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Send a WhatsApp Message

After you’ve contacted us to enable WhatsApp support, and created WhatsApp-approved templates in Twilio, you can send a WhatsApp message in any campaign or broadcast where you can send a SMS message.

1. Go to the campaign or broadcast workflow that you want to send WhatsApp messages from.
2. Add an SMS message to the workflow. You may want to click in the Build menu to give the message a descriptive name.

   

   
3. Select the message and click Add Content.
4. Select WhatsApp. If you don’t see the WhatsApp message type, contact win@customer.io to enable WhatsApp support for your account and workspace.
5. Select a WhatsApp approved sender in the From field.

   

   

    We don’t know which senders are WhatsApp approved!

   If you select a sender or enter a message that is not WhatsApp approved, your messages will fail. If you use different senders for SMS and WhatsApp messages, you may want to note which of your senders are for SMS and which are for WhatsApp messages in Twilio before you sync your phone numbers to Customer.io.

6. In the Template field, search for the template you want to use for your message. If you haven’t created a WhatsApp-approved template yet, you should create a template first.

   

   
7. Fill in the templated variables for your message.

   

   
8. Click Save.

Business-initiated vs user-initiated sessions

The kinds of messages you can send through WhatsApp change depending on whether you or your audience initiate the conversation. These are called business-initiated and user-initiated (or conversational messaging) sessions respectively. In general, WhatsApp messages sent through Customer.io are business-initiated.

User-initiated conversations can be more flexible than business-initiated messages, providing a 24-hour window during which you can send free-form replies and use special templates, like location-based or list-based messages, that aren’t available in business-initiated conversations.

But Customer.io doesn’t support incoming messages natively. If you want to respond to user-initiated conversations, you’ll need to set up Twilio to handle incoming messages; you’ll use keywords in Twilio to send webhooks to Customer.io that trigger outgoing campaigns based on the messages you receive.