watch: quality rating in WhatsApp Manager. Should be GREEN after 48h.

Week 3 — moderate scale-up

Goal: demonstrate volume + healthy engagement so Meta’s scaling logic ticks.

• Volume: 250 unique/day, 5 days out of 7. Total ~1,250 over the week.
• Recipients: broader segments now. Still no scraped or bought lists.
• Send pattern: Moderate drip (10 → 25 → 50 every 30 min) is fine. You no longer need the slowest preset.
• Watch: delivery + read rates above 80%. Block rate below 1%.

Week 4 — Business Verification cutover

If your Business Verification is in progress and clears around now, your tier will jump from 250 to 1,000 within 24h of verification + GREEN quality. From here, scaling is automatic.

Week 5+ — normal operation

You’re now climbing automatically. The rules from this point on:

• Keep quality GREEN. See Quality rating.
• Send at most ~80% of your current tier’s daily cap. Leaving headroom prevents accidental over-sends from blowing past the cap (which is what triggers 131048 spam-rate-limit errors).
• Don’t change template content too aggressively. Each new template starts at UNKNOWN quality and needs its own warm-up.

Vibot’s automatic warm-up safeguards

When you launch a campaign in Vibot, three things kick in automatically without you having to configure anything:

1. The first-send warning modal

The moment you click Launch to N contacts on either:

• The first campaign you’ve ever launched from this WhatsApp number, OR
• The first time you use a specific template (even if you’ve launched campaigns with other templates before),

…Vibot shows the amber “Heads up: First send on this WhatsApp number” modal with two buttons:

• Send slow on first launch — uses Conservative drip (5 → 10 → 25 → 50 per hour). This is the right answer.
• Send normally, I accept the risk — bypasses the drip and sends at the default 50-msg-batch pace.

The modal only shows for the first send. Once Vibot has seen one campaign go through on this number, the modal is suppressed.

2. The canary cohort

On every campaign — first send or otherwise — Vibot sends the first 10 recipients as a canary cohort. Sixty seconds later, the evaluator checks for 131049 (ecosystem spam-block) errors among the cohort. If ≥ 5% of the 10 came back with that error, the entire campaign auto-cancels.

On a small canary, 5% = 1 failure. The threshold is intentionally aggressive on first sends.

If the canary aborts, you’ll see:

• Campaign status: CANCELLED
• Canary status: abort
• Red banner on the campaign detail page showing the spam-failure count
• A cool-off window of 6 hours before you can resume. If the chain has already aborted once before, the cool-off escalates to 24 hours.

3. The 15% per-batch hard halt

Inside the worker, every 50-message batch tallies its spam-block (131049) failures as it goes. If ≥ 15% of a batch fails with spam-block codes, the worker halts the entire campaign mid-flight. This catches situations where the canary passed (low failures in first 10) but recipients further into the list are flagged.

Drip strategies on Vibot

Three presets (plus custom) for spacing sends out across hours:

Aggressive is gated by Vibot:

• Disabled if the campaign chain has already had a previous resume.
• Disabled if the recipient list is > 200 contacts.
• Requires explicit “I acknowledge this can lock my number for 24h if it spam-halts” checkbox.

You don’t choose a drip strategy on the launch screen — Vibot uses 50-message batches by default, OR Conservative if you accepted the first-send warning. Drip strategies are explicitly chosen on the Resume Skipped flow after a campaign has been cancelled.

What “warm up” does NOT mean

A few things customers often get wrong:

• “Warm up = wait between campaigns.” Not really. The signal Meta wants is healthy engagement, not silence. A number that goes silent for 2 weeks then blasts is worse than one that drips daily.
• “I’ll just send 250 today and 5,000 tomorrow.” No. Tier doesn’t double overnight just because you waited. Tier scales when Meta’s continuous scaling logic ticks, which requires the criteria in Messaging tiers to all be met.
• “I’ll send the same message to all my numbers in parallel.” Bad idea. Quality rating is per-number. Spreading bad messages across 3 numbers gives you 3 rated-down numbers, not 1.
• “Warming up isn’t worth it for OTPs.” Authentication templates have the highest engagement of any category (people want to receive their OTP). They warm up faster. Day-1 OTP sends are usually safe up to the 250 cap if your list is your own customers.

What if I already blasted on day 1 and quality went RED?

Stop sending immediately. Then:

1. Pause every Marketing campaign and template.
2. Audit which contacts blocked you (use the Contacts page’s optedOut filter).
3. Send only Utility templates for 48h.
4. Read Quality rating → recovery playbook.
5. After quality is GREEN for 24h, resume sending with Conservative drip only.

A first-week RED rating is recoverable in 7–14 days. A first-month suspension is much harder to recover from — usually requires reconnecting a different number.

Next step

You’re warmed up. Now learn how to drive a campaign end-to-end through the wizard: Send a campaign.