Why your follow-ups need their own template

WhatsApp has a rule: outside a 24-hour window after a customer’s last message, you cannot send them free text. You can only send a template — a fixed message Meta has read and approved in advance.

That window is why your assistant needs templates at all. Inside it, it writes normally. Outside it — a week after an enquiry went quiet, which is exactly when a follow-up is worth sending — every message has to be one Meta already approved, sitting in your own WhatsApp Business account under your own number.

Your assistant uses two for its own follow-ups, and the difference between them is the whole of this page.

There are four more. Reviving a stalled enquiry with a file attached needs its own family of templates, because an approved template is locked to exactly one kind of attachment. They are a separate feature with separate limits — see Reviving stalled enquiries.

And each of them exists twice. Every follow-up template can be approved in English and in Malayalam, so a customer who writes to you in Malayalam is followed up in Malayalam. That is ten rows on the Templates tab, not ten templates — see Following up in Malayalam below.

⚠️ Follow-ups stop until the second one is approved. If kooday_chase is missing, deals your assistant would have chased outside the window are left alone and the reason is recorded as no_chase_template. Nothing is lost and nothing is sent wrongly — but nothing is sent.

The two templates

	kooday_reengage	kooday_chase
Used when	A person needs to reach a customer whose window has closed	Your assistant follows up on a deal by itself
Meta’s category	Utility	Marketing
Carries a STOP line	No	Yes

They read almost the same. They are not the same message, and putting both jobs on one template would be a real problem rather than a tidiness one.

kooday_reengage is a service nudge: a human has something to say to a customer about a conversation already under way. Meta calls that Utility and reviews it against a light bar.

kooday_chase is a sales message. Your assistant decided by itself to have another go at a deal the customer has not replied to. However warmly that is phrased, it is marketing — and Meta’s rules, and your customer’s “stop sending me offers”, both apply to it.

Sending those chases under the Utility template would be a way of slipping past both. It would work, for a while. It is also exactly what gets a number’s quality rating cut, because the customer who wanted the promotions to stop keeps receiving them and eventually blocks you.

So the chases go out under Marketing, are reviewed as marketing, and stop when a customer says stop. That is a real trade — Meta reviews Marketing templates more carefully, and there is more to lose if the number’s quality slips — and it is the right one, because the alternative is a sales message dressed as a service message.

The line you cannot remove

Every kooday_chase message ends with:

Reply STOP to stop promotional messages.

You will want to take it off. Here is why we do not let you, in the order that matters:

1. It protects your number, not ours. Somebody who cannot see how to stop the messages blocks you and reports you instead. Meta counts that against your number’s quality rating, then cuts how many people you may message, and eventually bans it. A visible opt-out is the cheapest insurance there is.
2. The alternative is not “no opt-out line” — it is a customer who feels cornered. They have already had one message they did not ask for. The line is what turns that from an intrusion into something they control.
3. WhatsApp shows its own “Stop promotions” button on some marketing messages — sometimes. Whether it appears depends on category, region and Meta’s own rollout, none of which we can see or are told about, and it can vanish without any change on your side. We cannot build your compliance on something we cannot observe. Ours is the guarantee; Meta’s button is a bonus, and both work.

Note the wording: promotional messages, not messages. A customer who replies STOP stops your promotions and keeps getting their order and booking updates — see When a customer asks you to stop. A footer promising to stop “messages” would be a promise we deliberately do not keep, and they would find out by receiving one.

The check is not one-off. Kooday re-reads the approved template at Meta and confirms the footer is still there, word for word. A template edited in Business Manager can keep its approved status while quietly losing its footer, so an approval alone is not enough to keep sending.

Getting them approved

Both templates live in your WhatsApp Business account, created with your own credentials. Kooday owns the name and the wording — every business on the platform uses the same two, which is what makes them supportable — and you own the instances, because they send under your number and it is your reputation Meta is scoring.

Approval is Meta’s, not ours, and usually takes minutes to a few hours. Marketing templates are reviewed against a stricter bar than Utility ones, so expect kooday_chase to take longer, and occasionally to need a resubmission.

Both templates live on the Templates tab of your bot’s page in the dashboard: create each one from there, and use Re-check to see what Meta’s review said. The tab also shows the two states that are easy to miss — approved but the opt-out footer has been edited away, and approved but with the wrong number of placeholders (which happens when the template was built by hand in Business Manager). Either one stops follow-ups exactly as a rejection would, for the reason this page explains.

