You can send WhatsApp notifications in bulk by uploading a CSV or Excel file with the names and phones of the people you want to send the notifications to.
In order to do it, you must first create a Bulk Messaging delivery. This campaign will contain the Facebook template you want to use, the language, and some tags if needed.
Once the campaign has been created, you can upload your Excel or .csv file with the names and phones to be used, and then launch the campaign.
These are the steps to do it:
- Create the bulk message deliery using the Respira WhatsApp Connector.
- Create in and upload the Excel or .csv file with user data and template parameters
- Set up delivery date and time (optional).
- Launch the delivery
1.- Create the bulk messaging delivery using the Respira Whatsapp Connector.
First, click on the left menu to enter the Respira Whatsapp Connector (if you don´t see this icon, you need to install the Respira Whatsapp Connector first):
Log In into the app if needed, and then click Bulk messaging:
Now create a new campaign, by clicking on the plus icon at the top right. Then fill in the form, and click Save:
Once you save the campaign, and choose your template, you will be able to upload your file.
2.- Create in and upload the Excel or .csv file with user data and template parameters
First, click to Download the template. You will see an structure like this:
As you can see, you need to enter the name, phone number, and email. We will use that data to create the user in Zendesk.
The columns ri_body_param_1 to ri_body_param_5, and ri_footer_param_1 to ri_footer_param_3 are the variables to be included in your template. Leave them blank if your Facebook template does not use them.
Columns ri_header_type, ri_header_text and ri_header_link must only be filled if your Facebook Template has a multimedia or text header. The values for those columns are:
- Leave the cell blank if your Facebook template has no header.
- "text" if your Facebook template has a header with one parameter {{1}} (if there are no variables in the header, leave blank). In this case, the ri_header_text will contain the value of the parameter. More information about sending notifications with text headers here.
- "image" if your Facebook template expects an image. In this case, the ri_header_link column must contain a publicly available URL pointing to your image (.jpg, .png or .gif). More information about sending notifications with image headers here.
- "video" if your Facebook template expects a video. In this case, the ri_header_link column must contain a publicly available URL pointing to your video (.mp4 format only). More information about sending notifications with video headers here.
- "document" if your Facebook templates expects a pdf document. In this case, the ri_header_link column must contain a publicly available URL pointing to your document (.pdf format only). More information about sending notifications with pdf document headers here.
Imagine that you want to send this message to John, using a facebook template called "fb_template_campaign" with this text:
Hello {{1}},
be welcome to our Awesome App!
In this example, we have 1 parameter, which is in the body of our template.
You can also add tags to some lines in the CSV file. Those tags will be added to the tickets created so you can later build views and reports based on them.
Also, keep in mind that:
- The email field is optional. If you add it, Zendesk will use it to identify the user and create it if needed. If you don't fill it, it will create a user based on the phone number.
- The name field is also optional. If you don't fill it, "Unknown recipient" will be set as user name.
- You cannot change the columns names, as this could lead to unexpected behavior and will cause errors.
3.- Setting up delivery date and time.
You can specify a delivery date and time for every notification. If you just want the notifications to be sent immediately, just leave those columns blank.
If you use a CSV file, you must use YYYY-mm-dd format for the delivery date, and Hour:minute format for the delivery time. If you use Excel, just enter your dates as usual.
For example, if you want your notification to be sent on August 1st 2024, at 5:30pm, you must enter 2024-08-01 in the date column and 17:30 in the time column.
If you specify delivery date and time, you must also specify the IANA Timezone. This is the list of IANA timezones (column TZ identifier). If the delivery date and time is referred to Dublin, then enter Europe/Dublin in the iana_timezone column.
Please note:
- If you set up delivery date and time, keep in mind that the campaigns can take up to an hour to be processed. If the delivery date is too close to the moment the campaign is been processed, some notifications might not be sent.
- You cannot specify only a delivery date, or time, or timezone. You must specify all three or none. If you specify none, your messages will be delivered immediately.
4.- Launch the campaign.
Once the campaign has been saved and the CSV file has been uploaded, you can launch the campaign, by clicking on the button "Launch Campaign" at the bottom right.
The system will send a WhatsApp notification to the phone number of each user in the CSV.
Please be aware that once the campaign has been launched, it cannot be stopped. The notifications will be delivered.
Other considerations
When the campaign is processed, a new ticket will be created for every notification sent. If the user in the CSV does not exist in Zendesk (ie there is no other user with that phone number), it will be created and then linked to the ticket.
The ticket will include the following tags:
- ri_campaign
- A tag with the name of the campaign in lower case plus the date, so you can identify the tickets from a campaign. For example, if the campaign name is "My awesome campaign" and it is launched on 2022 Jan 1st, the tag name will be "my_awesome_campaign-2022-01-01", and it will be added to all the tickets created.
- When the notifications are delivered, a "whatsapp_sent" tag is added, and an internal note is added with the text "Whatsapp sent successfully on 2022-01-01 00:00:00 using template my_awesome_campaign".
- If WhatsApp cannot deliver the notification, of if there is an error of any kind, a "whatsapp_error" tag will be added to that particular ticket, and an internal note will be added to the ticket with the description of the error.
Keep in mind also that the notifications are not delivered immediately. It can take up to 30 minutes for the system to process a campaign.
Contact us
Contact us if you have queries.