Picture a Vietnamese retail brand with 20,000 followers on its Zalo Official Account. Two years ago, hitting “send” on a promotion meant every one of those 20,000 people saw it in their inbox within the hour. Today, that same brand sends the identical announcement and reaches a fraction of that audience – not because Zalo broke, but because the platform rebuilt its entire OA package structure around broadcast access.
If your team is still planning campaigns off the old Zalo OA tiers, this guide will save you a failed send. Since June 1, 2026, Zalo has run four completely new service packages, and broadcast – Zalo’s free, high-open-rate messaging feature for followers – is no longer included by default on the packages most small businesses use. Here’s what actually changed, what each package gets you, and how to build a broadcast strategy around it.
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What Is Zalo Broadcast?
Zalo Broadcast (tin truyền thông) is a messaging feature inside Zalo Official Account (OA) that lets an admin send one piece of content – a post, image, or video – to everyone who has tapped “Quan tâm” (Follow) on that OA, or to a filtered segment of those followers. Unlike a private message thread, a broadcast is a single dispatch that fans out to thousands of recipients at once, making it the closest thing Zalo has to an email newsletter blast, delivered inside the country’s dominant messaging app.
Businesses have leaned on it for one straightforward reason: Zalo’s open rates for OA messages routinely outperform email by a wide margin, since the message lands directly inside an app people already check dozens of times a day. With tens of millions of active monthly users in Vietnam, that reach is hard to ignore – which is exactly why access to it is now tied to a paid package rather than handed out by default.
How Zalo Broadcast Actually Works
Sending a broadcast follows a fairly rigid workflow inside OA Manager:
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Create or select content | An admin publishes up to five pieces of content – a post, video, or product listing – as the broadcast payload. |
| 2. Choose the audience | OAs can target every follower, or narrow the list by tag, age, gender, location, device operating system, or telecom carrier. |
| 3. Schedule or send immediately | Campaigns can be scheduled up to a month in advance. |
| 4. Preview before launch | Admins send a test copy to their own account to check formatting before the full send. |
| 5. Review delivery | The dashboard reports how many followers actually received the message. |
One rule that trips up a lot of teams: broadcasts are only permitted to go out between 6:00 AM and 7:59 PM each day. A campaign queued outside that window simply won’t deliver until the window reopens.
The mechanics of sending haven’t changed much. What changed completely is whether your OA even has broadcast access to spend in the first place.
Zalo OA’s New 4-Package Structure (Effective June 1, 2026)
This is the update most Vietnamese marketing teams still haven’t fully absorbed. As of June 1, 2026, Zalo retired its old Basic / Trial / Advanced / Premium structure and replaced it with four new packages: Basic, Standard, Growth, and Complete. OAs registered under the old packages keep their existing benefits only until renewal – after that, they move onto one of the four new tiers.
Broadcast access is where the change hits hardest, per Zalo’s official announcement of the new package structure:
| Package | Annual price | Chatbot | Broadcast (per follower/month) | Consultative messages beyond 48h |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cơ bản (Basic) | Free | Not included | Not included | Not included |
| Tiêu chuẩn (Standard) | ~1,000,000₫ | Yes | Not included | Not included |
| Tăng trưởng (Growth) | ~2,500,000₫ | 10 scenarios | 4 broadcasts/follower/month | 500 messages/month |
| Toàn diện (Complete) | ~6,000,000₫ | 50 scenarios | 4 broadcasts/follower/month | 2,000 messages/month |
The takeaway: broadcast is not a free-tier feature anymore. Only the two upper packages, Growth and Complete, unlock it – and both cap it at four broadcasts per follower per month, not an open-ended volume. A business still running on the free Basic package or the entry-level Standard package cannot send a broadcast at all until it upgrades.
The Reset Rules — and Why They’re Not What Most Teams Assume
Zalo OA actually runs two separate reset cycles, and conflating them is one of the most common planning mistakes:
- The follower-side receiving limit (how many broadcasts an individual follower can receive) resets on the 1st of every calendar month.
- The OA-side sending limit and other package quotas (consultative messages, article publishing, MCC seats) reset on the anniversary of your package registration date, not the calendar month. Register on June 22, and your OA-side quotas reset on the 22nd of each following month – not the 1st.
Plan your content calendar around both dates, not just one, or you’ll either burn quota you don’t have yet or leave reach on the table you already earned back.
Beyond Broadcast: Engagement Now Gates Sending Rights
Zalo’s 2026 OA overhaul isn’t only about package tiers – it also shifted the platform’s underlying philosophy. Blanket mass-messaging is being phased out in favor of a model where a business’s ability to reach someone increasingly depends on that person’s real interaction history with the OA, not just their follow status. Businesses are being pushed toward personalized, consent-driven engagement instead of one-message-fits-all blasts.
The 48-hour consultative window remains the one channel unaffected by any of this. If a customer messages your OA directly, you get 48 hours to reply with service or sales content free of the broadcast package restrictions entirely – and, on Growth and Complete packages, an additional monthly allowance of consultative messages beyond that window.
Zalo also screens broadcast content before delivery and reserves the right to lock an OA that repeatedly sends content flagged as spam-like, sometimes without prior warning.
