Write, approve, personalise, schedule and measure.
11 answers
The category decides both the price and the odds of approval.
Utility covers messages about something the customer already did: an order, a booking, a bill, a delivery. Marketing covers anything promotional. Authentication is one-time codes only.
Meta re-categorises templates on its own reading of the text, so a "Utility" template that thanks the customer and then offers 20% off will be billed as Marketing.
A one-click check that shows which phrases are making your template Marketing.
In the template builder, run the check before submitting. It gives a verdict, highlights the exact phrases Meta will read as promotional, and offers a rewrite you can accept with one click.
On a large monthly volume, moving order and payment templates from Marketing to Utility is usually the single biggest saving available.
Most rejections are formatting, not content.
Keep to these and approval is routine.
Edit and resubmit. You do not have to start a new template.
Meta gives a reason code. "Invalid format" is nearly always variables or samples; "policy violation" means the content itself has to change.
Fix it and resubmit from the same screen. Repeated rejections on one number can affect your standing, so read the reason before resubmitting.
Images, PDFs, video, quick replies, call-to-action buttons and multi-card carousels.
A template can carry an image, video or document header, up to three buttons, and, for catalogue-style sends, a carousel of cards each with its own image and buttons.
Header media set on the template is prefilled automatically at send time, so you are not re-uploading the same image for every campaign.
Map a variable to any field on the contact, including fields you invented.
Define custom fields for whatever your business tracks (outstanding balance, plan, city, renewal date), and point a template variable at one. Each recipient gets their own value at send time.
Fields are filled by import, by the API, by a Flow response, or by a Tally or Sheets sync.
Choose the template, build the audience, review the checklist, send.
Audiences come from tags, custom fields, imported lists, or a saved segment. The pre-send checklist shows the recipient count, the template's approval status, the header media and the source of every variable before anything leaves.
Delivery is paced deliberately. A campaign to a large list is queued rather than fired at once, which protects both your quality rating and your limit.
Pick a date and time; cancel any time before it fires.
Scheduled campaigns are listed on the Scheduled Messages page with their send time and audience, and can be cancelled from that list.
Times follow your account's timezone, so set that first if your team works across regions.
Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, set once and it keeps running.
Useful for weekly stock updates, monthly statements and annual renewal reminders. Each run appears in campaign history as its own batch, so you can compare week to week.
A recurring campaign stops when you stop it, or when the template is no longer approved.
Sent, delivered, read and failed, per campaign and per recipient.
Campaign history is searchable and filterable by status, template and date, and each row opens to per-recipient detail, including the exact error on anything that failed.
Sends made through the external API appear here too, so the totals on your dashboard cover everything that left the platform.
Refresh approval status, or import templates that only exist on Meta.
The refresh has two modes: update the status of templates you already have, or also pull in templates that exist on Meta but were never created in VedLink, useful right after a migration.
Imported templates arrive with their components intact, so media headers and buttons come across.
Tell us the number, the time and what you expected. That is usually enough for us to spot it.