Opt-outs and contact preferences
When customers request to stop receiving messages, Yapper automatically manages their preferences to ensure you respect their choices. This page explains how opt-outs work, what kinds of messages are affected, and how to manage these preferences from the dashboard.
How customer opt-outs work
Customers can opt out of proactive messages in three ways:
- Asking the assistant: If a customer tells the assistant they want to stop being messaged, the assistant automatically halts scheduled messages and template updates for them. The assistant does not end the conversation and will still reply if the customer asks a direct question.
- Tapping an opt-out button: When receiving template messages, customers can tap a quick-reply button (such as "Stop these updates") to instantly opt out of all future template updates.
- WhatsApp profile settings: For marketing messages, customers can use WhatsApp's native "Offers and announcements" setting on your business profile to stop or resume marketing templates. Yapper automatically respects this native choice.
Types of contact preferences
Yapper tracks three independent contact channels for each customer:
Scheduled follow-ups
This preference stops proactive, non-marketing messages: scheduled message batches, automated follow-ups the assistant sends when a customer goes quiet, and any opener the assistant would send to move a customer into a new stage of your Phases. A customer who has opted out of scheduled follow-ups receives none of these until they are resumed.
- Customers can opt out of scheduled messages by telling the assistant to stop messaging them.
- Team members, admins, and owners can also manually pause or resume these messages for any customer.
- For more on scheduling follow-ups, see scheduled-messages.
Template updates
This preference stops all template messages, regardless of their category (utility, authentication, or marketing).
- Adding opt-out buttons: When editing a utility or authentication template in the Templates page, you can check Add opt-out button. This appends a "Stop these updates" button to the template. This checkbox is not available for marketing templates, which use WhatsApp's native setting. For more on template configuration, see whatsapp-templates.
- When a customer taps this button, they are opted out of all future templates and receive an automated confirmation message.
- Team members, admins, and owners can manually pause or resume template updates for a customer in the dashboard.
WhatsApp marketing preferences
This is a native WhatsApp control for marketing templates only.
- When a customer stops marketing updates via their WhatsApp settings, Yapper mirrors this state.
- Attempting to send a marketing template to a customer who has opted out via WhatsApp will fail to deliver and will show as a delivery failure in the dashboard.
- Native options like "Interested" or "Not interested" feedback and spam reporting do not trigger this automatic opt-out.
- This native preference is WhatsApp-specific and does not apply to Instagram or Messenger.
What "opted out" means for active conversations
Opt-out preferences only apply to proactive outreach (scheduled follow-ups, broadcast batches, and template messages).
If a customer who has opted out sends a new message to your business, the assistant will still reply to their message normally if the conversation is in an active phase. Opting out does not block your team or the assistant from answering inbound questions.
Manage customer preferences in the dashboard
Team members with access to a customer's conversation can view and edit that customer's contact preferences directly from the dashboard:
- Inbox and Address book: Open a customer's details in the Inbox contact-pane (see inbox) or the Address book. You will see their current opt-out status.
- If a customer has opted out of native WhatsApp marketing messages, an Opted out badge is shown. This status is read-only.
- For scheduled follow-ups and template updates, you can use the Pause and Resume toggles to change the customer's preferences.
- Schedules page: On the Schedules page, message cards display a clickable badge showing the number of paused recipients. Click this badge to open a list of customers who are currently excluded from receiving the batch. This list is not shown for template batches, which evaluate opt-outs at the time of sending.