Two WhatsApp numbers, and why

If you send promotions on WhatsApp, they go out on a different number from the one your order confirmations, booking reminders and payment receipts use.

That is not a licensing trick or a way to sell you a second line. It is the single most effective thing you can do to keep the number your customers actually depend on working.

What the split protects

Meta scores every WhatsApp number you own, on its own, using what the people receiving your messages do about them. Blocks and reports pull the score down. When it falls far enough, Meta cuts how many people that number may message in a day, and if it keeps falling, bans it.

Promotions are what people block. Order updates are not — nobody blocks a business for telling them their delivery is out.

Put both on one number and you have tied the two together. A campaign that lands badly on a Tuesday takes down your delivery notifications on the Wednesday, and there is no way to separate them afterwards. Your customers do not know why they stopped hearing from you; they only know the messages they were relying on stopped.

Split them and the worst case is bounded. A bad campaign costs you the campaign number. The receipts keep going out.

⚠️ This reduces your exposure. It does not make anything safe. A number can still be rated down, limited or banned, and none of that is ours to appeal — Meta’s decision is Meta’s. What the split does is stop one mistake from taking everything with it.

One assistant, one customer

The split is on the phone lines. It is not on anything else.

• The same assistant answers on both numbers. It is not two bots to configure.
• The same customer record covers both. Someone who gets a campaign on the marketing number and replies has one history, one set of deals, one opt-out state.
• An opt-out crosses both, and crosses channels entirely. Somebody who says stop is stopped, whichever number they said it on. See When a customer asks you to stop.

This is worth saying because the usual way to get two WhatsApp numbers is to buy a second tool for the second number, which gives you two contact lists, two conversation histories, and two places an opt-out can be forgotten.

Which number sends what

	Marketing number	Transactional number
Campaigns	Yes — only this one	Never
Order, booking and payment updates	Only if you have no other number	Yes
Your assistant replying to an incoming message	Yes, on whichever number they wrote to	Yes

Campaigns refuse anything but a marketing number. The check runs when the campaign is created, again when it starts or resumes, and again on every pass while it is sending — because a number can be re-labelled while a campaign is in flight, and a campaign that got its permission at the start and never looked again is exactly the wrong shape for this.

Order updates are less strict, deliberately. They go out on your transactional number if you have one, and on whatever number you do have if you do not. A business with a single number still gets its payment confirmations delivered — the alternative would be a customer paying you and hearing nothing, which serves nobody.

The asymmetry is the point. Promotions are refused when in doubt; a receipt is not.

Adding the second number

Today we set this up with you. Connecting a WhatsApp number is self-serve, but marking one of them as your marketing number is not yet — tell us which one and we do it. A newly connected number is always transactional until then, so no number ever becomes promotional by accident.

The number itself needs to be a real WhatsApp Business number in your own account, connected the same way as your first one. Two things worth planning:

1. Use a number that is not printed on anything. Not the number on your shopfront, your invoices or your Google listing. If it does get limited, you want that to be an inconvenience rather than a reprint.
2. Templates are per number. A message approved on one number is not approved on the other. See WhatsApp templates.

Quality rating

Meta gives each number a rating and updates it as messages land. Kooday reads those updates as they arrive and records them against the number.

Rating	What happens to campaigns
Green	Sending at the pace you set
Yellow	Sending, slower — small batches while it recovers
Red	Every running campaign on that number is paused
Nothing reported yet	Treated as yellow, not as green

The last row surprises people. A number Meta has said nothing about is not a number Meta has approved of — it is a number we know nothing about, and the careful reading is the right one for a promotional send.

Red pauses, and only a person restarts

When a number goes red, campaigns on it stop immediately and a job appears for you. They do not start again by themselves, ever — not even when the rating goes back to green.

Every part of that is on purpose. A red rating means the messages that already went out landed badly with real people. The one thing that must not happen next is the rest of the same list going out automatically at nine the next morning because a number in a database moved. Somebody has to read what was sent, decide whether to send the rest of it, and press resume.

A rating recovering changes a rating. It does not undo a decision that was made about your customers.

