LINE OA Broadcast Tips for Small Business: Fewer Blocks

Picture a stationery shop across the road from a school. At the start of every month the owner writes one newsletter, photocopies a hundred of them and walks the lane dropping one into every mailbox. This month it's a notebook sale, next month new printer ink, the month after that laminating. People read them at first. Six months in, the houses without school-age children start throwing the envelope away unopened, and a few put a small "no flyers" note on the mailbox.

A shop one lane over writes fewer letters. Before walking out, though, the owner sits down and sorts the envelopes into two piles. One pile is the homes that once bought school uniforms. The other is the offices that come in for photocopying. The back-to-school letter goes to the first pile. The bulk A4 paper letter goes to the second.

A LINE OA broadcast works exactly the same way. The only difference is that on LINE the "no flyers" note is called a block, and once someone taps it, your shop can't send them anything at all. If LINE OA is new to you, start with what LINE OA is and how it works with a business website.

A three-minute check before your next broadcast

Open LINE Official Account Manager in a browser on your computer and look at three things. No maths required.

First, go to the Insights page for friends and see whether the daily block count jumps on the days you broadcast. If an ordinary day loses two or three people and a broadcast day loses a dozen or more, that's the clearest signal you'll get. Second, open the statistics for your last three broadcasts and note how many people opened each one and how many clicked a link. Third, check where those links actually sent people: your homepage, your Facebook page, or a page that matched what the message was about.

If you can answer all three, you already know more about your broadcasts than most shop owners do.

Why people who chose to add you end up blocking you

Most people add a shop's LINE OA because they wanted something that day: a welcome coupon, a price, a booking. Once they have it, your shop stays in their chat list, and every broadcast pops up on their phone just like a message from a real friend.

If what pops up matches what they care about, they open it. If it misses two or three times in a row, the block button is only a few taps away.

LINE Thailand says as much in its LINE for Business guide to Performance Insight. Only your Target Reach sees your messages, meaning friends who are still active and haven't blocked you. And if Target Reach starts to fall or blocks start to rise, the guide suggests asking whether your broadcasts are too frequent and whether your promotions are attractive enough. Those two questions are really what this whole article is about.

What each number on the broadcast stats page tells you

The same LINE guide describes four broadcast indicators. Impressions is the number of people who read the broadcast, whether or not they clicked. User clicks is the number of people who clicked a link. Clicks is the total number of clicks, since one person can click more than once. Click rate is clicks as a percentage. That guide still calls LINE's feed "Timeline", which has since been renamed LINE VOOM, so the labels on your own screen may differ slightly, but what the numbers mean is the same.

The one I'd watch most closely is user clicks compared with the number of people who opened. It tells you how many of the people willing to open your message cared enough to go further. Blocks live on the friends Insights page, shown day by day. Put them side by side with your broadcast dates and the picture appears straight away.

Once it's sent, it can't be edited

The Thai LINE Official Account Help Center is clear that a message cannot be edited or deleted after it has been sent. A wrong link, a typo in a price, the wrong audience: it all stays in your customers' chats as it is. That's one more reason I'd rather see a shop send less often and check carefully than send often and chase corrections.

Segment before you send, with tools already in your account

Plenty of shop owners don't realise their LINE OA already has segmenting tools built in. Nothing extra to buy and no one to hire. You just need to start collecting the information today.

Tags in one-to-one chats

When you chat with a customer one-to-one, you can tag that chat, for example "bought before", "asked wholesale price" or "walk-in customer". According to the Chat section of the LINE Official Account Help Center, without an OA Chat package subscription you can create up to 5 tags and add 1 tag per chat. With the package, that rises to 300 tags and 30 per chat.

Five tags sounds limiting, but for a small shop I think it's about right. It forces you to decide how many genuinely different groups of customers you have, and most shops have three or four at most.

Audiences, for sending a broadcast to only some friends

Under Home > Broadcast > Audiences you can build several kinds of recipient groups. The three small shops use most are click retargeting (people who clicked a link in a past broadcast), impression retargeting (people who opened a past broadcast) and chat tag audiences (people you tagged in chats).

