Most WhatsApp benchmark numbers shared in Indian D2C circles are useless, because they quote open rates. WhatsApp read rates run extremely high across almost every list, so reporting them tells you nothing except that the channel is WhatsApp.
Metrics that discriminate
Block and report rate is the one that matters most and the one nobody publishes. It is the leading indicator of template quality degradation, and Meta uses it to set your quality rating, which caps how many messages you can send. Watch it per campaign, not monthly.
Reply rate tells you whether people treat you as a business worth talking to. Broadcasts that never generate replies are billboards on a conversation channel.
Revenue per message sent is the honest efficiency number, because per-message billing means every recipient costs you whether they engage or not. Cost per conversion follows from it directly.
Opt-out rate per send, tracked over time. A single high number is noise. A rising trend over four sends means you are sending too often, and the correction is frequency rather than creative.
What good looks like
Rather than chase published benchmarks, build your own baseline over six sends and manage the trend. The useful comparison is your own previous campaign, because list quality varies so much between brands that cross-brand numbers mislead.
The one external threshold worth watching is your Meta quality rating. If it drops to medium, treat that as an incident and cut send frequency immediately. Recovering a low rating takes weeks and messaging limits bite while you wait.
Frequency is usually the problem
When Indian D2C teams see WhatsApp performance decay, the cause is almost always frequency rather than content. The channel feels personal to the recipient, so the tolerance for promotional volume is far lower than email.
Teams that move from weekly to fortnightly broadcasts usually see revenue per message rise enough to offset the halved volume, with block rates falling. Test it before assuming more sends means more revenue.