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WhatsApp requires every business-initiated message sent outside an open customer-service window to use a pre-approved template. Templates are how Switchbord sends booking confirmations, marketing offers, OTPs, and any other outbound message that isn’t a direct reply to an inbound one. Meta reviews and approves (or rejects) every template before it can be used. This page is the entry point. For the exact validator rules, category rules, and the visual editor, see the deep-dive pages linked throughout.

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Categories

Every template belongs to exactly one Meta-assigned category, and the category determines both what content is allowed and how much Meta bills per delivered message:

Utility

Transactional updates about something the customer already requested — order confirmations, receipts, appointment reminders.

Marketing

Promotional content — offers, campaigns, re-engagement. Highest scrutiny and highest cost.

Authentication

One-time codes, OTPs, and MFA messages. Cheapest category, tightly restricted format.
Picking the wrong category doesn’t just risk rejection — Meta can silently re-categorize an approved template later, which changes what you’re billed. See Marketing templates for the decision tree, billing differences, and how Switchbord surfaces category-migration events.

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Where templates live

Templates are stored per-workspace with a status of draft, pending, approved, or rejected, and are versioned per language — the same template name can have an Italian and an English variant, each reviewed independently by Meta. Authoring happens in the Template Studio — a 3-pane visual builder with a pixel-accurate iOS/Android preview so you can see exactly how the header, body, footer, and buttons will render before submitting. See Visual Template Builder for the full editor walkthrough, including variable mapping and media upload.

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Variables and structure rules

Templates use {{1}}, {{2}}, … placeholders in the header and body, filled in at send time with real contact or order data. Meta enforces strict structural rules — placeholders can’t lead or trail the body, can’t sit adjacent to each other, and every placeholder needs a realistic example value. Switchbord’s client-side validator checks all of this before you submit, so most rejections are caught in the editor rather than by Meta’s review queue. The full rule set — with DO/DON’T examples for every validator check — lives in Template rules reference.

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Approval workflow

  1. Draft the template in the Template Studio.
  2. Submit it — Switchbord runs the client-side validator, then forwards the submission to Meta.
  3. Meta reviews (usually minutes to a few hours) and returns APPROVED or REJECTED with a reason.
  4. Approved templates become available immediately in Campaigns, Journeys, and the transactional send API.
Approved templates can be re-categorized by Meta after the fact (a UTILITY template later reclassified as MARKETING, for example). Switchbord logs every migration to the audit log for billing reconciliation — see Category migration.

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Using templates

  • Broadcasts / Campaigns — map template variables to contact fields for a whole audience.
  • Journeys — send a template as a step in an automated flow.
  • API — send an approved template programmatically; see Template API endpoints.
  • Margaret — ask Margaret to draft a new template from a plain-language description; she proposes a draft you review before creating it (see Margaret).

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See also