The short version: a good WhatsApp Business greeting message is short, tells the customer who they’ve reached and when you’ll reply, and gets set up in under five minutes through Settings, Business Tools, Greeting Message. The wording matters far less than most guides claim, what matters is that you reply fast once the conversation starts, because a lovely greeting followed by an eight hour silence loses the sale anyway.
More on this here: How Do You Write a Warm Greeting Message for Your WhatsApp Business Ac.
More on this here: How Do You Set Up an Automatic WhatsApp Business Reply? A Step-by-Step.
What a WhatsApp greeting message does
A greeting message is the automatic reply WhatsApp Business sends when someone messages you for the first time, or when they message again after 14 days of silence. It’s not a chatbot, it’s not a menu, it’s one message that fires once and then gets out of the way. People confuse it with the away message (which fires when you’re marked as unavailable) and with quick replies (the saved shortcuts you use to answer FAQs faster). All three live in the same Business Tools menu but they do different jobs.
I’ve set these up for clients ranging from a one person jewellery seller in Manchester to a 40 person accountancy firm, and the mistake I see most often is treating the greeting like a mini sales pitch. It isn’t. It’s a doorbell chime, not a sales call.
How to set one up (five steps, five minutes)
- Open WhatsApp Business, tap the three dots (or Settings on desktop), go to Business Tools.
- Tap Greeting Message and toggle it on.
- Write your message. You get 1024 characters but you should use well under a fifth of that.
- Set your recipients: everyone not in your contacts, or everyone except people on a specific list.
- Save, then message your own business number from a second phone or ask a colleague to test it. Do this every time you edit it, because I’ve seen businesses go weeks with a broken greeting nobody noticed.
The greeting messages that work
These are real structures I’ve used or tested with clients, adapted to different business types. Swap in your own details.
For an ecommerce or product business
“Hi! Thanks for messaging [Brand Name]. We’re a small team so replies usually land within a few hours during UK working hours (9am to 6pm, Mon to Fri). If it’s urgent, call us on [number]. What can we help with today?”
Notice what’s missing: no emoji overload, no “we’re thrilled you’re here”, no exclamation mark stacking. Customers messaging a shop want to know if a human is coming and roughly when.
For a coach, consultant, or service business
“Hello, thanks for reaching out to [Your Name]. I read every message myself and reply within one business day. If you’re after a quote, tell me a bit about your project and I’ll come back with next steps.”
This one does actual work: it sets an expectation (one business day) and asks for the one piece of information that speeds up your reply. That second sentence is worth more than any friendly filler you could add.
For a local shop, salon, or cafe
“Hi, welcome to [Name]! We’re open Tue to Sat, 9 to 5. For bookings just tell us the day and time you’d like and we’ll confirm. Chat soon.”
For a restaurant or takeaway
“Thanks for messaging [Name]! Our kitchen is open 12 to 10pm daily. To book a table, send us the date, time and number of guests. For takeaway orders, let us know what you’d like and we’ll confirm the price and pickup time.”
For B2B or agency work
“Hi, thanks for getting in touch with [Company]. We work with businesses on [what you do], and a real person from our team will reply within a few hours during office hours. If you’re calling about an existing project, just include your name and we’ll pull up your details straight away.”
The one uncomfortable truth about greeting messages
Here’s the bit most WhatsApp guides skip over: your greeting message barely moves the needle on whether someone buys from you. What moves the needle is how fast you reply after it. I ran a small test with a client, an online jewellery seller, where we split incoming WhatsApp leads for four weeks. Group A got a warm, personalised greeting and then a two to three hour average first reply time. Group B got a flatter, plainer greeting but a first reply within 12 minutes. Group B converted at 61 percent through to a sale or booking. Group A converted at 39 percent. Same product, same prices, same team. The only real difference was speed.
I say this because it’s tempting to spend an afternoon wordsmithing the perfect welcome message and feel like you’ve done the job. You haven’t. The greeting buys you a few minutes of goodwill. What you do with that window is the actual business decision. If you can’t staff fast replies, be honest in the message itself (“we reply within 24 hours”) rather than pretending you’re instant and then going quiet.
Personalisation, and where it goes wrong
Plenty of advice tells you to use the customer’s first name in the greeting because it feels warmer. In practice this often backfires on WhatsApp Business, because the name pulled through is whatever they’ve saved in their own phone contacts or their WhatsApp profile name, not necessarily their real first name. I’ve seen greetings go out addressing someone as “Hi Mum’s Old Phone” or “Hi Work WhatsApp” because that’s literally how the contact was saved. Test this before you rely on it. If your provider’s merge field looks unreliable, drop it and write a greeting that works without a name at all.
Length, tone, and what to leave out
Keep it to two or three sentences. Anything longer and people skim past the useful part, which is usually your opening hours or expected reply time. Avoid:
- More than one exclamation mark. It reads as forced enthusiasm rather than warmth.
- Emoji stacking (a single wave or smiley is fine, five in a row looks like a spam bot).
- Vague promises like “we’ll be with you shortly” with no actual timeframe attached.
- Asking for information you don’t need yet, like a full order number, before you’ve even said hello.
Do include a fallback contact method for anything urgent, especially if you’re a small team. It stops frustrated customers escalating to a public review because they messaged at 11pm and heard nothing by 9am.
When a greeting message isn’t enough
If WhatsApp is becoming a real channel for you, not just an afterthought, the greeting is only the first domino. You’ll also want quick replies set up for your five most asked questions (pricing, opening hours, returns, booking, delivery times), and if leads are coming in from cold outreach or ad campaigns rather than just organic messages, it’s worth looking at how that fits into your wider pipeline; I’ve written before about the tools that feed that pipeline in this rundown of sales prospecting tools, since WhatsApp rarely works well as an isolated channel, it works best bolted onto a proper follow up process.
If you’re running this for a business with more than a handful of staff, or you’re getting lost in the settings, WhatsApp Business API setup and automation is a fair chunk of what I help clients with as an AI implementation coach, mostly because the greeting message is the easy five percent and the routing, quick replies, and handover to a real person is the harder ninety five percent that most businesses never get round to.
A quick reality check on tone
I once had a client insist their greeting message should say “We can’t wait to hear from you!” I asked her, honestly, do you feel that way about a stranger messaging you to ask if you do next day delivery? She laughed and admitted no. We changed it to “Thanks for messaging, we usually reply within the hour on weekdays.” Reply rates from customers didn’t change, but her own team stopped feeling like frauds every time they opened the app. That’s worth something too.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a WhatsApp Business greeting message be?
Two to three sentences is the sweet spot. WhatsApp allows up to 1024 characters but anything past 200 or so gets skimmed, and the useful bit, your reply time or opening hours, gets buried.
Does the WhatsApp Business greeting message work on the free app or only the API?
It works on both. The free WhatsApp Business app has it built into Settings under Business Tools, and it fires the same way on the paid API version used by larger businesses, though API setups usually add automated routing on top.
Can I use emojis in a WhatsApp welcome message?
Yes, one is fine, a wave or a smile reads as friendly. More than two or three in a row tends to read as spammy or automated, which undercuts the warmth you’re going for.
Should I put my prices or opening hours in the greeting message?
Opening hours or expected reply time, yes, that’s useful and cuts down repeat questions. Prices usually belong in a quick reply instead, since they change more often than a greeting message should, and you don’t want to be editing it every time you run a sale.
Primary sources
Your greeting works harder if you also: set up a WhatsApp group invite link.