Messaging limits

Separately from the rating, Meta caps how many different people a number may message per day — 50, 250, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, and eventually unlimited. The cap rises on its own as your number builds a record.

Campaigns stop when the day’s cap is reached and carry on the next day. This is not a pause — the campaign stays running, nothing is recorded against it, and nobody has to press anything. The budget belongs to the number, not to the campaign: three campaigns running on one number share one daily allowance, rather than each getting its own. This matters most on a new number, where a campaign paced at the default 250 messages an hour will stop within the first few minutes and finish over several days.

If Meta reports a tier we do not recognise — a rename, a new one — it is read as the smallest, not as unlimited. A limit breach is answered with the same quality downgrade the rest of this page is about, so the careful reading is the one that costs a slower send rather than the number.

The other two things that slow a campaign are the messages per hour setting on the campaign itself and the frequency caps, which are tighter than any tier. Whichever is strictest at the moment is the one that applies.

Troubleshooting

”This number is not set up for marketing”

The number the campaign points at is marked transactional. Tell us which number is your marketing one. Campaigns will not send from a transactional number even if it is the only number you have — that refusal is the whole point of the split.

A campaign paused itself and I did not do it

Check the reason recorded on it. A campaign the system stopped says so in as many words, and names what it wants you to decide:

A campaign a person stopped says something different, and calmer:

The eleven the system can record:

Reason, as the screen words it	What it means, and what to do
Meta rated this number red	Meta has flagged the quality of messages from this number. Read what went out before you resume — see above
That number is no longer a marketing number	The number was re-labelled while the campaign was running. Relabel it, or point the send at your marketing number, then resume
The WhatsApp number is gone	The connector was removed, switched off, or is no longer a WhatsApp number. Fix the connector, then resume
Broadcasts were switched off	Your account no longer has broadcasts. Your admin can restore it, and the send can then be resumed
The uploaded header file expired	WhatsApp keeps an uploaded file for about 30 days and this campaign’s has passed that. Upload it again on the campaign, then resume — nothing else about it has changed
Too many sends failed in a row	Twenty-five recipients in a row failed permanently, so we stopped rather than burning the rest of your list the same way. That pattern is usually the campaign, not the people. Check the report’s failure reasons before resuming
This number is temporarily paused	Deliveries from this number hit repeated errors, so it was paused for a short cool-off. Nothing for you to do — see below
Meta will not accept this template	Meta rejected the message template itself, or the values this campaign fills into it no longer match what was approved. Re-sync your templates, fix the campaign’s message, then resume
We can no longer sign in to this number	Meta rejected our credentials for this number — usually an access token that expired or was revoked. Nothing about the campaign is wrong. Reconnect the number under Integrations, then resume
We do not know this number’s daily limit	Meta did not tell us this number’s messaging limit, and we will not send a campaign while guessing it. The next sync with Meta usually fills the limit in, but the campaign stays paused until you resume it; if the limit is still missing, reconnect the number under Integrations first
This send’s time zone is not recognised	The campaign’s sending hours are set in a time zone we cannot read, so we cannot tell whether it is the middle of the night where your list is. Find the campaign in the broadcast list and use Change send time to pick a time zone from the list, then save — Resume is withheld until the zone is one we can read, and this one never clears on its own

In the campaign list the same distinction is one chip: a system pause shows its reason, a person’s shows Paused by your team.

Resuming is your decision, with one exception. This number is temporarily paused is a short cool-off after repeated delivery errors, and it lifts by itself — the campaign carries on when the cool-off ends, and resuming it by hand achieves nothing. Every other reason in the table above waits for you.

Our quality rating dropped and we do not know why

The rating is Meta’s and they do not explain it. What it reflects is blocks and reports from the people you messaged. In practice, look at: how recently those people last heard from you, whether they had any reason to expect the message, and whether the audience was people who had genuinely opted in. The campaign report shows the last one — a campaign where most of the list was suppressed for having no consent on record is a campaign that went to a thin slice of people who did opt in, which is the safe outcome, not the problem.

Can we go back to one number?

You can, and campaigns then have no number to send from. Order updates carry on exactly as before.