Engati - User Guide
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Simplified Broadcast
Activating Broadcasts

Send WhatsApp Template Message

20min

Send Template Message using Engati

The template message feature allows sending personalized broadcast messages to all your active WhatsApp users. This is useful for sending announcements, promotions, alerts and more.

Key benefits of template messages include:

  • Reaching your entire WhatsApp userbase with important updates.
  • Personalizing messages by adding user-specific parameters.
  • Driving engagement by sending relevant, non-promotional content.
  • Getting your message content approved by WhatsApp for broadcasting.
  • Automating and scheduling broadcasts to engage users.

With template messages, you can customize content for each user while reaching your entire audience. This allows sending relevant updates at scale to drive growth. Overall, it enables engaging users in a personalized, non-intrusive manner.

Availability

This feature is available if you have an active WhatsApp setup with 360Dialog, Kaleyra.

Navigate to Configure>Deployment > WhatsApp to set up your WhatsApp account.



Setting Up

After deploying your bot on WhatsApp:

Step 1 : Navigate to Broadcast > Broadcast History and then click "Create new broadcast" to start a new broadcast campaign.

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Step 2 : Select WhatsApp as the channel.

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When only WhatsApp is selected, you will see a "Send Template Message" option in the broadcast type dropdown.

Step 3 : Choose "Send Template Message" from the dropdown menu.

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So once your bot is live on WhatsApp, you can create a new broadcast, choose WhatsApp as the channel, and select the "Send Template Message" option to get started with sending an approved template message to your users. This allows you to send personalized broadcast messages to all your active WhatsApp users.

For 360Dialog

  • You can select the required template from the list of approved templates in the Select Template drop down menu.
  • Once you select a template its preview will be loaded on the right and corresponding parameters/media/document fields on the left.
  • If you had given parameters while creating a template you can now enter the desired value/attribute against those fields
  • You can only use User level attributes, all other custom attributes cannot be used
  • If an attribute is not present for a user, that will be sent as a blank field
  • You can similarly upload media/documents against the corresponding field, if the approved template contains those fields.
  • There is a support two types of buttons:

1) Call to action: If you have used a parameter field in the URL during template creation then you will be able to pass an attribute/value to it however the rest of the URL along with the button field values and button names will not be editable

2) Quick reply: For the quick reply button type, a customer can select the path that will be triggered upon clicking the button

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For Kaleyra

  • The basic broadcast functionality remains the same. However previews will not be available for Kaleyra as a provider
  • If Kaleyra is the whatsapp provider, you will see fields to enter Template Name, Body Parameters and Image/Document (if any)
    • Template Name: Go to Kaleyra portal, Channels>WhatsApp> Configurations and select Template tab. Title can be copied and pasted in ‘Template Name’ field on Engati
    • Parameter Header: Select the header type from the drop-down menu to match the header type of the corresponding template on Kaleyra. You can choose from None, Text, Image, Document, and Video and the UI will adjust to let you fill in the header fields with text/attribute for type Text and a URL for Image, Document, and Video types
      • None
      • Text –By default there would be one parameter field present. You can add more fields if required to match the number of fields present in the template on Kaleyra. You can choose an attribute or value to pass to this parameter, just add the required number of parameters in ‘Header’ column
      • Image – Upload the required image
      • Document – Upload the required pdf file as a document
      • Video – Upload the required image
    • Parameters: By default there would be one parameter field present. You can add more fields if required to match the number of fields present in the template on Kaleyra. You can choose an attribute or value to pass to this parameter

Note:

1. In case of no parameters in Header or Body, just leave the field ‘Parameter 1’ as empty

2.While editing the template you have to ensure that the configurations i.e. the number of parameters, media fields and buttons match exactly with the template created on Kaleyra or else the template will not be sent to the users. Visit Kaleyra logs to see the status and reports of the sent templates. 

You can test out the broadcast, by sending it to an existing user connected with the bot.

 Customers can now download the csv file with status of broadcasted messages from Engati portal. Go to Published Broadcast and select View Broadcast.

Click on the number of target users once the broadcast is completed to download the status for each number.

Test Broadcast

This option is only available for WhatsApp as a channel. You can fill all the fields and choose to click on ‘Test Broadcast’ to send it to one of the existing users

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Type the number and select an existing number from the auto fill dropdown or search for a existing contact and then click on Send to send the template.

Send template message using Postman

Engati allows sending WhatsApp template messages via Postman for more technical users. This is useful when you want to integrate broadcast messaging into other systems.

Key benefits of using Postman include:

  • Integrating broadcast messaging into your existing workflows.
  • Building customized scripts and tools to manage messaging.
  • Scheduling and automating broadcast messages programmatically.
  • Tracking message status and insights programmatically.
  • Managing broadcasts at scale more efficiently.

For developers and technical teams, leveraging Postman for template messaging provides more flexibility to build custom tools and workflows around Engati's broadcast capabilities. The APIs allow managing and scaling messaging in ways tailored to your needs.

WhatsApp Template Messages for 360Dialog

WhatsApp message templates are specific message formats that businesses use to send out notifications or customer care messages to people that have opted in to notifications. Messages can include appointment reminders, shipping information, issue resolution or payment updates.

There are two advantages to using a Template

  1. You can send it to any Whatsapp user even if they have not interacted with your business number.
  2. Templates can be sent to users who have crossed the limit of last interaction within 24 hours.

For more information you can refer to Message Templates.

Creation of Templates

Templates are static messages that need to be approved by the Whatsapp team before execution. For creating templates follow the following steps:

Step 1 : Log into the 360 Client hub.

Step 2 : You can access the platform for setup of templates by navigating to Dashboard > Select the account > Manage Templates.

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Step 3 : Click on the Add Template button to create a new template

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Step 4 : Fill in the fields available with valid inputs.

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Step 5 : Once you have created a template then you would need to submit it for approval.

Approval process takes time and hence we would advise you to send the correct template for approval to reduce back and forth, violation of rules set by Whatsapp team would lead to rejection of the template.

Sending Template messages via API

Logs for it will be present in the API Logs, and can be viewed by the filter WHATSAPP_API

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Here the API Keys need to be added in the Authorization header as follows –

Request Type: POST Request URL : https://api.engati.com/whatsapp-api/v1.0/customer/<customerId>/bot/<botKey>/template Header : Add these to the header.

  • Authorization : Basic <API key>
  • Content-Type : application/json

Note : To get your Customer id, Bot key and API key, navigate to Integrations > Engati API. To generate an API Key : Click on "+Create App"

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Once you've grasped the concepts of customer ID, bot identifier, and API key, as well as where to locate them, proceed to follow the steps below to send a template message via API.

Step 1 : In the engati portal navigate to Broadcast > Message Templates, click on "..." button beside the template you want to sent and select Generate cURL.

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Step 2 : Copy the cURL generated.

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Step 3 : Import the copied cURL in postman and replace the variables with the values of the attributes in the Body section that were created during the template creation process.

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Step 4 : Once done adding text, images and receiver phone number in respective places, click on "Send" to send the template.

Sample Request

Send Template cURL


Responses

Success

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Failed to validate contact

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Failed to send message

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Bot not found

JS


Api key not found

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Other Failures

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 If you face any issues or queries please reach out to us at [email protected]