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When businesses want to start a conversation with their customers out of the 24-hour customer service window, they must use WhatsApp message templates. There are three types of templates:
- Text-based message templates
- Media-based message templates
- Interactive message templates
For simple communications like appointment reminders or booking confirmations, you can send simple text-based templates to your customers. If you want to communicate more complex messages, you could use media-based templates. For example, an airline business that wants to send its passengers a booking confirmation and ticket QR code can send a simple confirmation message and attach an e-ticket document to it.
If you need your customers to reply to a question or take a certain action, text-based
and media-based messages may not be enough. They lack guidance, and require more effort from the customer. In such situations, interactive message templates might be a better option.
In The Complete Guide to WhatsApp Message Templates for Your Business, we talk about all three types of message templates in more detail.
What Are Interactive Message Templates?
Interactive WhatsApp message templates give the recipients options of answers to choose from, or actions to take, by tapping on their desired option in the message.
Interactive message templates provide the recipients with either call-to-action or quick reply buttons.
Call-to-action buttons — These buttons let your customers call a number or visit a website. Here is an example of a message that helps customers track their order:
Hello {{1}}, Your order is expected to arrive today. Track your package to see where it is.
- Contact us
- Track Package
A potential customer sees the above template in their inbox as below:
Quick reply buttons — With quick replies, you give your customers up to 3 answers they can choose from. For example, let’s say you want to know whether a customer is happy with a recent purchase. An interactive message template that you send them can be like this:
Hello {{1}}, thank you for shopping with us. How do you like your purchase?
- I love it!
- I like it.
- I don’t like it.
A customer named Sam would receive the above message as shown below:
Please note that interactive message templates are different from interactive messages. Read our article One-stop Guide for Interactive Messages to learn about interactive messages.
Benefits of Interactive Message Templates
Higher Customer Response Rate
With interactive message templates, you make it easy for your customers to reply to a question or take a certain action. Rather than typing, all they need to do is to click on their desired answer. This ease gives them more incentive to respond.
Better Customer Service and Experience
Using interactive templates allows for some predictability in your customer support chats. This may help you organize your team better, define processes, and even build automations based on how your customers interact with your messages.
Higher Chance of Sales
If you use an interactive message template to tell your customers about a new promotion and get them to claim a discount with a button, they are more likely to do so. You have a higher chance of making a sale when your recipient has less work to do, and can make a purchase or claim a discount with just one click.
How to Create an Interactive Message Template
You can create an interactive message template from your WhatsApp Business account. If you use a customer communication platform like Rasayel, you can create a template from there too.
Please follow Facebook’s official guidelines to create an interactive message template from your WhatsApp Business account.
To create a message template from Rasayel, you must have a few prerequisites first:
- Create a WhatsApp Business API account with one of our partners.
- Create a Rasayel account.
- Connect your WhatsApp Business API account to your Rasayel inbox. In our help center, under Connecting a Channel, you can see how to connect your Rasayel account to your WhatsApp Business API account, depending on the business partner you choose to create a Business API account with.
Once you have the above, you can create an interactive WhatsApp message template on Rasayel.
To learn about the dos and don’ts of creating a message template, read our article How to Make Sure WhatsApp Approves Your Message Templates.
Here are the steps to take to create a WhatsApp message template on Rasayel:
- Go to Settings, click on Channels and select your WhatsApp channel.
- In your WhatsApp settings page, scroll down to the Message templates section. Click on + Add new template.
You can now craft your template. First, fill in the Template name, Template language, Template category.
The name field is limited to 512 characters. It can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores. No other characters or empty spaces are allowed. For example, “order_confirmation” is an acceptable template name.
The language you select must match the language of your template message.
There are three categories to choose from:
- Marketing
- One-time password
- Transactional
For promotional offers and product announcements, select Marketing. If your message is about account updates, order updates and alerts, select the Transactional category.
If your message includes a code to let your customers securely access their accounts, choose the One-time password category.
You can choose to create either a simple text-based template or a complex template with images, videos, documents, buttons, and more. The body of your message is limited to 1024 characters. For interactive message templates with reply buttons, you can create up to three buttons, each limited to a maximum of 20 characters.
While creating your template, on the right side of the screen, you’ll see a preview of what your template will look like on WhatsApp.
When you’re ready, click the **Submit template.
**When you create a template, Rasayel submits it to WhatsApp for approval. It can take up to 24 hours for WhatsApp to approve a template, and you’ll receive an email once the review is complete. Once approved, you can use it as many times as you wish for the customers that have given you consent to receive messages over WhatsApp. In The Complete Guide to WhatsApp Message Templates for Your Business, there is more information on obtaining customer consent.
How to Send an Interactive Message Template to a Customer from Rasayel
- Go to Contacts and look for the customer you wish to send a template message to. You can also type Ctrl + K to launch Rasayel’s quick search.
Then, select the customer you wish to contact and click on New message.
- You’ll be taken to the inbox and the customer’s conversation box will open. Under Select a channel, choose the WhatsApp number you wish to send your message from.
Then, click on Use a message template.
- A list of all your approved templates will appear. Select the template you’d like to send to your contact, fill in the template variables, and click Send.
- That’s it! Your template has now been sent to your contact.
Final Thoughts
If you want your customers to take a certain action, like visiting your products or answering your questions, interactive WhatsApp message templates should be your choice. They simplify responding to questions, viewing and buying products, and therefore, there is a higher chance that your customers would actually reply and make a purchase.
To learn more about Rasayel and how it could help you support your customers using WhatsApp, feel free to book a call with us. For North America and South America, book a call here. For Europe, the Middle East and Africa, please book a call here.
Further Readings
The Complete Guide to WhatsApp Message Templates for Your Business
How to Make Sure WhatsApp Approves Your Message Templates
One-Stop Guide for Interactive Messages
