In today's digital age, businesses rely heavily on messaging applications like WhatsApp to communicate with their customers. WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging applications globally and provides a rich set of APIs for businesses to interact with their customers.
In this article, we will learn how to create a message template on the WhatsApp cloud API and map it with BotSailor, a popular chatbot platform.
The first step in creating a message template is to log in to business.facebook.com. If you have multiple business accounts, select the relevant business account from the drop-down menu. Next, click on the "All Tools" menu and select the WhatsApp Manager.
From here, click on the three dots menu and select "Manage Message Templates."
It will redirect you to the “Message Templates" section, from here, select the "Create Template" option. As soon as you do that you will be prompted to select a category for your template. WhatsApp provides three categories: marketing, utility, and authentication. Select "Utility" if you want to send messages about an existing order or account. Next, give your message template a name and select a language. Then click on the continue button.
If you wish, you can add a header to your message template. WhatsApp provides two types of headers: text and media. If you select media, you will be prompted to choose from three available options. Let's select an image header for our template.
After setting up the header, you can write the body text of your message. You can use variables in the message body. If you wish, you can also add a footer to your message template. Additionally, you can add buttons to your message template, such as call-to-action or quick reply buttons. In our example, we will add quick reply buttons.
Before submitting the message template, we need to add sample data to test it. We can add sample data for the header and variables that we have used in the message body. After adding the sample data, we can submit the message template for approval.
WhatsApp will verify the template and approve it, after which it can be used.
Now, let's move on to mapping the message template with BotSailor. To do this, we need to go to the message templates section on BotSailor and click on the "Check Status" button. BotSailor will fetch the message template that we have created on the WhatsApp cloud API. From here, we can map the variables that we want to use in our chatbot. If we haven't created any variables yet, we can create them from the template variables section.
After mapping the variables, we can save the message template. Now, the message template is ready to be used by the BotSailor chatbot.
In conclusion, creating a message template on the WhatsApp cloud API and mapping it with BotSailor is a straightforward process. By following the steps outlined in this article, businesses can create and use message templates to communicate more effectively with their customers. These templates can also help in reducing response times and improving customer engagement.
We have a video tutorial available that explains the process of creating a WhatsApp message template using a cloud API and then mapping it onto the BotSailor platform.
