Table of contents

Introduction #

Templates are reusable messages that you can send to your customers on various occasions. We talk more about templates in our guide here: WhatsApp Templates 101

WhatsApp has 3 template types: text-based, media-based, and interactive templates.

Rasayel supports all template types. Furthermore, you can create and submit templates for approval directly within Rasayel! In this article, we will demonstrate how to craft an interactive template.

To start creating your template, click on your WhatsApp account in your Rasayel dashboard:

Scroll down to WhatsApp message templates, then click on Add new template to create and submit a new WhatsApp message template:

Creating a template #

Here’s an example of an interactive template you can create using Rasayel #

Let’s start with basic template information. Your template message should have a name, category, and language. Message template name can only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters and underscores ( _ ). No other characters or white spaces are allowed. You also need to choose a language and create your template in this chosen language. Each template is required to have one of eleven categories. I chose the “Reservation Update” category for this example:

Interactive template elements #

Interactive message templates can have the following elements: #

• Header (1) - With text, image, video, or documents
• Body (2)
• Footer (3)
• Interactive buttons (4)

Header #

Let’s create the Header. I want to send my customers PDFs with their booking information, so I choose “Document” as a header:

Body #

The body can contain up to 1024 characters and can be registered as plain text, or text with variables. You can include variables that you’d like to fill in later on, to cater your message to each customer:

Footer #

Footers can be used for additional information, or as a thank you note:

Buttons #

The last (but the most interesting) part is interactive buttons.

There are two types of predefined buttons offered by WhatsApp:

• Call-to-Action — Allows your customer to call a phone number or visit a website
• Quick Reply — Allows your customer to return a simple text message

To create buttons with a call-to-action, choose “Website URL or Phone number” as your button type.

There are two types of call-to-action buttons: “Phone” or “Link”. You can customize your buttons’ text and use your company phone number or website:

That’s it! Your interactive template is ready!

After filling in the form, you can preview the template. The one we just created will look like this:

Quick-reply buttons #

Instead of adding call-to-action buttons, you can also use “quick reply” buttons. These act as easy shortcuts for your customers to click on in response to a question or a message. You can add up to 3 buttons with customized text:

My buttons will look like this:

If you’re happy with the template you created, just press Submit Template, and it will be sent to WhatsApp for approval:

Once it’s approved, it will be added to your template list in Rasayel:

Conclusion #

When applying for new templates from our dashboard, please keep in mind that only 360dialog WhatsApp accounts support all of the elements in complex templates (footers, headers with text, images, documents, videos, and all kinds of buttons).

Twilio and MessageBird only allow for text-based body and interactive buttons (can be quick reply or call-to-action buttons). For more about the differences between our providers: WhatsApp Business Solution Provider (BSP) Showdown

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