> Source: https://docs.virtuo.in/vibot/sending/warm-up-new-number
> Why a freshly connected WhatsApp number can't blast 3,000 messages on day 1, and the exact week-by-week pacing that gets your tier scaling instead.

# 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.

<Callout type="warning">
**Read this before your first campaign on a new number.** Even if your contact list is clean, your wallet is full, and your message body is polite — a fresh number blasting at full volume on day 1 will produce a worse outcome than a slow ramp. Meta is watching engagement, not just delivery.
</Callout>

## 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**](/vibot/sending/messaging-tiers).
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](/vibot/meta-setup/business-portfolio)** 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**](/vibot/sending/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:

| Preset | Stage sizes | Gap between stages |
|---|---|---|
| **Conservative** | 5 → 10 → 25 → 50 → 50 → 50 … | 60 minutes |
| **Moderate** | 10 → 25 → 50 → 50 → 50 … | 30 minutes |
| **Aggressive** | 25 → 50 → 50 → 50 … | 15 minutes |
| **Custom** | You define sizes + delays | You define |

**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**](/vibot/sending/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**](/vibot/sending/quality-rating#how-to-recover-from-a-yellow-or-red-rating).
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**](/vibot/sending/send-campaign).