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Your first broadcast is the one most likely to go wrong, and the errors are expensive: WhatsApp charges for every marketing send, and a bad one costs you the number’s reputation as well. Work through this in order.
1

Check you can send at all

Three things, and each screen tells you what the next needs:
  • WhatsApp connected — Connect WABA in the sidebar
  • At least one approved template
  • Contacts with granted consent and a phone number
If Contacts shows zero consented people, stop here. A broadcast with an empty audience is not a broadcast.
2

Write a marketing template

Category it as marketing. It is promotional, and labelling it utility to bypass consent is the fastest route to getting your number restricted by Meta. Utility is for order confirmations and delivery updates, not for anything you would call a broadcast.
Submit and wait for approval — usually minutes, always Meta’s decision.
3

Send to yourself first

Before any audience, use the API or a one-person audience to send it to your own number.
Read it on a phone. Templates that look fine in an editor routinely arrive with a blank where a name should be, or a link that wraps badly.
4

Choose the audience

Four lists, ordered by risk, each showing its count before you commit.
Start with the narrowest list. A first broadcast to 40 engaged people teaches you more than one to 4,000 strangers, and costs less to get wrong.
5

Bind the variables

{{1}} to the contact’s name. A template with a placeholder cannot go out with it empty, so this is enforced rather than trusted.
6

Send, and leave the tab open

A send started in the console runs from your browser. Close the tab and the send pauses.It does not lose anything — each recipient is its own row, so it resumes and nobody is messaged twice. But it will not finish while the tab is closed.Schedule it instead if you want to walk away. A scheduled send has no tab and needs none.
7

Read the results properly

The broadcast’s page separates four different facts:Read the refusals. They are grouped by reason, and they are the most useful part of the page — a batch of “invalid number” says something about your contact data that no success count will.

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After the first one

  • Delivered but not read is a timing problem. Try a different hour.
  • Read but no replies is a message problem, not a reach problem.
  • Refused for consent is correct behaviour. Those people opted out.

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What will not work

  • Multi-channel. The picker is real; only WhatsApp sends. Telegram could and is not built.
  • A/B testing. Not built.
  • Sending to a bought list. Consent is enforced where it cannot be bypassed, and Meta punishes it harder than we do.