Zalo Broadcast vs. ZBS/ZNS Template Messages: Know the Difference
It’s easy to conflate Zalo Broadcast with Zalo Business Solution (ZBS) template messages – the current name for what was previously marketed as ZNS. They solve different problems entirely.
| Zalo Broadcast | ZBS / ZNS Template Message | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Marketing content: promotions, new products, events | Transactional: order confirmations, appointment reminders, OTPs |
| Recipient | OA followers only | Any phone number or user ID, no follow required |
| Cost | Included in Growth/Complete package quota | Billed per message, by button/interaction type |
| Approval | Content reviewed before delivery | Template must be pre-approved before use |
| Open rate | High, but capped by quota | Typically higher – reaches non-followers directly |
If your use case is order status updates, ZBS is the correct tool. If it’s audience-wide promotional reach to people who already follow you, Broadcast is what you want – as long as your package supports it. This distinction mirrors a pattern playing out across every messaging platform right now: Meta runs a similar structured, template-approved system alongside its own recurring notifications for Messenger, and teams weighing Zalo against other channels for a broader rollout may find it useful to compare options in this guide to the best messaging apps for business in 2026.
Building a Zalo OA Broadcast Strategy That Actually Works in 2026
Confirm your package supports broadcast before you plan around it. If you’re on Cơ bản or Tiêu chuẩn, broadcast simply isn’t available – the fix is upgrading to Tăng trưởng, not troubleshooting a send that was never going to work.
Reserve broadcast for genuinely high-value moments. With four sends per follower available per month even on the paid tiers, every broadcast needs to earn its place – a major sale, a product launch, a policy change – rather than routine updates that could live in a 48-hour consultative reply instead.
Segment before you send. Filtering by tag, location, or demographic isn’t just a courtesy; it directly protects your open and click rates, which in turn protects your OA’s standing under a platform that increasingly weighs engagement over volume.
Treat the 48-hour window as your primary channel. Because it sits outside the broadcast quota entirely, building flows that encourage customers to message first – through QR codes, comment-to-chat triggers, or website widgets – gives you far more room to communicate than broadcast alone ever will.
Send inside the 6:00 AM–7:59 PM window, every time. Queue campaigns with this hard cutoff in mind so nothing sits pending overnight.
Track both reset dates separately. Mark your calendar-month follower-reset date and your package-anniversary OA-reset date as two distinct recurring events, not one.
Where an Omnichannel Platform Fits In
The tighter Zalo OA’s broadcast access gets, the more a single-channel strategy becomes a liability – a brand locked into the free or entry-level Zalo OA package now has no broadcast reach at all until it upgrades. This is the exact gap ChatbotX was built to close. Rather than treating Zalo as an isolated tool, ChatbotX is an open-source, agentic omnichannel platform that connects Zalo alongside WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and other channels your audience already uses, so a package-tier ceiling on one platform doesn’t have to cap your total customer reach.
Inside that setup, the visual Flow Builder lets teams design the 48-hour consultative journeys – welcome sequences, lead qualification, FAQ handling – that keep conversations flowing between the rare broadcast moments, without writing a line of code. And because every reply that comes back from Zalo, WhatsApp, or Messenger lands in one shared inbox, support and sales teams stop juggling separate apps for every channel their audience happens to use, a workflow covered in more depth in this breakdown of CRM integration for messaging channels.
For teams that want full control over data, deployment, and cost, the platform is also fully open source on GitHub, where the codebase, integrations, and self-hosting instructions are publicly available for teams that would rather run it on their own infrastructure than rely on a closed SaaS vendor. That matters specifically for Zalo-dependent businesses in Vietnam, where data residency and long-term platform lock-in are real strategic concerns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Zalo Broadcast free?
Broadcast itself carries no per-message fee, but as of June 1, 2026, it’s only included in the Tăng trưởng (Growth) and Toàn diện (Complete) OA packages, both paid. The free Cơ bản package and the entry-level Tiêu chuẩn package don’t include broadcast at all.
How many broadcasts can I send per month under the new packages?
Growth and Complete packages both allow up to 4 broadcasts per follower per month. Cơ bản and Tiêu chuẩn don’t support broadcast.
What happened to the old Basic, Advanced, and Premium OA packages?
They were retired for new registrations starting June 1, 2026. OAs that registered before that date keep their old benefits until their current subscription expires, then must move to one of the four new packages.
Can I send a broadcast to only some followers?
Yes. You can filter recipients by tag, age, gender, location, device operating system, or carrier before sending.
Does replying to a customer message count against my broadcast quota?
No. Replies within the 48-hour window after a customer initiates contact are treated as consultative messages and sit outside the broadcast limit entirely.
What’s the difference between Broadcast and ZBS/ZNS?
Broadcast is promotional messaging to followers, included in the Growth/Complete package quota. ZBS (formerly marketed as ZNS) is a paid, template-approved channel for transactional messages like order confirmations and OTPs, sent by phone number or user ID.
Is there a time restriction on sending broadcasts?
Yes. Zalo only delivers broadcasts between 6:00 AM and 7:59 PM daily.
Ready to Reach Customers Beyond a Single Channel?
Zalo Broadcast is still one of the most cost-effective ways to reach a Vietnamese audience – but 2026’s package restructuring means it’s no longer a given, and it can no longer be your only lever even when you have it. Pairing it with an omnichannel strategy that keeps conversations alive between broadcasts is what separates brands still growing their reach from ones watching it plateau. Start building your omnichannel messaging strategy with ChatbotX for free and connect Zalo alongside every other channel your customers already use – no lock-in, and full source-code ownership if you ever want to self-host.
