Your first message
Sending an approved template to a real contact and reading what the delivery statuses mean.
You have a connected number and an approved template. This is the last step of setup: getting a message onto a real phone.
Send to yourself or a colleague first. Never point the first campaign at your customer list — a mistake there costs money and quality rating, and neither comes back.
Add a test contact
Open Contacts and choose Add contact. You need a phone number; name, email, company and tags are optional.
Write the number in full international form without the + — 919876543210 for an Indian mobile. If you write a number without a country code, ONPAD applies the workspace default, which is +91 for India.
Use a phone you can physically pick up. You want to see what arrives, not assume it.
Send it
Open Campaigns and choose Create campaign.
- Choose the template you had approved.
- Choose the audience — for this test, just the one contact you added.
- Fill in the variables. If the template has
{{1}}for a name, map it to the contact's name so each person gets their own. ONPAD pre-fills from the template's sample values; replace them with real mappings. - Send now, or schedule it for later. Scheduled campaigns run in your workspace's timezone.
Then watch the campaign page.
What the statuses mean
| Status | What happened |
|---|---|
| Queued | Accepted by ONPAD, waiting its turn to go to Meta |
| Sent | Meta accepted it and is delivering |
| Delivered | It reached the customer's phone |
| Read | The customer opened it — only if they have read receipts on |
| Failed | It did not go. The reason is shown on the row |
Read is not reliable as a measure. Customers who turn read receipts off never report read, no matter how carefully they read the message.
A message can sit at Sent for a while if the phone is switched off. Meta retries, then gives up after 30 days.
If it failed
The failure reason is on the recipient row. The common ones:
Invalid phone number. Wrong country code, a missing digit, or a landline. Check the full international form.
Number is not on WhatsApp. Exactly what it says. The number exists but has no WhatsApp account.
Template not approved. The template's status changed between creating and sending the campaign. Check Templates.
Outside the 24-hour window with a non-template message. Cannot happen from a campaign, since campaigns only use templates — but it can from the inbox. See the 24-hour window in WhatsApp Business API.
Messaging limit reached. Meta caps how many new conversations your number may start in 24 hours. New numbers start low and the limit rises as you send well-received messages.
Payment issue at Meta. Meta has no valid payment method on your WhatsApp Business Account and stopped delivering. This is on Meta's side — fix it in Meta Business Manager. An active ONPAD plan does not help here. See What it costs.
When it arrives
Reply to it from the phone you sent it to. The reply appears in your Inbox, and a 24-hour window opens in which you can answer in free text with no template.
That round trip — template out, reply in, free-text answer — is the whole product working. If it did, you are set up.
Then, carefully
Before pointing anything at a real list:
- Import your contacts properly. A CSV with bad numbers wastes money and quality rating on every send.
- Start small. A few hundred, not everyone, on the first real campaign.
- Check your messaging limit. New numbers can only start a limited number of conversations a day.
- Send to people who expect you. Bought lists are the fastest route to a red quality rating and a paused number.
Next
You have finished setup. From here:
- Inbox — answering customers as a team
- Contacts — importing your real list
- Campaigns — audiences, scheduling and results
- API — sending from your own software