What is Click-to-WhatsApp?

How the ad and the chat fit together

You build the ad in Meta Ads Manager and pick WhatsApp as the destination. Meta hands you a pre-filled first message, which you should rewrite, because something like ‘I want the 3BHK floor plan’ tells your agent what the lead wants before anyone types a word.

Then the clock starts. Once a customer messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens in which you can reply with ordinary text, images or PDFs, and nobody has to approve any of it. Then it shuts. After that you cannot simply send a follow-up, you have to use a template message, and templates go to Meta for approval before you can send them at all.

This is also where the tooling question bites. The ordinary WhatsApp Business app is fine for a two-person team handling twenty chats a day, but the WhatsApp Business API is what you need once several agents share one number, chats land in a CRM and template follow-ups go out automatically. Different product. Different cost.

Where teams get it wrong

The biggest one is response time. A Gurugram developer runs the campaign on a Saturday, leads pour in from Sector 65 and Golf Course Extension, nobody staffs WhatsApp over the weekend, and by Monday morning the window has shut on every chat. Half the budget spent on silence.

Second mistake: writing templates only after you need them. Approval is not instant. Draft your follow-up templates before the campaign launches, get them approved, keep two or three variants ready.

Third, teams treat the chat like a form, so the agent opens with a wall of text asking for name, email, budget and timeline, and the person who tapped out of curiosity thirty seconds ago quietly drops off. Ask one question. Answer theirs first.

What this looks like in practice

A boutique hotel near Khan Market runs Click-to-WhatsApp for weekend stays, and because the ad copy names the rate band, say ₹7,500 to ₹9,000 a night, the chats that open are already half qualified. The front desk answers on the same number guests later use for room service. That is quietly the whole point.

Real estate works differently. Higher ticket, longer cycle, so the value sits in attaching a name to a WhatsApp number inside your CRM within the first hour, brochure sent and project tagged while the window is still open. Everything after that is ordinary sales work.