Glossary · As of June 2026
What is a Marketing Template? (India 2026)
A marketing template is a pre-approved WhatsApp message template whose primary intent is promotional — sale announcements, abandoned-cart nudges, festive offers, product launches and re-engagement campaigns. It is billed under Meta’s marketing conversation category, the most expensive of the four bands.
Meta categorises every WhatsApp conversation as marketing, utility, authentication or service. The template you choose to send first determines the category of the resulting 24-hour conversation, and therefore the per-conversation INR fee. Marketing sits in the top pricing band in 2026, reflecting Meta's preference for solicited communication.
Under India's DPDP Act 2023, every recipient of a marketing template must have given free, specific, informed and unambiguous consent to receive promotional content from your business on WhatsApp. Pre-ticked boxes, bundled consent, or implied consent inherited from a different channel are not sufficient. The opt-in record must include timestamp, channel, exact notice text version and the consent string itself — and withdrawal must be as easy as opt-in (Section 6(4)).
Operationally, the best Indian D2C brands in 2026 do three things: cap marketing frequency at one template per contact per 48 hours, pair every marketing send with a utility follow-up triggered by the user's response inside the resulting 24-hour window, and segment audiences by phone-number quality score so red-rated cohorts do not poison the warm list. Never reuse a marketing template for utility purposes — Meta's automated re-categoriser will catch the mismatch and drop your quality rating.
Authoritative source: Meta WhatsApp Business Platform pricing and MeitY DPDP framework.