Approval is only half of it. Each template also has a switch on that same tab, and it is yours rather than Meta’s: nothing goes out until you turn it on. Both start off, so a newly approved kooday_chase sends nothing until you say so — the tab says as much, in place of the approval warning, so the two halves are never confused.

What each one actually says

kooday_reengage (Utility):

You have a new message from {{1}}.
Tap below to continue the conversation.

kooday_chase (Marketing):

{{1}} here — just following up on your enquiry.
Reply to this message and we'll pick up where we left off.

Reply STOP to stop promotional messages.

{{1}} is your business name, filled in at send time. Everything else is fixed: that is what “approved template” means, and it is why the STOP line has to be part of the template rather than something added per message.

Following up in Malayalam

Your assistant already replies in Malayalam — it follows whichever language a customer writes in. Reaching out is different, because outside the window it can only send something Meta approved in advance, and Meta approves a template in one language at a time.

So each of your follow-up templates can be approved twice: once in English, once in Malayalam. On the Templates tab they appear under two headings, one per language.

The same name, twice — and that is Meta’s design, not ours

kooday_chase in English and kooday_chase in Malayalam are one template name with two reviews. Meta identifies a template by its name and its language, so you are not creating a second template with a longer name — you are submitting the one you already have in another language. In Business Manager they sit together.

You approve them separately, and they can be in different states: English approved while Malayalam is still pending is completely normal, and is what most accounts will look like for a while.

What happens before Malayalam is approved

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is deliberate and it looks like a bug if you do not expect it.

A customer you know speaks Malayalam is skipped, not written to in English.

Your assistant learns someone’s language from what they actually write to you. Once it knows, that is a fact about that person — so if the Malayalam follow-up is not approved yet, it leaves them alone rather than sending them a marketing message in a language they did not use with you. A follow-up in the wrong language is worse than no follow-up: it is an unsolicited message that also gets the person wrong.

Customers you have not learned a language for are unaffected. They get the English follow-up exactly as before.

There is one case that reads differently. If you have set your assistant’s own language to Malayalam but a brand-new lead has never sent you a message — someone from a missed call or a web form — then nothing about them says Malayalam; your setting does. Those follow-ups go out in English rather than stopping, and the report says so. Your preference is a preference; what a customer actually wrote is not.

What to approve first

kooday_nurture in Malayalam, then kooday_chase in Malayalam. Everything else falls back to the plain note, so those two are what turn Malayalam follow-ups on at all. The three attachment templates only decide whether a file can ride along.

Two things it does not cover

• kooday_reengage is English only. That is the template a person on your team uses to reply outside the window, and it is deliberately left alone for now.
• Nothing is translated when it is sent. A Malayalam template is a template you had approved in Malayalam. There is no live translation of a message — that is not something WhatsApp allows for templates, and it is not something we fake.

Troubleshooting

Follow-ups stopped for my Malayalam-speaking customers only

That is the behaviour above working. Your Malayalam kooday_chase or kooday_nurture has not been approved yet, so customers you know speak Malayalam are skipped rather than written to in English. Check the Malayalam section of the Templates tab — everything there shows its own review status.

Follow-ups have stopped for everyone

Most likely kooday_chase is missing, still under review, rejected, or has lost its footer. Your assistant records no_chase_template against the deal instead of sending, and moves on. Check the template’s status on your bot’s Templates tab.

It is worth knowing that it does not fall back to the other template. That is deliberate: a silent downgrade to kooday_reengage would put a sales message out under a service category with no advertised way to stop it, which is the exact thing these two templates exist to separate. A visible stop beats an invisible violation.

A customer replied to a follow-up and nothing happened

Check whether the conversation was taken over by one of your team in the Inbox. A thread being handled by a person is left to that person.

Follow-ups stopped for one customer only

Two likely reasons, both intentional:

1. They opted out. Check the Opted out screen.
2. Your assistant has already followed up three times with no reply. It stops there and leaves a note on the deal asking whether it is worth a personal touch — rather than sending a fourth.

Everything else that stops a chase — a snooze, a takeover, a clear “no” from the customer — is listed in When does your assistant follow up?.