WhatsApp isn't email. Meta restricts when a business may message someone: for a limited period after the customer writes to you, you can reply freely; outside it, you can only send a message template that Meta has approved in advance.
This isn't a Gleap setting — it's Meta's rule, applied when the message is sent. Understanding it explains most of the confusion around WhatsApp.
Starting a conversation with someone who hasn't messaged you.
Following up after the window has closed — a fix that took two days, an answer you promised.
Any notification you send on your own initiative.
Inside the window, a normal reply is fine, and each new customer message opens it again.
Manage them from your WhatsApp channel settings. A template can have a header — text, or an image, video or document — a body, and a footer, with placeholders for the parts that change per recipient.
Meta reviews every template before it can be used, so create the ones you'll need before you need them. Waiting for approval while a customer waits for an answer is a bad time to discover the review step.
Each placeholder is mapped to a field, and can have a fallback for when that field is empty. Values are resolved in a fixed order, and this is the part worth knowing:
A value entered directly when sending wins over everything.
Otherwise the mapped field is used.
The fallback applies only when the mapped field has no value at all.
Meta rejects templates that read as marketing when submitted as service messages, and templates whose placeholders could produce anything at all. Write a specific, useful message — an order update, an appointment reminder, an answer to a question — and keep placeholders to concrete values like a name, a number or a date.
Keep the total number small. Every template is a thing to maintain, translate and re-approve, and most teams need far fewer than they first write.
