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. 

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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.

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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.

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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 an interactive WhatsApp message template on Rasayel:

1. Navigate to Settings.
2. Click Templates.
3. Select your WhatsApp channel. If you have more than one WhatsApp channel, you can select any of them.
4. Click + Add new template.
5. Craft your message and place it in the body section. If you want to include variables, use two curly brackets on either side of a number. For multiple variables, ensure the numbers are in sequential order. We added buttons for variables and emojis in the composer, so you don’t have to type them manually.
6. Click + Add button
7. Select Quick reply or Website or Phone number
   1. If you select Quick reply you can add up to three buttons with different messages
   2. If you select Website URL or Phone number, you can add only two buttons, one for a website URL and one for a Phone number.
8. Click Submit.
9. Wait until our AI processes the information. It only takes a few seconds.
   1. Optionally, you can edit the name, the category, and the language.
10. Click Submit again.

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.

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 #

1. 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.
2. Select the channel you want to use to send the message.
3. Click Send Template or Bot flow.
4. Select the template you want to use.
5. Write the variable information in the placeholders. Depending on your template, the placeholders could be for the name of the customer, or product, etc.
6. Click Send.

That’s it! Your template has now been sent to your contact.

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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.

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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

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