The Help Center lists three details worth remembering. Audiences can only be created in the browser version of LINE Official Account Manager, not in the mobile app. Audiences expire 180 days after they are created, except chat tag audiences, which don't. And targeted broadcasts need a Target Reach of at least 100 people.

That last one matters for new shops. If fewer than a hundred friends are still reachable, the feature isn't available yet. Keep tagging in the meantime and use it once you get there.

How often, and at what time?

I'll be straight with you. I couldn't find a recommended frequency or a best sending time published by LINE Thailand itself. The widely shared "Wednesday at 11am works best" type of figures mostly come from blogs that don't say who was measured, how many accounts, or when, so I don't want to hand you one of those as if it settled the question.

What I suggest is our own rule, not LINE's. Pick a rhythm your shop can genuinely keep up, such as twice a month, and watch whether blocks per broadcast go up or down. If you want to test timing, send similar messages at two different times and compare opens and clicks, using scheduled sending to make it easy. A coffee shop's customers and a building-supplies shop's customers check their phones at very different times. The best answer is in your own statistics.

For message quotas and monthly cost, I've written that up separately in LINE OA package pricing, with a message quota calculator. It's worth reading alongside this one, because sending only to the right group also makes your quota last longer.

One message, one topic, one link

This is a rule our team uses, not a LINE rule. The broadcasts people read to the end usually cover one thing. The first line says who it's for and what they get. "For everyone who bought school uniforms from us: this year's new sizes are in" does far more work than "Hello everyone, we have some great news today", because the first line is what people see before deciding whether to open or scroll past.

Then use one link, to the page that matches the message. If the message is about new uniform sizes, the link should go to the uniforms page on your site, not the homepage where the customer has to search all over again. It's the same idea as in what a landing page is and how it differs from a homepage: someone who just tapped through from a message should land on what the message promised.

If you want to know what people who click a broadcast do next on your website, add UTM tags to the link before you send. How to name them consistently is covered in UTM parameters for small business.

The permanent buttons under the chat that people can tap any time belong to the Rich Menu, which is a separate job from broadcasting. If you'd like to get that part right too, see how to design a LINE OA Rich Menu for high clicks.

Rewriting one catch-all message

Say the stationery shop from the start used to send something like this. A greeting paragraph, then a paragraph saying new uniform sizes are in, then a paragraph about a discount on A4 paper by the box, then a homepage link and a Facebook link at the bottom. Parents have to read past the paper. Offices have to read past the uniforms. Neither group knows which link to tap.

Split it into two messages. The first goes only to the "parents" chat tag audience: the first line says the new sizes are in, two lines say which sizes and whether exchanges are fine, and one link goes to the uniforms page. The second goes only to "offices": the first line gives the price per box, and one link goes to the paper ordering page. The shop spends a few extra minutes writing, and everyone who receives a message reads something that is entirely about them.

It makes the stats easier to read, too. When every message has one topic and one link, the click count tells you directly how much interest that topic had.

"Just send it to everyone. More people, more chances to sell."

There's truth in that, and I won't argue with it. If you have news that genuinely helps everyone, such as a move to a new location or closing over Songkran, sending it to all your friends is the right call. And while you have fewer than a hundred friends, sending to everyone is the only option anyway.

What I'd add is the cost you can't see on the day. Today's clicks show up immediately. But the person who blocks you after a message that had nothing to do with them is someone you can never reach again, even with the offer that would have suited them perfectly. Like the house with the "no flyers" note: even if the shop one day has exactly what that house wants, the letter can't get through.

So segmenting doesn't mean your shop talks to fewer people. It means you can still talk to all of them next year.

Why starting to tag today beats starting next month

Chat tags can't be backfilled. The customer who asked about wholesale prices last week, if you didn't tag them then, means scrolling back through chats one by one today, and nobody really does that. Start tagging now and every chat that comes in becomes a ready-to-use group next month, and chat tag audiences don't expire the way the other audience types do.

