For most Indian businesses the festive season — Navratri through Diwali, and the sales around them — is the busiest few weeks of the year. It is also when the most things break at once: support queues triple, customers will not wait, and WhatsApp is at its most crowded, so your messages compete with every other brand's.
This is a playbook for getting through it on WhatsApp and the phone without a quality-rating drop, an unanswered inbox or a bot confidently quoting last month's offer. It runs backwards from the day: three weeks out, one week out, the week itself, and the week after.
Three weeks out: the things that take time
Check your number's health, not just your plan
Your WhatsApp number has a quality rating and a messaging limit — how many people you may start conversations with in 24 hours. Both are decided by Meta, both move on their own, and most businesses only find out when they hit one mid-campaign. How limits and quality work.
- Look at the rating now. If it is medium or low, fix the cause before the festive sends, not during them.
- Do not launch a festive sale on a brand-new number. Its limit starts low and grows with good-quality volume over days, not hours.
Get every template approved before you need it
You will need two kinds: marketing templates for the offers, and utility templates for what follows a purchase — order confirmation, dispatch, delivery, payment reminders. Submit them all now. A rejection a week before Diwali costs a resubmission cycle you will not have. Templates that get approved and why they get rejected.
File them in the right category. A dispatch update filed as marketing costs several times more and competes for the same crowded attention as every offer. A Diwali greeting with a discount code in it is marketing, however warmly it is worded.
Clean the audience
The fastest way to lose a messaging tier in October is to send an offer to everyone who has ever bought from you. Send to people who opted in and have engaged recently; leave the rest for an email. Every block and report counts against the number you need for order updates next week. Building a segment that will not get you reported.
One week out: prepare the people and the bot
Update the bot's facts
The most common festive chatbot failure is not a technical one. It is a bot answering from last month's facts: the old return window, a delivery promise that no longer holds, an offer that has ended. Add a short festive document to the knowledge base with:
- The offer terms, start and end dates, and what is excluded.
- The last order date for delivery before the festival, per region if it differs.
- Any change to returns, exchanges or cancellations during the sale.
- Your opening hours on the festival days themselves.
And take it out again when the sale ends. Why stale facts produce invented answers.
Write festive handover conditions
A few conversations should reach a person fast during the sale, whatever the queue looks like: a payment taken but no order confirmed, a gift that will not arrive in time, a damaged item, and anyone who asks twice for a person. Write these as handover conditions so the bot sends them straight to a person instead of trying. When an agent should stop talking.
Plan the rota around the replies, not the sends
Replies arrive when the messages land. A broadcast sent at 9pm means a queue at 9pm. Set your broadcast timings to the hours someone can answer, and split large sends into batches so the replies do not all arrive at once. Setting broadcast timings.
Line up the phone
Some customers will not open a WhatsApp offer but will answer a call: high-value carts, repeat buyers, enquiries that went quiet. If you call, check consent and DND before dialling at volume, and keep to calling hours. The checks before you dial.
Festive week: fewer, better messages
Expect some marketing messages not to arrive
Meta limits how many marketing templates any one person receives from businesses over a period. Above that limit, messages are simply not delivered — not as a penalty to you, but to protect the person. In festive week, when every brand is sending, your customers reach that limit sooner, and more of your offers go undelivered.
So the third offer of the week is the one most likely not to arrive, and the one most likely to annoy the person if it does. Send one strong offer and one reminder instead of five variations.
Move traffic to conversations customers start
Messages that customers start are not subject to that limit, and Meta does not charge for your replies inside the 24-hour window. Put a WhatsApp button on the sale page, a wa.me QR code on the packaging and in-store, and consider click-to-WhatsApp ads, which give you a free 72-hour window when you reply within 24 hours.
Let the bot take the night
Festive shopping runs late. The questions at 11pm — is this in stock, will it arrive by Friday, does the offer apply to this — have known answers, and a customer who has to wait until morning buys elsewhere. A chatbot covering the night is worth more in festive week than in any other.
Watch three numbers daily
- Quality rating. A drop mid-week is a reason to pause marketing sends, not to push harder.
- Unreplied conversations. Anything waiting more than an hour in festive week is a lost sale. Finding the unreplied ones.
- Bot versus team load. If the team is drowning while the bot hands over half its chats, the handover conditions are too cautious — or the knowledge base is missing the question everyone is asking. Reading bot versus agent load.
The week after: the second peak
Many teams staff for the sale and are caught out by what comes after it. Once orders start shipping, "where is my order" climbs, followed by returns and exchanges.
- Tell them before they ask. A utility template on dispatch and on delay prevents a large share of "where is my order" chats, and costs far less than a marketing message.
- Make tracking a bot job. Order status is the clearest case for a bot that can look things up rather than only answer questions. WhatsApp for e-commerce.
- Ask for the review once. After delivery, not before, and not three times.
- Save the segment. Everyone who bought in festive week is your best audience for the year-end sale — if you did not burn them in October.
The checklist
- Quality rating checked; nothing new or untested on the number.
- All marketing and utility templates approved, in the right category.
- Festive audience limited to people who opted in and engaged recently.
- Festive document in the knowledge base: offer terms, delivery cut-off, returns, hours.
- Handover conditions for payment, delivery-in-time and damaged-item chats.
- Broadcast timings set to staffed hours; big sends batched.
- Calling list checked for consent and DND.
- WhatsApp button, QR code and click-to-WhatsApp ads live.
- Daily watch on quality, unreplied chats and bot load.
- Dispatch and delay templates ready for the week after.
Doing it in Convarza
The pieces above are one platform in Convarza: WhatsApp broadcasts to segments from your contacts, held to your broadcast timings; an AI chatbot on WhatsApp, Instagram and your website that answers from the knowledge base and hands over on your conditions; a shared inbox with an Unreplied filter; and campaigns that call, message and email in the order you write, inside your calling hours. If festive volume runs past your plan, extra AI messages and calling minutes are add-ons for the month rather than a forced upgrade. See plans, or see how D2C brands run it.