Manage Customer Consent

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain best practices for customer consent.
Collect and honor customer consent.
Explain how customer consent impacts your quality rating.
Explain the difference between opting out and blocking or reporting.

Opt-In Methods, Requirements, and Best Practices

Before sending a business-initiated message, you need to get opt-in consent from your customers. Consent is required to ensure people receive useful, expected information from the businesses they want to hear from. You can obtain consent in multiple ways, both in and out of WhatsApp.

Methods

Examples of supported opt-in methods include:

SMS: Request opt-in consent via text message.
Website: Create an opt-in signup form on your website’s homepage, dedicated landing page, or at key touch points during the purchase process.
In a WhatsApp thread: Require opt-in consent during a user-initiated message thread.
By phone: Create an interactive voice response (IVR) flow.
Missed call: Send an opt-in message if a caller hangs up before your business answers.
In person or on paper: Customers sign a physical document to opt in.

Requirements

To guarantee your method is policy-compliant, make sure it meets these requirements.

Clearly state that a person is opting in to receive messages from your business via WhatsApp.
Clearly state the business name that a person is consenting to receive messages from.
Follow all applicable laws.

Prioritize the Customer Experience

When designing an opt-in consent flow, optimize for the user experience. Make sure your customers expect the message they receive by doing the following.

Obtain consent that encompasses all message categories you plan to send—for example, order updates, relevant offers, or product recommendations.
Obtain separate consent for each message category. By getting consent for each category, you mitigate the risk of users blocking your business because they receive unsolicited messages.
Provide clear instructions for how they can opt out of receiving specific categories of messages. Make sure to honor these requests.
Monitor your quality rating, especially when rolling out new opt-in methods.
Make sure your opt-in and opt-out flows are clear and intuitive for users.
Clearly communicate the value of receiving this information on WhatsApp.

To easily honor opt-in requests, use Marketing Cloud to create a Master Contacts Data Extension with different columns to manage consent for each category. Use these columns to help you filter your segments by consent type.

Opt-Out Best Practices

In addition to collecting opt-in consent, it’s important to offer customers the ability to leave your channels whenever they want. The option to opt out of future messages is critical for ensuring that your business obeys global privacy laws and maintains a high quality rating.

As a best practice, include an opt-out message in the footer of each template message you send. You can also create a Data Extension to store all opt-out requests for each of your journeys. These data extensions make it easier for you to honor unsubscribe requests. Each data extension should include at least these columns.

Id: Unique identifier of each user.
Mobile: Customer phone number.
Location: Customer location.
Opt-out status: Number column in which “1” means the customer has opted out.

Opting Out, Blocking, and Reporting

When a customer decides to leave a channel, they can either use the opt-out flow you created, or block or report your business channel directly to WhatsApp and Meta.

If they choose the opt-out flow, the request goes directly to your business. However, if they choose to block or report your business contact, Meta is alerted. This alert tells Meta that a WhatsApp user is unhappy with your channel as a whole, which can impact your quality rating and messaging limits. By implementing a process to collect and honor opt-out requests, you better protect these values.

Driving high-quality conversations between people and businesses is a top priority. People can block or report businesses, and Meta systems decrease your messaging limit if your business’s quality is low for a sustained time. Meta may also reactively evaluate a business’s opt-in consent flows, including user feedback, to flag policy violations and develop additional types of enforcement over time.

You’re now armed with everything you need to know in order to effectively communicate with your customers. From conversational marketing strategies and business account types to messaging limits and customer consent, you’re officially ready to create personalized experiences that your customers are sure to love.