Retargeting audiences work the same way. Every broadcast you send today leaves a record of who opened and who clicked, so your next broadcast can go to people who showed interest in something similar. The longer you send with intent, the more groups you have whose interests you actually know.

The smallest version you can start this afternoon

You don't need a year-long plan. For a small shop this is enough: create three tags that really split your customers, such as "bought before", "asked but hasn't bought" and "wholesale", and tag every new chat from today. Make your next broadcast about one thing, with a first line that says who it's for and one link to the matching page. Two days after sending, write down three numbers: opens, clicks and blocks.

If you find there's no page on your site to link to, because the site is only a homepage and a contact page, that's the point where a website starts helping your broadcasts a lot more. If you'd like to see what a site with separate pages for each product or service looks like, and which kind suits which size of shop, the details are on TumWebSME's website packages page.

A real example from a Thai brand

LINE Thailand has published the story of POW Thai Herbal Medicine on LINE for Business. The brand sells herbal products and supplements, its core customers are 40 and over, and people take a long time to decide on products like these. So instead of one message to everyone, it used chat tags to split friends into groups and broadcast content that suited each one, and used Step Message to send automated sequences so that differently tagged people received different content.

The result the brand reports through LINE is a ROAS as high as 3.3 times. Read that figure with some care: it's a case LINE chose to tell, and it includes LINE Ads spent on gaining new friends, so it doesn't measure segmented broadcasting on its own. What I'd take from it is the way of thinking. Even a brand with an ad budget chose to segment before sending rather than sending everything to everyone.

A real story from our side: some numbers no tool can see

Our own sales team at TumWebSME gets a share of its customers through LINE, and we found early on that website analytics can't see what happens inside a chat. Who came from where, what they saw first: the system doesn't know. So our sales team asks every customer who calls or messages on LINE, "Where did you find us, and what did you search for?", and writes it down every time. The stats page tells you how many people clicked. The customer's own answer tells you which message made them get in touch.

Another lesson came from rebuilding our own website in 2026. The Google Ads conversion tag was written into the code and went live with the site, but it wasn't actually running on the live site for about a week after the ads started, because it sat in the wrong place. Clicks came in normally, and conversions read zero. Since then we always check things on the live site before trusting a number. Broadcasts are the same: before you hit send, open the link in the message on your own phone once and make sure it goes to the right page, because a sent broadcast can't be edited.

A 5-step starter plan

1. Open Insights, compare daily blocks with your past broadcast dates, and write down your starting numbers.

2. Create no more than five tags that genuinely split your customers, and tag every new chat from today.

3. Make your next broadcast about one thing, with a first line that says who it's for and one link to the matching page, tagged with UTM.

4. Once Target Reach hits 100, try sending a topic to a chat tag audience or a click retargeting audience instead of everyone.

5. After every send, log opens, clicks and blocks in one table. After three months, adjust your frequency.

How to tell it's working

The first number that should improve is blocks per broadcast. If you used to lose a dozen friends every time you sent and after segmenting it's down to a few, that's the best sign you can get, even if total clicks haven't moved yet.

The second is user clicks as a share of opens. Compare broadcasts sent to everyone with broadcasts sent to a segment. If the segmented ones get a clearly higher share of clicks, your groups match real interests.

The third lives on your website. With UTM tags in place, Google Analytics shows how long people from each broadcast stay and whether they go on to contact you or order. And the last number, which no tool can give you, is the customer's answer when you ask which message made them get in touch.

Back to the stationery shop

The shop that sorted its envelopes into two piles wasn't more hardworking than the first one. It just spent a few extra minutes before setting off, in exchange for the houses on that lane still being happy to open their mailboxes to its letters the following year.

Five chat tags and a couple of audiences in LINE OA are that same sorting. If you try it and get stuck, or want us to look at whether your website has pages your broadcasts can link to directly, just message us and tell us about your shop. We're happy to think it through with you.

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