Businesses tend to discover quality rating on the day it goes red. Understanding the mechanism beforehand is worth doing, because the damage is quick to inflict and slow to undo.
The chain
- You send to a broad, poorly targeted list.
- People who do not recognise you block or report the message.
- Quality rating falls from high to medium to low.
- At low, your messaging limit is reduced — sometimes back to the lowest tier.
- Reduced limits mean even legitimate transactional messages get constrained.
Step five is the one that hurts. A marketing decision ends up degrading order confirmations, which is a customer service problem rather than a marketing one.
What actually feeds the rating
Chiefly negative signals from recipients — blocks and reports — weighed against volume, within a recent rolling window. Positive engagement helps, but nothing offsets a high block rate as directly as not being blocked in the first place.
The rating is per phone number, not per campaign and not per template. One bad send contaminates the number that also carries your delivery notifications. Some businesses separate marketing and transactional traffic onto different numbers for exactly this reason.
What causes blocks
- Not recognising the sender. Overwhelmingly the largest cause. Long-dormant consent produces exactly this.
- Frequency. Several messages a week to someone expecting occasional updates.
- Irrelevance. The wrong product to the wrong person.
- No obvious way out. Someone who cannot find an opt-out blocks instead.
- Bad timing. Late night and early morning sends.
- Bought or scraped lists. The fastest route to a low rating there is.
Recovering
- Stop outbound marketing immediately. Continuing while hoping the average recovers is the most common mistake. The window is rolling, so the fastest lever is adding no further negative signal.
- Keep transactional flowing. These are wanted messages and generate positive signal.
- Find the cause. Which campaign, which segment, what changed? It is almost never mysterious.
- Clean the list. Remove dormant contacts and anyone with no engagement across several campaigns.
- Resume small. Restart with your most engaged few hundred, and watch the block rate for a week before widening.
Recovery typically takes days to a couple of weeks of good behaviour. There is no appeal that substitutes for it.
Prevention, in one line
Send messages people would be mildly pleased to receive, to people who remember agreeing to receive them, no more often than you promised. Every quality problem we have helped diagnose was a violation of one of those three clauses.